The Knowledge Contract: Politics and Paradigms in the Academic Workplace

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THE KNOWLEDGE CONTRACT

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THE KNOWLEDGE CONTRACT Politics and Paradigms in the Academic Workplace

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university of nebraska press lincoln and london

Acknowledgments for previously published material appear on p. 295.

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© 2005 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America 䡬 ⬁ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Downing, David B., 1947– The knowledge contract : politics and paradigms in the academic workplace / David B. Downing. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-8032-1730-0 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-8032-1730-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Universities and colleges—Curricula.

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2. Interdisciplinary approach to knowledge. I. Title. lb2361.d69 2005 378.1'2—dc22 2005006605

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For Joan, Peter, Jordan

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CONTENTS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Acknowledgments Writing the Knowledge Contract: An Introduction

ix 1

1. Working outside (and beside) the Knowledge Contract

19

2. Professions, Disciplines, and Paradigms: Reconstructing Academic Labor within the Nonmodern University

50

3. Paradigms Performed and the Kuhnification of the Humanities

92

4. Radical Diversities and the Cosmopolitan Self: The Disciplinary Intellectual Confronts the Multivalent University

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5. Pragmatic Interventions: The Lure of Method and the Rise of Disciplinary Labor

159

6. The “Mop-up” Work of Theory Anthologies: Theorizing the Discipline and the Disciplining of Theory

190

7. Beside Disciplinary English: Working for Professional Solidarity by Reforming Academic Labor

225

Imagined Futures: A Miniepilogue

262

Notes

267

Works Cited

295

Index

313

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

In any project that grows over many years, personal and professional indebtedness becomes intangibly mixed. I want to thank my colleagues and students at Indiana University of Pennsylvania for teaching me a great deal about working conditions in higher education. Claude Mark Hurlbert read and commented on every page of the manuscript, and this book first took shape as we shared writing sessions over coffee. David Hanauer also read the entire manuscript and offered valuable suggestions. I appreciate the friendship of Maurice Kilwein-Guevara, and his response to chapter 6 was for me an important affirmation of why both poetry and theory cut new edges on the language we encounter and create in the world. James Sosnoski has been a friend, colleague, and collaborator on many projects over the past twenty-five years; he helped me clarify key sections of the manuscript, and I have valued his wisdom on many of the issues I take up in this book. Patricia Harkin has also been a longtime friend whose care in reading portions of the manuscript led to important revisions. I thank Arthur Efron for unwavering personal and professional support for thirty years; it was he who first showed me what cultural criticism, anarchism, and radical pragmatism could be. For reading and commenting on various stages of what became various parts of the manuscript I thank Brian Caraher, Teresa Derrickson, Jeffrey DiLeo, Gerald Graff, Steven Mailloux, Paula Mathieu, Don McAndrew, Derek Owens, and Mike Sell. Marc Bousquet’s suggestions after reading the manuscript were invaluable, and it is to him I owe the suggestion for the title. Jeffrey Williams’s detailed comments on the manuscript were immensely helpful, and he led me to several important sources. I want to thank Rena Mei-Tal for her unfailing grace and unerring judgment, especially concerning my questions about the title for this book. Ladette Randolph has been an exemplary editor and supporter of the project at every stage of its production with the University of Nebraska Press, and for that I am very grateful. I am especially appreciative of the innumerable improvements Mary M. Hill made in copyediting the final manuscript. The faults, of course, are my own. I could not possibly list the innumerable ways my wife, Joan, my son, Peter, and my daughter, Jordan, have made this entire project both possible and rewarding. My indebtedness simply goes beyond words, which is why this book is dedicated to them. In the spring of 2003 Indiana University of Pennsylvania granted me a sabbatical that was crucial for the completion of this book. An earlier version of chapter 5, “The Political Consequences of Pragmatism; or, Cultural Pragmatics for a Cybernetic Revolution,” was published in ix

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acknowledgments

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Rhetoric, Sophistry, Pragmatism, edited by Steven Mailloux (1995). Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press. An earlier version of chapter 6, “The ‘Mop-up’ Work of Theory Anthologies: Theorizing the Discipline and the Disciplining of Theory,” was published in symplok¯e 8.1–2 (2000): 1–22. Permission for reprint granted by the University of Nebraska Press. An earlier version of chapter 7, “Beyond Disciplinary English: Integrating Reading and Writing by Reforming Academic Labor,” and a portion of chapter 1 are reprinted by permission from Beyond English, Inc.: Curricular Reform in a Global Economy, edited by David B. Downing, Claude Mark Hurlbert, and Paula Mathieu. Copyright 2002 by Boynton/Cook Publishers. Published by Boynton/Cook Publishers, a division of Reed Elsevier, Inc., Portsmouth nh. All rights reserved.

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THE KNOWLEDGE CONTRACT

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WRITING THE KNOWLEDGE CONTRACT 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

An Introduction

Over the thirty years prior to its fourth edition in 1995, Clark Kerr kept adding material to his original 1963 publication of The Uses of the University. Each revision had to account for the increasingly divergent uses of what he called the “multiversity.” The “uni” that he was trying to reconceive as “multi” kept getting more and more “multi.” Of course, Kerr’s title echoes that of another well-known book on the university from the middle of the nineteenth century, Cardinal John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University, a book that the author also kept editing and revising for a period of more than thirty years. 1 The rhetorical play between the two titles, separated by more than one hundred years in publication, suggests that higher education has shifted from a sense of a single ruling idea, say, the “principle of reason,” to multiple, practical, and professional uses among many competing interests. But Newman was never so pure in his regulatory idea, and the multiversity is not quite so “multi” (or “infinite”) as Kerr would sometimes have us believe when he exults in the “city of infinite variety” (Uses 102). The case against Newman is easier to prove and familiar to anyone versed in the deconstruction of universalist discourse. An historical look at the context in which he was working demonstrates that even as he argued for the virtues of “useless” forms of universal knowledge Newman was interested in establishing and justifying a Catholic university in Ireland, so that both religious doctrine and national identity were intimately part of his inevitably contradictory arguments. On the one hand, the essence of the university exists “independently of its relation to the Church,” but on the other hand, “it cannot fulfill its object duly . . . without the Church’s assistance” (Newman 3). In “Discourse VII: Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Professional Skill” Newman insists “on the cultivation of the intellect, as an end which may reasonably be pursued for its own sake” (108). In what can only be seen today as an ironic twist of diction, he conceives that pursuit “to be the business of a University” (Newman 110, emphasis added). Even as he tries to distinguish intellectual work from vocational and professional interests he also insists that intellectual training “for its own sake” is not really for its own sake, because it “best enables” the recipient of such liberal education “to discharge his duties to society” (Newman 125). Whether Newman’s brand of universalism served merely as a cover for special interests or whether it was more directly part of an activist concern for justice in the material social world could only be determined through 1

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a deeply contextualized analysis of his concrete actions in British society. But even without those details we can be sure that it was a society deeply invested in religious, scientific, and political interests, as was Newman, a citizen with both significant social and intellectual power to intervene in the conflicts of his day. When it comes to Kerr my claims will be challenged on almost every count, because pluralism has become a kind of default modus operandi of higher education. 2 There are now many users of the multiversity, and they all expect different things from quite different kinds of institutions. I like the most progressive forms of pluralism, but this diaspora of difference should not conceal the ways that hegemony and cultural dominance within the university continue to take a disciplinary shape even as they adapt to increasingly competitive market conditions. Kerr himself maintained in 1982 that “the big research university is particularly impervious to structural changes” (Uses 126). By 1994 he saw that he had to modify that claim, because “higher education is becoming more market-oriented” (Kerr, Uses 192) and because hard economic choices were forcing structural changes beyond what he had imagined a decade earlier. Kerr, however, glosses the problems of labor, treats student dissent such as the Berkeley Free Speech movement in dismissive terms, and does not specifically address disciplinary issues other than in general terms of administering departments and organizing research around multiple forms of industrial and government interests. This book focuses on the question of disciplinarity, the contractual arrangements that sustain the production of disciplinary knowledge, and the problems of academic labor with respect to the larger structural changes of the university. In the effort to maintain this focus I am guilty of speaking in forked tongues: my theoretical reductions chafe against my arguments for multiple kinds of practices. On the one hand, I have to grant all the dramatic changes in the university, especially in its transformation after the Second World War: the traditional categories that name the separate but clearly related fields of knowledge are getting even more “blurred,” to use Clifford Geertz’s well-known articulation. Interdisciplinary studies, subaltern studies, disability studies, science and technology studies, multimedia, vocational training, service learning, telecommunications, and the “mode of information” all call for new kinds of work and labor. Academic stability seems to give way to the crossing, splintering, and pulling apart of disciplinary boundaries as the modern multiversity becomes more disorganized or “disaggregated” (Leitch, Theory Matters vii). 2

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But, on the other hand, I am describing a cultural dominant within higher education that imposes some very real limitations on the work we do in the university. During the late nineteenth century research faculty members no doubt created the specific features of academic disciplinarity, but the general formation emerged primarily as a tactical compromise worked out through contractual negotiations between university presidents seeking funding and resources from the industrial capitalists while simultaneously fending off the more disruptive forces of profit and politics (see Newfield, Ivy and Industry). It was, indeed, a double-edged sword from its inception: disciplinary constraints could have the desirable effect of protecting the freedom and autonomy of academic workers but not inevitably so. The constraints could also be used as weapons to deplete autonomy, creativity, and imagination when unfettered forms of invention threatened disciplinary stability. We can’t know in advance of specific contexts which way the disciplinary sword cuts. I should be careful of the “we,” too—my claim is that, in the eyes of some users, the experiential reality of academic forms of disciplinarity is quite a pleasant experience. These workers appreciate the fluidity and dynamism of the diverse set of rhetorically specialized forms of literacy that characterize each particular discipline: mastery of those disciplinary tools grants certain variable forms of discursive power to those who wield them. Of course, such pleasures tend to be located in the shrinking core of tenured professors. Yet for many others—the expanding periphery of poorly paid flex labor or “cheap” teachers—disciplinarity is quite painful, and for the rest it is somewhere in between those extremes. The central premise of this book is the recurrent power (Michel Foucault came to call it “biopower”) of disciplinary forms of knowledge. The modern university “represents its knowledge and expertise to the public primarily in disciplinary terms” (Nelson and Gaonkar, “Cultural Studies” 18). Power/knowledge forms the basis for technoscientific expertise. Yet even as disciplinarity has adapted in recent years to remarkably different kinds of conditions so as to produce some remarkably important kinds of knowledge, much of the work of higher education remains either unaccountable or devalued within academic forms of disciplinary registers. The institutionalization of disciplinarity can be, and has been, framed within any number of semantic registers and historical mappings, and I borrow extensively from a number of theorists and historians who have provided some of the maps we now have of the disciplines. Although I believe that Foucault and Karl Marx loom large in any discussion of discipline and labor, I acknowledge a certain theoretical and methodological eclecticism 3

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that I have tried to minimize in practice by keeping the focus on the problems (and benefits) of disciplinarity rather than on the application of any single theoretical foundation. Terry Eagleton surely has it right that “theorists are pluralists in this respect: there could be no set of concepts which opened up the work for us in its entirety” (95). The “work” in the context of this book is that performed by the many different users of higher education: faculty, students, administrators, the public, private corporations, and special interest groups. It is fair to say that at different points in my analysis I borrow from a set of complementary semantic clusters that strategically highlight different dimensions of the same basic historical formation. To try to name those vocabularies I most often refer to disciplinarity as a set of material, institutional practices insofar as disciplines organize the behaviors of individuals and groups. At other times I refer to disciplinarity as a particular kind of cultural rhetoric insofar as specific disciplines operate through permutations of identifiable forms of persuasion, argumentation, and configuration in the construction of knowledge; as a discourse insofar as disciplinarity is an identifiable set of oral and textual language uses; as a form of literacy, or literacy acts, insofar as practitioners of a discipline must acquire a specialized vocabulary and syntax that determine what can be said and enunciated within any given field. Each of these terms signals a whole set of possible theoretical positions, but I use them (judiciously, I hope) to suggest my affiliation with those whose work in rhetoric, discourse analysis, and literacy helps to emphasize different dimensions of the recurrent problems associated with disciplinary normalization as it affects both epistemology and labor under late capitalism. Whereas most contemporary critiques of higher education have focused on the economic dominant, the corporatized university of “excellence” (Readings) that serves rapidly shifting markets in late capitalism, this book focuses on the disciplinary dominance of particular permutations of what I call the “knowledge contract” as a form of discursive regularity that cuts across the specialized rhetorics of different fields. As a set of normalizing rhetorics, or institutionalized forms of literacy demanded of teachers and students in higher education, disciplinarity mediates the relations between concrete and abstract forms of labor. By performing a set of material practices classified under research, teaching, and service categories as specified by the general terms of individual faculty contracts as well as in bargaining unit contracts, individuals acquire relatively objectified forms of symbolic capital. In the same system students acquire the objectified symbolic cap4

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ital of grades as a measure of abstract labor that can be socially circulated (Watkins, Work Time) without any recognition of the specific material labor actually performed in classrooms. The goal of disciplinary meritocracy was the purification of unstable, individual, cultural differences into the uniform scale of objectified, abstract value. By translating “qualities into quantities,” as Christopher Newfield explains, disciplinary bureaucracy “created an abstract monoculture in which every citizen could be ranked on one uniform scale” (Ivy and Industry 102). Why such meritocracy is more myth than reality has been addressed by many writers, but why, despite those critiques, it remains dominant within the modern university is the key problem I pose. The gist of my answer to this dilemma hinges on my analysis of the knowledge contract, the set of implicit and explicit obligations that justify both the epistemological and commercial uses of higher education. My critique has a positive aim of trying to theorize some alternative possibilities to that dominance. Naming a cultural dominant is always risky business because one has to theoretically simplify matters by the use of relatively decontextualized generalizations, thus the unavoidable incompleteness of any macro-analysis of complex social institutions. All theorists of institutional critique confront a double bind because they inevitably have to articulate a holistic vision that is, admittedly, never quite so holistic, never so total as the language of analysis implies. In their massive study Empire Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri confront this bind with respect to naming the dominant form of the world order: “The problematic of Empire is determined in the first place by one simple fact: that there is world order” (3). But at the same time they have to make concessions at every turn because it is not the case that “order is dictated by a single power and a single center of rationality” (Hardt and Negri 3). It is, nonetheless, a global order at the same time that “globalization, of course, is not one thing, and the multiple processes that we recognize as globalization are not unified or univocal” (Hardt and Negri xv). As an institution, the multiple forms of the university play a significant role in the dominant world order that Hardt and Negri call Empire. This mix of multiplicity and dominance means that I have to hedge my assertions on many counts. Behind every one of my admittedly frequent uses of abstract nouns like “discipline,” “knowledge,” “paradigm,” and “capital” I can hear many readers protesting, “No, no, it’s more flexible, dynamic, less monolithic than that!” In the wake of feminism, cultural studies, postcolonialism, area studies, queer theory, and environmental studies, to name a few, who 5

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wouldn’t believe in such pluralism? But the epistemological pluralism does not match up well with a plurality of secure employment, the latter dwindling as fast as downsizing and casualization of the workforce can make it happen. Yet even as epistemology and employment seem to be heading in opposite directions, the premise of this study is that epistemology and labor are not different but deeply entwined processes. Although the “system” linking these processes is never so closed and the world never so neat as my concepts sometimes make them seem, they have systemic dimensions nevertheless. I am trying to name those dimensions so that they can be altered and made more equitable. Since there are and have been so many rationales and missions attached to higher education, it is useful to articulate a few of them. In Democracy’s [6], (6 Children John McGowan does just that “to illustrate how pluralistic the multiversity is, how many arguments are made about its value” (134). While refraining “from evaluating the merit of the arguments,” he lists sixteen Lines: possible kinds of legitimation for the existence of a university, not all of —— them compatible. I like many of them, as I suspect most educators can find 12.6p themselves at home in more than one of the rationales. Different users have ——— different uses for higher education, and this list does achieve a remarkable Norma inclusiveness. McGowan is one of the fine liberal pluralists whom I admire, * PgEnd and I like pluralism—at its best, of course, as I will argue in chapter 5 on radical pragmatism. 3 Interestingly, then, I find that without too much revision of the several rationales based on moral, creative, utopian, and [6], (6 community-based concerns, they can adequately justify most of the alterations in working conditions for students and faculty that I advocate in this book. Even more, his list matches my own anecdotal evidence: once on a retreat by some of our department members charged with articulating a more updated, comprehensive mission for the department, we found ourselves muddling around a bit with generalities and fearing that we could never come to consensus. One colleague suggested that we brainstorm by each silently writing down a list of suggested rationales for our work. It was a great intervention. When collated (and some of them were quite remarkably inventive), they all added up to most of the sixteen counts that McGowan lists, even though there was a wide range of political differences among the group itself, and even though there were a number of more disciplinespecific tasks focusing on writing, textuality, rhetoric, language, literacy, and literature. Even those latter mostly fell within the general rationales McGowan lists. 6

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But the pluralist catchall of general rationales can conceal the power differentials between different kinds of academic workers: disciplinary models for the production of knowledge have retained their dominance within the institutions, and they continue to affect the distribution of labor in ways that I think call for reform of material practices and structural relations. Those relations institutionalize the ideological justifications for elevating disciplinary knowledge above all other ways of knowing not as a horizontal buffet of variably appealing dishes but as a vertical scale of unequal rewards so that, for example, even for those who champion “community” values, collaborative forms of community work will always pale under the yardstick of individual competition for disciplinary knowledge. Ironically, then, even though McGowan insists that he is not listing them in any hierarchical order, it is hard not to see the first three rationales on the list for “culture,” for “civic” responsibility, and for “cultivation” of personal growth as high on any traditional list, even though in practice they may be materially subordinate to the disciplinary codes. Two kinds of epistemological rationales appear as eighth and ninth: useful or practical knowledge and “useless” or disinterested knowledge, basically corresponding to the split between applied and basic research. But these epistemological justifications worked out in disciplinary practices are indeed hierarchically embedded in the institution. To this extent, even as different individuals key into some rationales more than others, institutionally speaking, the contractual obligations for the production of knowledge in the form of disciplinary practices structurally organize most of the other rationales, including the culturalist arguments, the autonomy argument, the economic and professional arguments, and even the argument for critique. Even more, the intense commodification of education has most commonly been worked out through cruelly reductive forms of disciplinary objectifications. The moral, creative, utopian, and community-based rationales often based on fundamental assumptions about education as self-knowledge and crosscultural understanding tend to be worked out (or suppressed) under the dominant disciplinary conditions, even though they open to many other alternatives. This explains why in advocating institutional reform I am not actually adding to McGowan’s list but articulating ways to better shift the dominance of disciplinary rationales that make it less possible to fulfill some of the less epistemologically based justifications. Educators must find ways to justify not only the recognizable forms of border work represented by inter- and cross-disciplinary inquiry but also the labor involved in the many 7

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forms of nondisciplinary educational tasks that occupy positions between, besides, and sometimes outside of the disciplinary rhetorics. Of course, if Foucault’s general characterizations about the disciplinary society are accepted, one can’t simply step outside of the social. So I will have to distinguish (as I attempt in the first two chapters) between the specific academic permutations of disciplinarity and the more general societal disciplinarity that affects all forms of professional and cultural tasks. Much of the valuable work we perform in academic settings does not strictly correspond to the disciplinary terms of the knowledge contract, even though it certainly gets “disciplined” in the more general sense of being institutionally devalued in the reward systems of higher education. Pluralism can sometimes hide these hierarchies within a more seemingly user-friendly multiplicity. This book argues that in renegotiating the disciplinary terms of the knowledge contract so as to better serve more users of higher education the focus has to be not just on the ideas but on the working conditions of many faculty and students. The argument of this book has two overlapping themes. First, the social dimensions of what I will define in chapter 1 as the knowledge contract have to be reinvented in the face of the thoroughgoing commodification of all phases of education. Many progressive educational commentators have been working on this phase of reforming the university. Most agree that these negotiations can only take place within and against the deregulated political economy. A crucial negotiating point is that seeking regulations and creating domains of autonomy, innovation, social justice, and notcapital have long-range consequences that are good for most everyone. This includes those who work directly in the business sector itself (if not the select cadre of managers for whom profit is the only good), and these socially contracted values are basic principles of the welfare state. As Benjamin Johnson, Patrick Kavanagh, and Kevin Mattson argue, “If we don’t ensure that citizens have access to full-time quality teaching, if we don’t carve out spheres of life safe from the pressures of profit and money, we cheat our democracy of its future” (10). Current levels of anxiety fuel the focus on narrowly conceived vocational training in the battle to enter fiercely competitive short-term markets. Students and faculty cannot but respond to these circumstances, but they create dis-ease. The health and security of any nation’s citizens are crucial to long-term business investments, and narrowly epistemological forms of disciplinarity have been the main way university workers could create stability by intervening in the short-term cost-effectiveness equations. 8

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Of course, university management hasn’t often worked that way, so more equitable participation in the construction of disciplinary knowledge requires alterations in management practices and working conditions, and the pressure to bring about such changes requires collective bargaining as well as collective action within the terms of the current contractual relations. One striking feature of late capitalism is that the traditional gaps between professional privilege and the working class are breaking down as the shrinking core and expanding periphery of workers affect all domains of labor. These class breakdowns are potential sites of solidarity and coalition that might emerge as a collective source of resistance. As Richard Ohmann points out, “Agile capital has erased some old social fault lines. Professors and managers can be downsized along with line workers” (Politics of Knowledge xxiv). Solidarity of purpose across class lines might, potentially, lead to better working conditions. More diverse kinds of labor could be concretely named and differentially valued (or revalued), and such specifications of work could then be more equitably scripted into the contractual obligations of higher education employees so that they might better serve the general public welfare while protecting the exploitation of flex workers. But the second and more contentious part of my argument is that even if faculty and students could collectively negotiate a wider range of epistemological practices and a dynamic concern for social justice into the disciplinary terms of the knowledge contract, these changes would not be sufficient to adequately address the very real educational needs of an increasingly more diverse population. This second part of my argument is pivotal, and much of the book is devoted to explaining what I mean by establishing new kinds of contractual relations that may better protect educators who often work outside and beside the disciplinary formations for the production of knowledge. This is necessarily a double-edged process: contractualization and thus professionalization are basic conditions of modernization to the extent that they are both necessary and unavoidable at the same time that modern contract laws must now be revised to protect nondisciplinary, nonmodern kinds of work performed within the profession. This need not be a contradictory so much as a complementary process, because modernity is not a totality but, rather, “an incomplete project and necessarily so” (Gaonkar, “On Alternative Modernities” 17). And it is not a process of completing some impartial development but of creatively adapting the conditions of modernity. Despite the enormous range of differences evidenced by disciplinary forms of knowledge, there are, nevertheless, some very real limits in terms of what can be disciplined, 9

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and these limitations are crucial to the story as I tell it here. The disciplinary forms of the knowledge contract have tended to value propositional kinds of knowledge, but there are many other kinds of knowledge such as situated, distributed, procedural, tacit, ad hoc, collaborative, attitudinal, ethical, intersubjective that do not so easily measure up to disciplinary rhetorics that value specific propositions about objectified bodies of knowledge. 4 The labor associated with the alternative or nondisciplinary forms of knowledge tend, therefore, to be automatically subordinated under the current permutations of the modern knowledge contract, even though nondisciplinary work often provides some of the most basic kinds of educational needs for a broad range of public interests. In contrast, fast capital thrives when knowledge can be quickly objectified, conveniently transformed as bits of commodified information customized to serve rapidly shifting markets. Disciplinary procedures for protecting knowledge from capital and political uses are now reversed so that they directly serve privatized interests for the profit of an elite few. If my analysis is correct, there is a significant kind of historical reversal now taking place in higher education, although, as I argue, the possibilities for such a reversal have been operating in less noticeable ways all along. The gist of it is that the older, guildlike terms of the disciplinary knowledge contract invented by the rising professional-managerial class during the late nineteenth century to protect knowledge from short-term capital uses is now being retooled to precisely serve such private interests. In one sense, the discourse of objectivity as a valuable public goal of trying to get things right has been reduced to the much simpler processes of objectification whereby ideas, styles, and things become infinitely malleable objects tailored to the private interests of the marketplace: “A radical assault on fixed hierarchies of value merged effortlessly with that revolutionary leveling of all values known as the marketplace” (Eagleton 68). Such moves have incensed many faculty members and students, but they make it much more difficult to try to fall back on the old disciplinary justifications as an exclusive arbiter of the value of our labor. Of course, confronting the material realities of higher education requires collective and collaborative action, because it is beyond the scope of any individual, especially a theoretically inclined individual such as myself, to make any significant difference whatsoever in institutional life. With that caveat, the chapters that follow address the role of disciplinary practices in the organization of labor with an eye to what it might take to make higher education more responsive to needs that are not well served by 10

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(relatively) exclusive reliance on those disciplines. Given these intentions, this book is primarily a theoretical study and not a history of the modern university. Nevertheless, since theory is always historical in its rhetorical performances in any given context, my practical solution to this dilemma has been to design a narrative structure based on what I call “problem clusters,” a term I explain more fully in chapter 6, where I describe my work on a course on the history and theory of criticism. I have modified this term from the “problem-posing” kind of educational models developed in the pragmatist tradition, which I address in chapter 5. The historical problem that I confront is that I have a set of overlapping historical narratives, and any single linear historical narrative tends to flatten this multidimensional nature of historical representation, highlighting one thread at the expense of others. I can identify three main theoretical discourses, each of which has produced somewhat different but overlapping historical narratives of the modern university: (1) the story of labor, capital, class struggle, professionalism, and the economic mode of production pertaining to the rise of the modern university, a story most often associated with Marxist narratives; (2) the rise of disciplinarity, modernity, techniques of surveillance, and the discourse of power, often associated with Foucauldian narratives; and (3) the epistemological, philosophical story of the rise of science and the social construction of knowledge in paradigms, most often associated with the work of Thomas Kuhn. Most accounts of the university that we now have tend, naturally enough, to focus on one of these theoretical emphases, often to the exclusion of the others, even though they are each complementary and deeply entwined. One of the main practical problems my book confronts is that of trying to draw upon all three accounts without thinning the story to one dimension. While deeply indebted to the many historical narratives of the university that we already have, the organizing principles for this book derive from my efforts to write a different, or multidimensional, kind of text. My tactical solution to this familiar history/theory problem is that I chose not to engage a single, linear narrative. Rather, I selected a series of key contemporary problems, the problem clusters, and each chapter addresses one of these clusters. Each chapter follows a basic three-part structure. First, I begin by identifying the problem and its significance in our contemporary situation. Second, I turn back to particular historical moments pertinent to or exemplary of the problem at hand. This strategy of highlighting such moments allows me to provide relatively “thick descriptions” of those events without having to exhume an entire two hundred 11

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year history: the historical forays highlight different but often overlapping events within the general time frame of 1790–2004, although some chapters reach farther back. Third, I move back to the present, offering views of how my reconfigurations of the past play out in our work toward a better future for the university. As a problem cluster, each of the seven chapters is divided into subsections that highlight the movement back into the past and then forward into the present. While this general structure internal to each chapter is flexible and variable depending on the needs of the problem being addressed, the return to the present is crucial because it demonstrates that the foray into past events is not just archivalist but an activist orientation toward how such understandings lead to changes in the contemporary university. The linear sequencing of the chapters themselves reflects the three main theoretical emphases. Let me first gloss the sequencing rationales before I overview each chapter’s central argument. Chapter 1 highlights the labor issue with my articulation of the knowledge contract. Chapter 2 highlights the disciplinarity issue but ties it to the professional concern that emerges out of chapter 1. Chapter 3 highlights the epistemological problem of the discourse of paradigms but ties it to the discussion of disciplinarity and labor developed in the preceding chapters. Chapter 4 turns from the relatively impersonal account of institutions to the place of the cosmopolitan self in the modern university. Chapter 5 then engages a revisionist view of John Dewey and the pragmatic movement that inaugurated an often unnoticed dimension of disciplinary critique at the very moment when the modern disciplines were being formed. Since Dewey has often been criticized for his reliance on the liberal, individual self, this chapter profits from the more nuanced discussion of the self in the preceding chapter. The last two chapters involve a narrowing of focus toward my home discipline of English studies. Chapter 6 addresses the crucial issue of the “theory” movement, which many have claimed as a major cause of the “unsettled” nature of the contemporary university, especially in the fields of the humanities. This chapter also provides an explication of my notion of problem clusters central to the organization of the book. Chapter 7 concludes with a much more focused account of English studies. And there’s a certain symmetry here: the first chapter provides a synoptic overview of university history; the final chapter provides a synoptic overview of one discipline’s history, embedded, as it were, within the more general history. But to return to the first chapter: my main purpose here is to name the cultural dominant for the university as something I will call the modern 12

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knowledge contract, primarily because it is a terminologically convenient way to link epistemology (knowledge) with labor (contract relations). But more important, the world “order is expressed as a juridical formation” (Hardt and Negri 3), and the university depends upon the constitutional and legal status of knowledge, both through more implicit philosophical/political rationales and more directly legislated intellectual property rights. Variable sets of epistemological frameworks for disciplinary practices determine the primary categories of academic labor, creating the hierarchy of professional “services” rendered from pure to applied research, to teaching, and to the service functions of credentialing, vocational training, and skills management. I offer a few brief anecdotes drawn from some pivotal historical moments when epistemology gained its legitimizing power for higher education. My effort throughout is to reconnect epistemology to labor, so that alterations to the dominant forms of disciplinarity generally require some form of collective bargaining working in conjunction with student and faculty interventions in the tasks of institutional and curricular design, pedagogical innovation, and evaluation and hiring practices. What I propose in this initial chapter is that much of the labor many of us perform is outside or beside (in the sense of adjacent to rather than in opposition to) the primary forms of disciplinary practices, rhetorics, and literacies. In the second chapter I try to rearticulate some of the key terms that I sometimes wish would just go away but won’t for my wishing. The only alternative, it seems to me, is that we have to borrow these terms, sort them out, and dispense with or alter some of the binds they have repeatedly wrapped us into. I focus particularly on the different meanings of “profession,” “discipline,” and “modern” as they emerged during the nineteenth century with an eye to claiming that our professional domains of work extend well beyond academic versions of disciplinarity even as the latter have been distinctively valorized by the modern terms of the knowledge contract. Clarifying the terms of the analysis means we can better sort out some of those nondisciplinary or nonmodern practices that require other kinds of contractual recognition as part of our working lives. For these purposes I critically adapt some of Bruno Latour’s articulations of the nonmodern and draw distinctions between Foucault’s sense of the disciplinary society and the academic disciplines. The third chapter focuses on the core of disciplinary practices, the paradigms that organize working habits for most individuals involved in higher education. Whereas many educators have long argued that paradigm shifts will serve to reform the university, I follow Steve Fuller’s critical 13

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assessment that the enormous influence of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions has had a much more conservative impact on institutional critique than has been generally recognized. In many ways Kuhn was still too much of a modernist, happy with the exclusive reign of the knowledge contract. As Fuller argues, so many have uncritically adapted Kuhn’s work that it has had the political effects of justifying the current conditions rather than serving the needs of institutional change that are so necessary when disciplinary power is wielded unjustly, as it too often is. But, in contrast to Fuller, I also believe that with considerable revision Kuhn’s analysis of paradigms provides useful ways of sorting out various kinds of work and labor problems. Once paradigms are located within the networks of domination and power, we can better understand how they operate to provide control and jurisdiction but also to produce new and useful forms of knowledge in competition with other specific kinds of control— by capital or administrative authority or individual agency or collective bargaining—and that such kinds of jurisdiction have deep obligations to multiple public domains. By examining the performative dimension of paradigms (and in this case I do not mean a reductive sense of market “performance”) we can then see that paradigms are only one general form of professional performance, although the form most empowered by the knowledge contract. But from a performative perspective it also becomes clear that paradigms are more variable and more linked to social and political arenas than Kuhn had theorized and that there are clearly many other kinds of work performed by those who use higher education for different purposes. This theoretical analysis could lead to practical efforts to renegotiate the position of academic paradigms within the broader spectrum of university labor relations for both students and faculty. This requires a shift in basic evaluation and review practices at all levels, and it is in these micropolitics of disciplinization and professionalization that collective bargaining might create a more just education for more users of the university. In the fourth chapter I shift focus somewhat from the working conditions sustained by the dominance of the knowledge contract to the social conditions of diversity that pressure the disciplinary economy of value. For this purpose I adopt Arjun Appadurai’s distinction between cultural diversity and the “culture of diversity.” The modern university has encountered an increasing range of cultural diversity in part because of demographic changes in the populations of students and faculties, but administrative efforts to construct a form of managed diversity have yet to achieve a real 14

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culture of diversity. As I argue, the latter cannot be fully achieved until other nondisciplinary practices can be contractually specified, named, and placed beside the knowledge contract that sustains disciplinary formations as the exclusive measure of cultural value in higher education. I examine several recent efforts to create a culture of diversity by recovering etymologically antecedent meanings for “discipline” that suggest a more learner centered focus on teaching and the creation of a cosmopolitan liberal “self ” responsive to cultural differences. However appealing these archival readjustments may appear, further historical investigation suggests that such antecedent meanings may be less idealistic and more compromised than imagined, and the effort to recover them may only cloud the picture when the term itself has been so captured within the enunciative powers of modern disciplinarity. Better to refine the dynamic, adaptable, and vital modern uses of discipline so as to reduce the more destructive effects of disciplinary controls and situate the best work alongside alternative working domains that allow for the creation of cosmopolitan citizens who move in and out of various alternative modernities. In the last section of this chapter I argue that, whereas the multiversity has basically allowed some degree of cultural diversity, it will not sustain a genuine culture of diversity until it becomes multivalent. I use the latter term to designate ways that a culture of diversity requires not just adaptations of disciplinarity to diversity but an active renegotiation of institutional contracts that open domains of nondisciplinary, nonmodern practices that are more inclusive of a greater range of both epistemological and cultural diversity necessary for a genuinely cosmopolitan education. In chapter 5 I address a recurring problem that has plagued much of the recent developments in pragmatism insofar as it often becomes reductively represented as a utilitarian adaptation to cost efficiency and neoliberal market forces as they reengineer the disciplined university. From this perspective pragmatic actions do not, therefore, call for much substantive alteration in the current bureaucratic structures. Instead, I first try to locate some moments in John Dewey’s early work where he responds in multivalent ways to alter, not just adapt, the increasingly constrictive role of disciplinarity. What is significant about these moments is that they occurred during the 1890s, the very period when the departmentalized, disciplined university created by the emergent professional-managerial class was being consolidated into its modern formation in virtually every university in America. These are stories of resistance that ultimately failed, but they provide some concrete instances of how radical pragmatism has roots in institutional critique and collective action that call for ways to displace the dominance 15

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of disciplinarity right from its origins. This is particularly significant for work in the humanities, where it is much more difficult to achieve strictly disciplinary domains that operate as paradigms. I then address the recurrent tendency to treat pragmatism as a method. While acknowledging the importance of methodology in a wide range of academic labor, I argue that a primary source for the lure of methodology arises from the modern knowledge contract’s legitimation of disciplinary procedures above other kinds of work that are less strictly dependent on specific methods. Reducing pragmatism to a method re-creates rather than reconfigures the function of disciplinarity and thus tends to defeat the broader kinds of institutional reform that might more successfully meet the needs of more users. Chapters 6 and 7 develop some of the implications of the institutional critique for specific domains, first with a focus on the disciplinary impact of theory on the humanities through a study of recent anthologies and then with a specific look at how disciplinarity has proven particularly troubling for my home discipline of English studies. Whatever one means by “theory,” it has typically designated the influx of ideas external to the discipline of English literature that, over the past thirty-five years, have tended to disrupt disciplinary forms of stability in the humanities. In what Jeffrey Williams has called the “posttheory” generation, books have appeared with titles like What’s Left of Theory? (Butler, Guillory, and Thomas, eds.). Or, perhaps more tellingly, one of the gurus of theory and the author of the influential Literary Theory: An Introduction, Terry Eagleton, has now written a book called After Theory. Those hoping that Eagleton has joined the happy camps of the antitheorists will be distressed to learn that, although “we are living now in the aftermath of what one might call high theory” (2), his entire effort is to demonstrate that “we can never be ‘after theory,’ in the sense that there can be no reflective human life without it” (221). Nevertheless, the disciplining of theory has often given it an institutional life at odds with the critique of disciplinarity carried out in the content of many theoretical works themselves. In chapter 6, therefore, I examine the institutionalization of theory through the production of theory anthologies, the textbooks that supposedly make it accessible to our students. The focus on textbooks follows Kuhn’s sense that textbooks are the primary means for constituting the normal practices of given disciplines. Thus they are fundamental to the reinforcement of the knowledge contract, so I examine the particular tension between theories that call for disciplinary transformation now being cast within disciplinary forms in textbooks. The language of models, methods, 16

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and paradigms has so shaped the institutional construction of theory, and I argue that we need to alter the production and uses of these texts to include the nonmodern practices that continue to escape theoretical work. The final chapter focuses on English studies, where the dominance of the knowledge contract has sustained some of the most inequitable labor conditions in the contemporary university. Unlike departments in many other fields, English departments have institutionalized a troubling internal division that has too often seemed “natural” in the sense that literature and composition, reading and writing, consumption and production, cultural ideals and social service just fall into their subdisciplinary places, which is to say that literature/culture rises above composition/service. We have a long history in English of trying either to justify this separation or to integrate it, but as an integrationist I can say that these goals can never be achieved without substantial alterations in the fundamental role of the knowledge contract of disciplinarity, which will always favor the literary objects and the paradigms of interpretation. Creative writing, the Third Sophistic, nonWestern rhetorics, paralogy, feminine écriture, multimedia experimentation, alternative discourses—these and many other activities are indeed vital concerns in the professional life of many academics. But they can’t just be disciplinized without destroying them. In order to appropriately reward these kinds of labor, something else has to happen, and that something else is the message of the whole book: the modern knowledge contract has to be renegotiated and supplemented, allowing for contractual specifications and rationales for many nonmodern practices and alternative kinds of knowing. We can’t pretend to be advocating social and political kinds of interpretive practices when the social life of our discipline reinforces some of the most vicious kinds of inequities in working conditions. In the end, the question of labor is always a question of care and dignity. Institutional critique of evaluation practices and labor inequities within the university is now “one of the tasks most indispensable to the exercise of academic responsibility, most urgent for the maintenance of its dignity” (Derrida, “Principle of Reason” 13). In the age of cultural studies and political criticism we need to care deeply about the institutionalized inequities in our academic workplaces. The lesson of this book is less theoretical than my theory suggests: some forms of disciplinarity have delegitimized important and valuable kinds of labor and depleted many individuals’ sense of worth and dignity. Just as John Dewey advocated a social reform function for higher education all along, a central task for collective bargaining (and collaborative action within and against the array of specific institutional 17

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practices) must be to join curricular design, pedagogical innovation, and labor relations. This means nothing less than altering the role and mission of the university in contemporary culture at the very moment when higher education seems to be changing at the hands of economic forces over which most humanists have little control. The latest transformation of modernity could be the global corporate nightmare of Empire without end, fueling the wealthy without feeding the poor, or it could be something new. Let’s hope it’s something new. We need the critical tools within our educational spheres to better model the democratic and collective working conditions that best serve human needs, not just the needs of the powerful and wealthy.

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1. WORKING OUTSIDE (AND BESIDE) THE KNOWLEDGE CONTRACT Living in the City of Knowledge I live in “knowledge-town,” at least according to George W. Bush. During a recent visit to Pittsburgh he was exulting in the transformation of “Steel Town” into its contemporary epistemological makeover. It is as if the troubles of labor had disappeared into a potent, high-tech knowledge reflected in all its glory off the glass facades of the usx tower and the neomedieval angles of the ppg building, both landmarks of the urban skyline that symbolically configure the city’s technoscience future rising from its manufacturing past. While some towns may have more of it than others, no one would deny that knowledge is now the main form of cultural capital in the world of multinationals, informatics, and cyborgs. The geopolitical transformations of global power relations that affect the flow of this “just in time” (Noble) knowledge have been most commonly described in economic terms: the shift to a “regime of flexible accumulation” (Harvey, Condition) where we labor under a “New Work Order” (Gee, Hull, and Lankshear) based on niche marketing strategies that direct the movement of capital toward the North Atlantic nations. This latest version of neoliberal capitalism fuels the spiraling gap between the wealthy and the poor. Staggering changes in the military and in technology fuel the economic realities. 1 Currently, the U.S. defense budget of more than $400 billion exceeds the combined defense budgets of all 191 other nations in the world, an imbalance unprecedented since the rise of modern nation-states. Deeply linked to the military expansion are the global networks of electronic media and virtual reality environments (the cutting edge of which often emerges in military simulations and “smart bombs”). These communication technologies provide wholly new domains for both empire and hegemony, on the one hand, and creativity and innovation, on the other. The World Wide Web, which emerged out of the military development of the arpanet communications network, is as accessible to cyberterrorists as it is to progressive educators. All of us working in higher education labor unequally under these overwhelming economic, military, and technological transformations that cut through our cherished disciplinary frameworks for making knowledge “purified” of such wayward contaminants. The most prestigious forms of knowledge were (presumably) enshrined within the purview of ivory towers 19

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that protected academic work from the ravages of political uncertainties. Since the nineteenth century the socially contracted service thought to be best performed by those of us working in higher education has been to produce new knowledge and to transmit it to our students. Under the aegis of these sanctions one of our key tasks has been to provide avenues for the acculturation of some of our citizens. Otherwise, we were not expected to worry too much about the social and political workings of the society except in a very abstract way. Education was “higher” to the extent that the knowledge it produced could be seen in relation to long-term social interests, cultural values, traditions, and public welfare. Of course, education did not often operate according to the long-range social ideals, and it tended to serve a very small, relatively homogeneous segment of the adult population. But the knowledge produced in most institutions had some general relations to what Steven Brint has called “social trustee professionalism” (In an Age), an ideology born with the rise of a new middle class, the professional-managerial class, situated between and in tension with the powers of capital and labor (see Newfield, Ivy and Industry; Ohmann, Politics of Knowledge). Figured as “social trustees,” educators participated in the moral and ethical dimensions of learning even as they sought to identify their own territories of authority within competing markets. In Brint’s view, “Powerful social and economic forces have brought the older idea of professionalism linking social purposes and knowledge-based authority close to an end” (In an Age 17). Disciplinary authority for the production of expert knowledge has become severed from long-term social values and public welfare as the competitive marketplace increasingly determines educational worth. What, then, does it mean to be a citizen of the world when the nation we inhabit spends half of every tax dollar on the military and more money on prisons than universities, when the loss of jobs accompanies cuts to Social Security, welfare, health care, and education? The recent Patriot Acts ring with irony as we are asked to give up certain civil liberties so that we can be better protected. Yet one of our most basic forms of protection from the abuses of knowledge is a strong, well-funded educational system that contractually establishes obligations to the long-term social well-being of its citizens, where self-knowledge, critical thinking, and the examined life are valued as fundamental attributes of citizens in a democratic society. “The university speaks precisely to our conception of public welfare, entitlement, and service, and specifically to how we bring citizens into public life” (Williams, “Franchising” 15). Many Americans have come to think 20

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of these entitlements as the rights of individuals living in the wealthiest nation on earth, but we live in an age of what Sheldon Wolin calls “inverted totalitarianism.” In the inversion of economics and politics business is no longer latched to the imperial powers of the state, as was the case in previous totalitarian regimes. Instead, “an increasingly unbridled government” fuels the corporate power of capitalism as it stretches into global empire. State administrative powers promote “a pervasive atmosphere of fear abetted by a corporate economy of ruthless downsizing, withdrawal or reduction of pension and health benefits; a corporate political system that relentlessly threatens to privatize Social Security and the modest health benefits available, especially to the poor” (Wolin b3). With these public entitlements at stake in a privatized economy, how does or should acculturation in higher education work, if the knowledge contract under which we labor seems to be either spinning out of control or taken over by capital interests? When human understanding and dialogue get displaced by digital bits of information transferred around the globe in nanoseconds, someone has some explaining to do. What Bush means by knowledge and what, say, feminist teachers mean by knowledge can hardly be registered by the same noun. 2 Bush was renaming Steel Town at the same time that the corporate scandals of Enron, Arthur Andersen, WorldCom, and his former employer, the Harken Energy Corporation, were placing a huge burden on the general public as well as those individuals directly affected by who knew what, when, and where. Who could or would determine when this knowledge might circulate beyond the control of a few powerful corporate executives? Or perhaps the better question is, Why should we expect anything less when cynicism and corruption have overtaken most havens of epistemological purity? “Corruption is not an aberration of imperial sovereignty but its very essence and modus operandi” (Hardt and Negri 202). At about the same time, the military buildup for the second war with Iraq demonstrated that unilateral power vested with the latest technoscience could both dominate and disturb a world the West did not and still does not know much about. Different and competing knowledges, indeed. What, then, can be left to us in our “ruined” institution, as Bill Readings ironically cast the question? The Knowledge Contract The relatively short two hundred–year history of the modern entanglement of knowledge and the university provides the backdrop to some answers about what has been ruined within the precincts of higher education. I 21

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want to conduct a few brief forays into key moments of that history by focusing on the contractual relationship that exists between the product (knowledge) and several competing parties (the university, the church, the public, the entrepreneurs, and the state). The modern knowledge contract was a vital part of the Enlightenment project of modernity as it emerged in the eighteenth century. Previous contracts justifying the tasks of higher education were not always epistemological in these terms because theological and moral legitimations formed the contractual bond between the work of the university and the particular society in which it functioned. Not just any kind of knowledge would count but only the kind produced by the social formation of academic disciplines. Even though there was considerable latitude within disciplinary parameters, many different kinds of human understanding were excluded from the modern discourse of knowledge. But these exclusions were thought to be acceptable because the contract also registered certain obligations for the general improvement of social and cultural life. Conceiving of knowledge in terms of contractual relations better situates the varying forms that knowledge can take within the differing historical and social contexts in which the contract operates because human labor and capital are key parts of what gets specified in all contracts. “Human relations are mostly based on contracting of one form or another, and there are a multitude of forms,” and “academic contracting is undergoing fundamental changes” (Kerr, Uses 169). Kerr lists several different kinds: explicit, implicit, incomplete, one-sided, and open-ended contracts. Most studies of epistemology tend to focus on either the content of what counts for knowledge or the ideological beliefs about that knowledge more than the relations between parties that legitimate the function of knowledge within the society. In the case of the knowledge contract, the contract itself may seem more metaphorical and implicit than real and explicit, since there isn’t usually a specific textual contract. But the reality of these contractual relations, especially with respect to the modernization of higher education, may have had more material consequences than Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s infamous conception in The Social Contract of 1762 of the state itself as a contract in which individuals should not have to surrender any of their “natural rights.” The knowledge contract has literal dimensions in the kinds of obligations that emerge between the individuals and groups involved, but it carries more metaphorical dimensions than the many literal contracts such as those written for faculty jobs or for student tuition payment plans. Nevertheless, the latter kinds of contracts are constrained in many ways by 22

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the more general set of implicit obligations pertaining to the knowledge contract. The knowledge produced by universities has this juridical status, and whether funding for universities arrives from state resources or private beneficiaries, there are usually specific provisions, even if these are articulated as a mission statement that can be one-sided and open-ended, for the production of disciplinary knowledge written into contracts that legally bind the parties to build a particular kind of institution. These contractual relations can, of course, be violated, but only at the risk of those involved. A key point in this contractual analysis of relations between parties is that much depends upon the contract laws of the given nation-state in which the knowledge is produced. For example, before the late eighteenth century European aristocracies enacted specific limitations that prohibited [23], (5) university teachers from contradicting state interests and theological doctrines. The secularization of knowledge during the Enlightenment wrested various legally sanctioned powers for the pursuit of reason, insofar as the Lines: 52 to 57 work of those professors so engaged could be justifiably seen to improve ——— social life. With the rise of professionalism in the late nineteenth cen12.6pt PgVar tury, university faculty pursued domains of relative autonomy in which they ——— could collectively regulate the criteria for the production of knowledge apart Normal Page from strictly market conditions. Today, in our politically conservative age * PgEnds: Eject of deregulation, market forces can now enter into almost all educational enclaves, and both the courts and the legislature are under increasing pressure to grant more rights to increase market competition within educational [23], (5) spheres. The knowledge contract has therefore varied throughout history depending on the political context in which it had to be litigated, from Kant’s division of labor based on the principle of reason, to Humboldt’s articulation of the culturalist basis of knowledge serving nation-states, to the socially constructed paradigms of the contemporary university, to the commodified forms of knowledge as academic capital. Today different colleges and universities negotiate between different and sometimes competing forms of state and federal labor laws. Both the ideological rationales and the content of knowledge shift as a register of the dynamic adaptability of the disciplinary institutions of higher education to the legal and economic conditions in which the work of education takes place. New parties enter into agreement: the church is written out; nation-states and industries get written in. The product, an increasingly diversified knowledge, still gets made, even as the obligations to the various parties shift. 23

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Since the late nineteenth century in America the knowledge contract has functioned in material terms through what Ellen Messer-Davidow, David Shumway, and David Sylvan call the disciplinary “economies of value” (vii). Disciplinarity gains its social legitimations from a knowledge contract that gives this historically specific institutional formation for the production of knowledge a special privilege over all other kinds of educational activities, especially over other provisional, situated, ad hoc, community-based lore and cross-cultural interaction. Practically speaking, the general terms of the knowledge contract implicitly justify the devaluation of teaching because it is less directly involved in the production of knowledge and thus further permits the contracting of temporary and part-time workers with low pay and few benefits simply because they work outside the key parameters of the knowledge contract. These activities certainly involve ways of knowing, but they don’t always follow disciplinary models, and the very situational nature of these practices has made it difficult for them to attain anything other than subordinate jurisdictional status within higher education. It is difficult to see the crucial part of my argument regarding the devaluation of work outside the disciplinary parameters of the knowledge contract without first understanding how the knowledge contract came to assume some of its modern, disciplinary configurations. The social concerns of those contractual relations have become increasingly irrelevant to the market-driven forces of legitimation, even as the social consequences of the commodification of knowledge have been devastating to many faculty and students while benefiting select others. We can better understand how the knowledge contract has been transformed if we first review some formative moments from its history. Founding Moments: The Modern Contract Negotiates War and Cultural Change A little over two hundred years ago the military expenditures of King Frederick William II of Prussia were compromising the educational mission of the emerging modern university. During the previous reign of Frederick the Great, the imperialist expansion of the Prussian empire had been based on a belief in discipline, authority, and “might makes right,” but the academic community had still enjoyed relative freedom from both theological and state interventions, at least compared to their counterparts in other European countries. With Frederick II’s death in 1786, however, liberal reformers were faced with the accession of the king’s nephew, who would prove to be hostile to this freedom. 24

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Tradition had it that the new king would be crowned in Königsberg. As the rector of the university in Königsberg, Immanuel Kant helped organize the 1786 coronation ceremonies for the new king, who publicly praised the great philosopher. But Kant undoubtedly had private reservations about the new regime, and for good reason. By 1788 “the King, his favorite minister [Woellner], and the coterie of likeminded officials they gathered around them launched a campaign to ‘stamp out the Enlightenment’ ” (Kant ix). The first enactment of that campaign was a new censorship edict dealing with any writings addressing religious matters. This ideological battle against the scholarly community united Prussia with Austria, Britain, Spain, and Russia in a war against the ongoing French Revolution and the antimonarchical ideals for which it stood. Although for his own safety he had to veil the full force of his criticism of these imperial activities, Kant was, as Mary J. Gregor explains, distressed by “kings who spend on war the money that might better be used for education” (Kant viii). During the unfolding of these war campaigns Kant himself became the direct enemy of the new regime’s attack on the so-called enlighteners whose intellectual and ecclesiastical freedoms were seen as a direct threat to state power. With the publication in 1793 of Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason Kant raised the ire of biblical theologians who believed that the philosopher was invading their territory. The ecclesiastics got the Censorship Commission to put all kinds of obstacles in Kant’s way, including an order that forbade faculty from lecturing on Kant’s philosophy of religion. In October 1794 Kant responded to these attacks by drafting the essay “The Conflict of the Philosophical Faculty with the Theological Faculty.” The piece became the first of the three parts of The Conflict of the Faculties, a larger work that was published in 1798, a year after Frederick William II’s death. As many have now argued, this text, although one of Kant’s lesser-known works, can be seen as a founding document for the formation of the modern university. What most concerns me here is the juridical nature of Kant’s analysis as it establishes a set of rights justifying the “division of labor” (23) between competing segments of the university community, all of which in turn gain their legitimation as autonomous spheres for the production of knowledge on a contractual set of obligations delimited by state power and religious orthodoxy. “The university would have a certain autonomy (since only scholars can pass judgment on scholars as such), and accordingly it would be authorized to perform certain functions through its faculties” (Kant 23). What we have here is an unprecedented Enlightenment version of what would later become academic freedom based on the principle of dis25

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ciplinary self-regulation and autonomy from state and church interference. Business and capital noticeably play no part in these contractual relations. For Kant and his Enlightenment heirs the juridical guarantor of these domains of freedom depended on the purification of reason and universality: the well-educated, mature, autonomous subject could exercise the principle of reason in the labor assigned to the philosophy faculty. Well educated meant literate in the Western traditions of philosophy and dialectic. “The University becomes modern when all its activities are organized in view of a single regulatory idea, which Kant claims must be the concept of reason” (Readings 14–15). No doubt Kant’s invocation of reason and universality are central to his philosophy and indeed justify the position of the “lower faculty” of philosophy that, paradoxically, serves as the final arbiter of the juridical truth claims put forward by the “higher faculties” of theology, law, and medicine (they are “higher” because they have more direct public consequences). There is also no doubt that these claims for universality and reason opened themselves to all the forms of deconstruction that Derrida and others have subjected them to in studies such as Richard Rand’s collection, Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties. 3 But the focus on the “single regulatory idea” can miss the multiple, material relations of power that Kant negotiates between the state, the church, the public, and the university, and, internally speaking, the divisions of labor that keep lawyers, doctors, clerics, and philosophers working on their own territorial claims without interfering unduly with each other. In short, Kant did not found the university on reason alone, he also justified it as a contractual relation of powers distributed by the rights of reason, theological tradition, state power, and citizenship. As John Michael explains, “Universality and transcendence are not philosophical absolutes; they are contested terms in political disputes” (11). Of course, the lower faculty of philosophy must not be interfered with because the principle of reason alone must protect the state and the public uses of the “higher faculties” from abuses of power such as Kant had experienced in the form of censorship and repression. To this extent, a concern for social justice was engaged with, not absolutely divorced from, the principle of reason. 4 The contractual divisions of separate fields of knowledge became the basic epistemological justification of the modern disciplines, disciplines whose contractual obligations were not quite so radically divorced from public interest. During the years when Kant was suffering from state and ecclesiastical censorship (1794–96), Wilhelm von Humboldt was studying in Jena with 26

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J. C. Friedrich von Schiller, who was at the time writing his seminal work on aesthetics, the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. The theoretical issues outlined in this book became a constant subject of discussion between the two. Schiller’s profound influence on Humboldt would later play out in the educational reforms Humboldt directed when he was appointed, in 1808, as privy councilor and director of the section for ecclesiastical affairs and education in the Ministry of the Interior. One of Schiller’s great accomplishments, as Readings explains, was that he closed the gap between Kant’s analysis of the abstract, nonempirical basis of pure reason and the less than perfect social history and tradition in which humans actually lived. The linking terms of aesthetics, art, Bildung, and culture were being reformulated for modern discourse within the great German romantic tradition, which provided a philosophical synthesis of nature and culture, subjective and objective, in the sublime moments of beauty. Schiller’s articulations of those relations deeply impressed Humboldt, whose early private tutoring had already left him a deep admirer of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s concept of Bildung, or the cultivation and perfection of individual character through a progressive educational journey based on the great works of classical culture. The idea of culture, however, emerged not just from intellectual arguments but from the military and political cauldron of early-nineteenthcentury Europe, when the Continent was being reshaped through the conquests of Napoleon Bonaparte. Prussia’s devastating defeat at the battle of Jena in 1806 resulted in the humiliating occupation by the invading forces. Under these oppressive conditions nothing but the creation and reclamation of a national cultural identity for Germany could hope to succeed. Humboldt’s educational reforms took shape in this context. The changes he inaugurated reshaped education in Prussia at all levels, from elementary through university, culminating in the formation in 1810 of the University of Berlin. Taken together, these reforms became models for the most effective kinds of education that influenced Europe and America over the coming century. As Marianna Wertz puts it, “Humboldt’s reforms of the Prussian school system were thorough-going and revolutionary. They produced the best-educated citizenry that any nation has ever known” (par. 5). Kant’s articulation of the knowledge contract operating under the principle of reason was not abandoned but recast in a culturalist model. 5 Readings explains it in this way: “The process of hermeneutic reworking is called culture, and it has a double articulation. On the one hand, culture names an identity. It is the unity of all knowledges that are the object of 27

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study; it is the object of Wissenschaft (scientific-philosophical study). On the other hand, culture names a process of development, of the cultivation of character—Bildung” (64). As a philologist by training as well as a statesman for Prussia, Humboldt understandably had a deep interest in the study of languages, especially the classical languages and culture of ancient Greece and Rome, which formed the backbone of this program of study. 6 War had left his country weak; philology and Wissenschaft would make it strong. His intention was to “inoculate the Germans with the Greek spirit” (quoted in Wertz). The knowledge contract was thus recast under the assumption that reason and unity were best achieved in practice through the inculcation of cultural hegemony in the form of an educated citizenry. The cultural unity that was idealistically supposed to have been achieved in ancient Greece could be recovered through an individual’s progressive participation in the unity of all knowledge. Under these terms, knowledge was thus often a one-sided kind of recovery and preservation of past accomplishments. But Humboldt’s culturalist ideals also placed a wholly new emphasis on the creation of new forms of inquiry through organized research, and it was these ideals that proved to be so influential. “A genetic imprint was established for the system itself, one that would strongly persist in the twentieth century; and the German system became a long-sustained exemplar internationally of how to turn research into a foundation for advanced teaching and study” (Clark, Places of Inquiry 20). Humboldt’s culturalist argument has tended to obscure the perpetually preeminent role of science. That is, the departmental honors seem to shift from philosophy to literature as the aesthetic embodiment of those cultural traditions, paradoxically, transcends the accidents of historical traditions themselves through their rendering of the sublime moments of beauty. Under these cultural valuations “the natural sciences take their often extremely powerful place in the University by analogy with the humanities” (Readings 4). But, contrary to this hypervaluation of the power of the humanities to shape the knowledge contract, Humboldt himself explains the “supreme” principle as belonging to science: “We find that from an intellectual standpoint, the education authorities must have the following as their supreme (though only seldom expressed) principle: to bring forth the purest and most profound view of science, by bringing the entire nation—while preserving all individual differences—as quickly as possible along the path which, if further pursued, will lead to science” (quoted in Wertz). But here we have an interpretive problem: science was an historically evolving discourse and not yet the modern set of identifiable practices. The term science 28

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has often been used as a translation for Friedrich Schleiermacher’s notion of Wissenschaft, which he tried to distinguish from religious knowledge. In the context of Schleiermacher’s founding of modern secular hermeneutics, Wissenschaft is perhaps better understood not as a term synonymous with the modern natural sciences but as “the unity underlying all pursuits of specific knowledges” (Readings 65). Nevertheless, the fundamental research practices of the sciences, even in general terms, prepared the way for the transformation of the knowledge contract as it adapted to the American research university in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Rewriting the Knowledge Contract in Post–Civil War America Shortly after General Lee’s Confederate army retreated from the Union forces at the Battle of Antietam in September 1862 President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. In that same year the U.S. Congress passed the first Morrill Land Grant Act, which granted every state thirty thousand acres of land for each senator and representative it had in Congress. The contractual idea was that the proceeds from the sale of the land could be used to fund a state college for agriculture and the mechanical arts, thus opening up whole new vocational missions for higher education. Not all states used the money in ways stipulated by the act, and some found that they could not even sell all the land they received. But thirty states, mainly in the Midwest and South, established new agricultural and mechanical colleges. Eighteen other states gave the money to state universities to finance new agricultural and mechanical departments; three gave the money to private colleges. Thus began America’s innovative adaptation of the knowledge contract to a society rapidly shifting from an agrarian to an industrial economy. In the process “a new middle class formed, between capital and labor and distinct from the old middle class of small merchants and craftspeople. Following a common usage, I call this new group the professional-managerial class (hereafter, pmc for short)” (Ohmann, Politics of Knowledge 86). On the American scene, higher education would have to be adaptable, because social change for the pmc was happening so rapidly in so many related arenas. Magali Sarfatti Larson called it the “Great Transformation” in America, characterized by the remarkable conjoining of the historical processes of professionalism, disciplinarity, modernization, and urbanization, all impelled by the forces of industrial capitalism. This Great Transformation falls under what Charles Taylor calls “the number one problem of modern social science . . . modernity itself ” (“Modern” 91). Taylor defines moder29

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nity as “that historically unprecedented amalgam of new practices and institutional forms (science, technology, industrial production, urbanization), of new ways of living (individualism, secularization, instrumental rationality), and of new forms of malaise (alienation, meaninglessness, a sense of impending social dissolution” (“Modern” 91). He understands, however, that “we need to speak of multiple modernities, the plural reflecting the fact that non-Western cultures have modernized in their own ways and cannot be properly understood if we try to grasp them in a general theory that was originally designed with the Western case in mind” (Taylor, “Modern” 91). Given these complications, it is often difficult to focus on any one of these processes without losing sight of the other dimensions, but I take this as a common analytic liability when one breaks down in analysis otherwise complexly interrelated phenomena. 7 What Laurence Veysey’s narrative of the rise of the American university confirms is that while service and teaching were important missions for higher education as it developed in America after the Civil War, a version of Humboldt’s research model adapted the knowledge contract to justify departmentally administered disciplines as the dominant organizing principle for the legitimation and evaluation of all kinds of academic labor. This is not a rigid, hegemonic univocality but a highly dynamic, fluid, but nevertheless systemic institutional practice, just as capitalism is fluid and dynamic and shifting as a dominant mode of production. Far too often, however, the more dynamic, inventive properties of disciplinarity that can yield important new forms of knowledge can be forcefully (and legally, under contract laws) scripted into a hollow echo of disciplinary objectivity that can then be repressively deployed by meting out reductive standards and excluding whole populations from the benefits of the knowledge contract. The dynamism of the new knowledge contract emerged out of this transformation from its former, primarily preservative function to the more Humboldtian version emphasizing the need to both preserve and create. Before the rise of the research university knowledge was a relatively static set of core texts and languages that needed to be preserved (Shumway, “Disciplinarity”). As we have seen, Kant justified such a preservative contract for knowledge because “all three higher faculties base the teachings which the government entrusts to them on writings, as is necessary for a people governed by learning, since otherwise there would be no fixed and universally accessible norm for their guidance” (33). Under the Kantian version of the knowledge contract the content of that knowledge was therefore relatively static: what was discovered was that which had existed all along 30

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as a priori, “fixed,” and universal norms available to the modern through the preservation of canonical “writings” from classic cultures of the West. During the great transformation of the liberal arts colleges into the modern, disciplinary culture of the professionalized research universities, the production of new forms of knowledge well served a society in which knowledge was scarce and in high demand by industries and nation-states. This was not a minor matter. What emerged in Germany and transformed itself in America was the “idea of something radically new—the idea of research, the systematic pursuit of the not-yet-known. Research, in this sense, represents an inherently collective, replicable, and professionalized mode of inquiry into the world, first institutionalized in the natural sciences, then in history and the fledgling human sciences, all the way from philology to sociology” (Appadurai, “Diversity” 31). Adapting the general Humboldtian model, the knowledge contract thus acquired its modern, double parameters: to preserve the old and to create the new. The church was basically severed from the agreement, and the nation-state and capital interests signed on with other special interest groups, guilds, and certification bodies securing secondary contractual benefits. Teaching and service became subordinate functions serving to disseminate to students as well as to various public sectors the fruits of the knowledge produced by research. The narratives describing the emergence of the new double function of the research university all reveal that the formation of the modern disciplinary sciences, especially physics and chemistry, provided the exemplary models for organizing the university as a vital institution serving, among other things, the emergence of the United States as a nation-state of formidable industrial and imperial power in the world. Again, I differ from Readings on exactly this point: although he maintained that as the university passed from reason to culture as its unifying principle the sciences were subordinated to the culturalist function of the humanities, I believe the best evidence suggests that in terms of material, institutional practices the opposite was actually the case. The forces of modernization and professionalization followed the institutionalized, European models of the sciences as the proper mechanisms for measuring and evaluating knowledge, making it stable and replicable by other practitioners, and in this way the humanities have struggled to “measure up” to the scientific paradigms with their greater prestige. The ideology (or alibi) might have been culturalist, but the material practices of the university structured themselves after scientific models. 8 There are, of course, many different ways of knowing, but the system of disciplinary knowledge based on scientific 31

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models excluded most alternatives. The craft labor attributes of tacit, intuitive, experiential, imaginative, creative knowledges could not be so easily objectified and measured by the more narrowly institutionalized forms of disciplinary knowledge so prized by the scientific fields (see Newfield, Ivy and Industry). So although as a worker in an English department much of my interest will be in the role and fate of work in the humanities, such work cannot be considered apart from a consideration of the role of science and technology in the perpetually changing conditions of advanced capitalism. The modern university, therefore, took shape as a displacement of the precursors of theology and philosophy toward the dominance of the disciplinary economy of value modeled by the sciences. Disciplinary Payoffs: The Scientific Management of the Knowledge Contract The reformation of the knowledge contract as exemplified by the American research universities affected not so much intercourse with the state and clergy, as in Kant’s day, but the relationship of knowledge to capital interests. 9 Whereas the Kantian version of the knowledge contract had stipulated, among other things, a separation of theology and philosophy, the modernized version supposedly stipulated an “incommensurability,” as Samuel Weber explains, between knowledge and capital. But the terms of the disciplinary knowledge contract as worked out by the scientific project were based more on procedural practices than philosophical ideals, and the basic procedures enacted by the controlled identification of clearly demarcated objects studied under equally identifiable methods proved to be calling cards for industrial interests. As Clyde Barrow and Christopher Newfield have now demonstrated, the disciplinary principles of objectivity and methodology were exactly those that could be appropriated and best serve the principles of scientific management as first articulated and put into practice in modern industry through the work of Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford. In Universities and the Capitalist State Barrow details the relationship between business and universities in the United States from 1894 to 1928. During this period, Barrow shows, business interests influenced higher education through increased representation on university boards, advancing scientific management and creating educational funding agencies such as the Carnegie Foundation. From 1860 to 1930 bankers, business executives, and corporate lawyers greatly increased their presence on university governing boards, gradually displacing clergy, judges, and local government 32

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officials. At public universities, for example, the percentage of trustees with business occupations increased from 20 percent in 1860 to nearly 47 percent in 1930. When adding in lawyers, most of whom were corporate lawyers, the business presence on boards of public universities in 1930 amounted to 67 percent (Barrow 37). Boards at private and technical institutions experienced similar trends. The effect of this leadership is significant for social and material reasons: “Modern governing boards inherited this dual responsibility for regulating the orthodoxy of academic staff and curriculum and for acting as the primary institutional mechanism through which the university lays claim to socially scarce material resources that can be converted into the material means of mental production” (Barrow 43). Fueled by corporate regulation of academic orthodoxy, scientific management began to affect university practices (Barrow; Newfield). In 1909 Henry Pritchett, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (cfat), consulted Frederick Taylor, father of scientific management whose famous “time and motion” study had reshaped the mechanical efficiency of factory assembly lines. The cfat “undertook extensive institutional surveys to formulate specific empirical definitions that could ‘scientifically’ designate the meanings imputed” (Barrow 65) to key terms such as college, university, professor, and private versus public institution. The disciplinary conditions specified by the knowledge contract would now be anchored to these corporately defined educational terms, which represented a narrowly reductive limitation of disciplinary powers. Significantly, then, contractual authorship came from external forces more than it emerged from the autonomous interests of scholars and teachers. In response to Pritchett’s request for “an economic study of education” Taylor recommended his friend, Morris L. Cooke, “a young mechanical engineer” (Barrow 67) who then wrote the study Academic and Industrial Efficiency. “In this pathbreaking theoretical work,” Barrow explains, “Cooke did successfully develop a calculus by which to measure the efficiency and productivity of educational institutions in a manner similar to that being employed in industrial factories” (67). This “disciplined” scientific study yielded most of the terms with which we still measure academic labor: The key unit of measurement in this new calculus was called the “student hour.” A student hour was “one hour of lectures, of laboratory work, or recitation room work, for a single pupil.” . . . The theoretical effect of this new measurement was to focus attention on professors as mental workers for the first time in their

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history. If the university was conceptualized as an economic unit of production, the role of the professor as its chief producer was altered as well. The religious mentality that promoted university life as a unique and special “calling” was discarded by Cooke for an industrial conception of intellectual “labor.” (Barrow 70)

The cfat was impressed with the possibilities of scientific management practices and guaranteed their spread by granting access to pension funds only to universities that complied with the foundation’s standards of efficiency and governance (Barrow 73–74). As a result, faculty were removed from the core of administrative work, placing university management in the hands of nonacademic supervisors.10 Since it was difficult in any but the most crude way to “measure” teaching ability beyond the number of hours assigned or the actual hours used for teaching and research in classroom buildings, the surest way to standardization was to deploy the work of the disciplines themselves as modeled in the research universities. “Cooke therefore recommended greater research and teaching specialization by faculty as a condition for promoting more intensive mass production” (Barrow 72). Disciplinary specialization and rigor became the models of academic success when tightly administered by a centralized, hierarchical management on the model of corporate industry. While facing greater specialization and scientific accountability, faculty enjoyed limited forms of academic freedom, which was “confined to the teaching and publication of empirical ‘facts’ that were generally accepted by other experts in the field” but not freedom to “speculat[e] about untested, political, moral or social arrangements” (Barrow 195). Modern forms of disciplinary purification thus persisted from the Kantian discourse of reason, but they were transformed primarily into positivist processes of objectification through quantification. 11 Since quantitative management of academic capital depended upon the efficiency and peacefulness of labor relations within the university, from these early stages intense forms of dissent and disagreement were strictly “disciplined” according to the new terms of the knowledge contract: “The new texts on university administration generally advised ‘that quarrelsome debate, including that based upon conflicts among academic ideals, must be minimized or suppressed whenever it became threateningly serious’ ” (Barrow 79). In short, there were practical reasons why Gerald Graff ’s proposals for “teaching the conflicts” (Beyond the Culture Wars) would not have been particularly welcomed during this formative period. Disciplinary work thus 34

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took on a distinctly preservative and conservative cast even in its production of new knowledge as faculty had to adapt to corporate management structures. Through the bureaucratic management of more tightly defined disciplines, “university presidents who adopted the ideology of managerialism as their administrative model found themselves rewarded with prestige, higher incomes, foundational or corporate directorships, and offers for better university positions” (Barrow 78). One of the primary sources of a university’s social prestige was the fame of its researchers, and so the principles of scientific management served explicitly to create a “free market in intellectual labor” that would enhance competitiveness and increase symbolic and financial capital that accrued to successful research: “Cooke pointed out that once a free market was established, its structural features would pressure professors into adopting a more competitive outlook on individual productivity” (Barrow 71). At the same time, the enhancing of these market-driven forms of “academic freedom” worked directly against any form of unionization that would disrupt management power. With these transformations in place, individual, disciplinary, specialized scholarship became the benchmark of academic value and eventually led to the “patterned isolation” (Veysey; Graff, Professing Literature) and the publishor-perish syndrome so familiar to academics in times of fiscal restraint and downsizing. The Hypermodern Contract and the Contortions of Academic Capitalism After the Second World War and with the invention of the microchip, we have shifted from knowledge scarcity to knowledge overload. Until about 1970, as Ohmann explains, the explosion of knowledge matched up fairly well with postwar economic growth. But about the time of the Arab oil embargo the economy went sour as competition from Europe, Japan, and the Pacific Rim altered the scene. With the rapid shift in market pressures, which have inspired a dramatic turn from public to private funding of education, the academic disciplines now seem to be coming undone under global economic conditions that have little need for the preservation of disciplinary boundaries. Under these conditions the power of disciplinary paradigms legitimated by the knowledge contract to control this proliferation may indeed seem, for many at least, to be “lost,” or, perhaps, they are just ineffective in the face of the forces that surround them and deploy them in seemingly uncontrollable ways. There are many different individual and collective users of many different kinds of universities in these times of 35

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technoscience, global capitalism, and vocationalism, and, depending on location and perspective, these different users each have different vested interests in changing the shape of higher education. Readings has argued that the “empty” term excellence is the new organizing term for what he calls the “posthistorical university,” which now functions not like but as a bureaucratic corporation. 12 In his analysis excellence is “dereferentialized” because it can mean anything to anybody, so long as it meets the terms of cost-effectiveness. No doubt, the power of Readings’s analysis derives from the remarkable rhetorical advantages that a generic term like excellence can have, especially for administrators, which explains why it has indeed served so often in contemporary academic bureaucracies. We are now drowning in excellence, as anyone who scans intra-institutional documents spelling out criteria for teaching excellence, research excellence, and service excellence will soon see. It is also hard not to find the term appearing on virtually every university Website and campus viewbook documenting the many kinds of excellence made available to anyone who enrolls. But this term is not ideologically empty: “In the context of the contemporary academy, the content of the word ‘excellence’ is competition, and its referent is winning” (Harkin, “Excellence” 4). Excellence thus carries and conceals considerable ideological content when the interests being served are corporate profits and business interests that seek to transform knowledge into information and education into training. And these interests have acquired new kinds of legal protections beginning in the late 1960s as deregulation laws were enacted that eliminated almost any kind of professional claim to anticompetitive practices. “During this period, the Supreme Court struck down the legality of standard fees for service, bans against competitive bidding, and bans on advertising” (Brint, In an Age 10). This “changed legal philosophy” could not help but alter the knowledge contract within higher education as it started to seek excellence under less-socialized professional market conditions. 13 Those alterations primarily appeared within a discourse of standards and objectifications that reduced epistemology to often trivial quantifications that served very powerful interests: the “service” we rendered had to be rapidly and simplistically objectified as quickly as possible so that concrete differences in labor could be rapidly converted into quantifiable standards suitable for certification of merit as abstract labor (Watkins, Work Time). We are deeply within and not after (or “post”) that history of late capitalism. Many educators have understandably sought to bolster disciplinarity as our best defense against these encroaching forms of commodification. 36

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Such bolstering constitutes a reinforcement of the modern knowledge contract for organizing university affairs, and it has certainly served as the main weapon for the pmc to establish its “exclusive right to do work of a particular kind” (Ohmann, Politics of Knowledge 87). The most basic argument of this book is that such efforts may well play a part in a concerted defense of valuable educational interests by reforming the links between community, social, and epistemological domains and for dynamically reforming the inventive properties of disciplines to produce new, often unexpected results, but they will simply not be enough. Although under the modern knowledge contract disciplinary forms of knowledge have often been conceived as resisting the powerful pulls of industrial and capital interests, as we have seen, the relationship between disciplinarity and capitalism is more complex. Disciplinary practitioners seek control, autonomy, and jurisdiction over particular knowledge territories; business practitioners seek control, autonomy, and jurisdiction over market territories. When knowledge and markets are so intertwined, sometimes disciplines compete with capital, but often they are conjoined as the many histories we now have of the rise of the universities, the disciplines, and the professions all tell us. Under these conditions, narrowly conceived forms of disciplinarity can reduce complex social and individual processes and events such as writing and composing and reading into violently reductive “standards” that demoralize the workers performing the labor and destroy the uniqueness of each learner’s experience. In this case I hope it is clear that I am not in the least arguing against a highly sophisticated sense of “standards” (in the plural) as a form of public accountability for the quality of our work. I am opposing the reductive forms of “standardization” and “objectification” that reduce complex forms of human labor and interaction to commodifiable units. In a painful twist of academic fate the insistence on disciplinarity can often aid and abet the exploitations of the market. When trying to meet the pressures of commodification and budget cutting, management can actually use disciplinarity to exploit the labor of nondisciplinary kinds of workers: disciplinarity can be used against many academic workers to justify the casualization of the workforce, since those devalued, nondisciplinary kinds of activity do not justify in management eyes more expensive, fully disciplinary workers. The knowledge contract hierarchically legislates labor such that the farther one moves away from the disciplinary terms for the protection or production of knowledge, the less costly the work will be: pedagogical scholarship, teaching, and service learning automatically get devalued. Individual faculty contracts high in teaching load are thus 37

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cheaper labor than those closer to the disciplinary parameters of the overarching knowledge contract. Most managers can agree that disciplinary status is important for certain specialized tasks, but, for example, since much undergraduate teaching in this view does not require such specialization because “standards” are so reductively construed, many courses, therefore, do not require disciplinary expertise beyond a master of arts or even a bachelor of arts degree. Only a small cadre of expensive, disciplined elites needs to be supported in this system—at least in the humanities, where there are few direct capital payoffs for our services except in writing courses, often conceived by administrators and business executives as little more than sophisticated grammar-checkers. These administrative forms of disciplinary “standards” now serve to justify low pay because of the minimalist criteria required to enforce them. There are too many signs around us that academic disciplines have utterly failed to impose their own criteria for valid knowledge as the final arbiters of human judgment: the disciplinary basis of the knowledge contract is not satisfying all parties involved because there are now so many different parties on the scene. Even though the social dimensions of the disciplinary production of knowledge have been reformulated by many academic practitioners, the acknowledgment of these connections is a starting point, not an answer to the problems of higher education. We have to account for the uses of disciplinarity under the terms of the knowledge contract, not just appeal to its standards. And what some have undoubtedly experienced as the misuses and abuses of disciplinary knowledge can best be seen with a view to the human labor involved in fulfilling the contractual obligations to produce and disseminate that knowledge. Epistemology meets labor at every point where work is performed in higher education. 14 When we examine these meeting points of work and knowledge we find many faculty and students involved in activities that don’t count for higher education’s version of disciplinary status, as if they were, even unintentionally, violating the terms of the knowledge contract or else administering them in minimalist terms suitable to sorting out and credentialing basic, commodifiable skills. Yet some of these nondisciplinary professional activities and alternative ways of knowing (such as innovative teaching, creative arts, rhetorical invention, etc.) require domains of freedom and autonomy from direct control and management, just as does the best of disciplinary research. Sometimes, it’s true, such freedom and autonomy depend on carving out disciplinary paradigms where models and symbolic generalizations can be learned and imitated in tremendously 38

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fruitful and often labor-saving ways that can also provide some measure of resistance to strictly short-term cost-effectiveness criteria. Paradigms determine the methods deployed, but in practice they yield new, sometimes unexpected forms of knowledge or sometimes anomalies that call for wholly new paradigms, so that the replicability of methods does not determine in advance the results of performing paradigmatic research. So this book is not a simple argument against disciplines that sustain the knowledge contract and for something that completely dissolves disciplinary territories into something we might call anti- or postdisciplinary practices (as I have occasionally argued in the past). I do, however, advocate an institutional reallocation of the disciplinary economy of value so that alternative but valuable forms of labor can be contractually legitimated with as much legal force as the traditional disciplinary activities. Often, nondisciplinary working domains are crucial to the best educational interests of a wide range of university users, especially in the humanities. Given the complex intercultural arenas we encounter in contemporary classrooms, a simplified version of disciplinary standards wreaks violence against many students and faculty. Paradigms, models, and symbolic generalizations can sometimes help, if we recognize the force of their generalizations and simplifications, but much of the care, work, and experience involved in these encounters require alternative, even ad hoc adjustments to learning and teaching. In our encounters with violence we often have to improvise, because “our received rhetorical, theoretical, and pedagogical knowledge does not, alone, prepare us for these discourses” (Blitz and Hurlbert 21). We need to protect these alternative domains as much as the disciplinary territories, and that calls for altering the contractual relations between higher education and both public and private demands. What Weber described as the forces seeking to “unsecure” “familiar schools and disciplines” of knowledge will likely “exert increasing pressure to bring about at least a partial realignment of the established academic division of labor. Such a realignment would have to entail not merely the introduction of a few new disciplines or departments, not merely the shifting of borders, but the tracing of a different kind of borderline” (213). This book can be seen as one effort to theoretically work out what these different borderlines might look like for an endlessly expanding array of multicultural users of the university whose needs are not often met inside the current terms of the knowledge contract. A central project, then, is to theorize how we might reenvision a more limited, less dominant role for epistemologically based forms of disci39

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plinarity within the expanded array of professionally contracted work we do as faculty and students. As Gary Rhoades has argued, faculty now work as “managed professionals.” Consequently, given the material relations between knowledge and labor, our main hope to preserve forms of autonomy and control over our working lives means that collective bargaining becomes more important than ever. Individual acts of creative scholarship and teaching will not, by themselves, alter the terms of the knowledge contract. Benjamin Johnson, Patrick Kavanagh, and Kevin Mattson spell out the stakes: “Nothing less than the link between democracy and education is at stake in the struggle between the academic labor movement and the corporate university” (10). Despite the remarkable growth of unionized faculty in recent decades, economic pressures from right-wing efforts to break the labor movement have forced many unions to devote themselves to the protection of basic working conditions and, as Richard Sullivan puts it, a “fixation on the narrow goals of collective bargaining” (108) rather than the broader, often more long-term but compelling issues of social justice. As Sullivan explains, this championing of “business unionism” tends to focus on only the economic issues and, consequently, to adapt the authoritarian (rather than the democratic and grass-roots) principles of “centralized and hierarchical governing structures” and “paid professional staff to negotiate and enforce contracts.” In contrast, “social movement unionism seeks to reinject [sic] unions with the qualities of a social movement that once made them a powerful voice for progressive social change” (Sullivan 108). Utilitarian legitimations for collective bargaining must be matched by moral legitimations (DeCew 40–41) that directly speak to the social and educational values of rewriting the terms of the knowledge contract. What this would mean is that, as collective bargaining gains ground, union activists can more “actively” join their labor concerns with epistemological and curricular issues in order to preserve realms of shared working spaces that include but do not always depend on disciplinary rationales. The knowledge contract itself has to be altered and supplemented by other contractual, educational, alternative, and sometimes nonepistemological obligations. This will not be easy, as can be readily attested by the many voices that have been working in this area over the past few decades. Much of what we do as part of our working lives, for both faculty and students, is much more than just producing knowledge, at least in the usual academic disciplinary senses of that term, but such work often gets drained of value within the domination of a disciplinary economy. It is not simply a matter of fighting for disciplinary validity or developing new and more 40

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just “disciplinary practices,” although such emergent forms of disciplinary labor are constantly being shaped and reshaped, as any social constructionist can tell us. The most innovative disciplinary work takes place at the boundaries of the disciplines, and interdisciplinarity opens new terrain even as such labor still works within the disciplinary economy of value, adapting paradigms from sociology, say, to read literary or cultural texts. But truly nonmodern forms of labor challenge the disciplinary rhetoric in more fundamental ways. One reasonable presumption is that we must, therefore, expand the disciplines. This, of course, happens all the time with the disciplinary process of creating new knowledge and splintering into new subdisciplines (Abbott, Chaos). But it is not the best use of academic discipline to believe that we can simply expand the range of this kind of discourse to include all the kinds of nondisciplinary language uses and literacies that may have considerable academic value. Higher education’s distinctive version of disciplinarity would then lose its remarkable powers to create stabilities of knowledge in the very process of making new discoveries. Instead, the basic argument of this book is that we can better recognize the special limiting characteristics of disciplinary rhetoric and contractually identify and legitimate alternative domains of truly emergent forms of language use, social interaction, and learning/teaching that cannot always be reduced to paradigms, models, and symbolic generalizations. New contractual obligations will then better serve many important users of the university. Only recently, therefore, have various critics begun to link disciplinary knowledge to unionized labor movements within higher education. 15 Linking knowledge and labor as contractual relations can be especially touchy for many academics whose most personal investment in disciplinary professionalization stems from an identification with a “calling” (Bledstein; Veysey) that, at least ideologically, surpasses the realm of “common labor.” The most recurrent mystification is the “incommensurability” clause of the knowledge contract, whereby intellectual workers had no contractual obligations because academic research was in principle based on the “disinterested” pursuit of “knowledge for knowledge’s sake.” As a “subplot in the story of professionalization” (Ohmann, Politics of Knowledge 158), academic freedom meant we could work according to higher ethical standards. After Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Bourdieu, Anzáldua, Lyotard, Harraway, and others we have witnessed the theoretical deconstruction of these idealistic prejudices so that we can better illuminate the contractual relations that should, indeed, protect certain domains of relative autonomy. 41

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Yet even with the dissipation of the “disinterested” discourse, intellectuals still “strive to subordinate academic work and academic disciplines to the service of their ‘larger’ commitments” (McGowan 4), whether they are for social justice, new knowledge, or democratic principles of inquiry. Even more significantly, perhaps, these long-ingrained prejudices for professional high-mindedness don’t stand up even to the most disciplined form of empirical evidence. As Larson put it nearly three decades ago in her groundbreaking study of professionalization, “The implicit assumption that the behavior of individual professionals is more ethical, as a norm, than that of individuals in lesser occupations has seldom, if ever been tested by empirical evidence” (xi).16 The prejudice still lingers, after all these years, but the irony is that now, in the early twenty-first century, the professoriat is the most highly unionized sector of workers in the entire U.S. economy, and “the academy is one of the fastest growing sectors of the North American labor movement” (Herman and Schmid 9). 17 There is good reason for this change, and it comes from faculty and student understanding of their role as workers within the new realities of the corporatized university. “This change in consciousness—felt, lived experience in everyday life—goes a long way in explaining the energy and anger that sustain the new academic labor movement” (Johnson, Kavanagh, and Mattson 5). Many campus negotiators and student and faculty action groups have struggled at collective bargaining tables under all kinds of inequitable conditions. But a recurring problem with the academic labor movement, as Rhoades’s study of faculty union contracts points out, is that the unions have themselves tended to accept the disciplinary terms of the knowledge contract that separates epistemology and labor. Under these limitations administrative control of labor gets legitimized through the management of faculty output as measured by “objective,” quantifiable registers of “primary” research and “secondary” teaching and service. Since higher education’s version of disciplinarity subordinates the latter categories as well as nondisciplinary forms of knowledge, these latter activities deserve less compensation even though they may be in greater demand by the public. The disciplinary conditions of the knowledge contract thereby facilitate far too many forms of potential exploitation of faculty and students. As William Tierney puts it, the risk of unions is that they too can become rigid and monological in ways that make them counter the progressive changes now needed: “Unions, like reengineering, are empty concepts if they are not defined and contextualized. If unionization means the rigid definition of structure that maintains at all costs the status quo regardless 42

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of present contexts, then I fully understand how reengineering can be seen as problematic” (170). The unions’ rightful concern for labor equities has to be reconnected to, not separated from, the epistemological and curricular domains at all points.18 Demographic and economic changes have been made more visible by exacerbating the inequities that have always structured higher education. And, once again, Larson’s analysis led her to make what appear today to be nearly prophetic remarks about changes in the professional life of academics: “Work conditions in our century may be drawing increasingly large numbers of professionals closer to a proletarian condition” (xvi). The status, prestige, and relative power gained by the rise of academic professions have eroded under the new forces of “academic capitalism” (Slaughter and Leslie) in times of “flexible accumulation” (Harvey, Condition). It is time to collectively renegotiate the terms of our contractual relations to the many users and beneficiaries of higher education. By themselves, the disciplinary forms of the knowledge contract will not prove sufficient for these tasks despite the contract’s remarkable historical resiliency. Of course, union labor negotiations by themselves are also not sufficient to bring about substantive institutional changes without being linked to the kinds of curricular, pedagogical, and scholarly alterations that take place through the usual academic channels of scholarly organizations, committee work, and departmental administration. Most of what I have to say pertains as much to faculty and students who do not work under collective bargaining agreements. Altering working conditions and curricular designs, however, inevitably requires group and collaborative efforts, whereas many alterations of teaching practices and research investments can be worked out within the enormously variable degrees of relative autonomy different individuals have to refashion their careers according to their interests. Workers in different academic fields also experience very different levels of disciplinary and economic constrictions. The limitations are particularly noticeable for workers in the various fields of the humanities. As Michael Bérubé puts it, we tend to “fly under the radar, so to speak, of Monsanto and Microsoft” so that our work is “in a financial sense immaterial to the corporate multiversity” (“American Studies” 103, 104). 19 But Bérubé also cautions that passive submission to this tendency conceals the tangible role our labor does play in the literacy practices that have practical economic consequences throughout the society. Ohmann pointed this out long ago in English in America, and many writers (I count myself as one of them) have followed his lead. I work in an English department, so my inevitable focus 43

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originates from this field, but, as Joe Moran puts it, “English has been at the center of academic debates about the shaping and division of knowledge” (19). For this reason alone the consequences of my argument press upon the larger issues altering the nature of the contemporary uses of higher education in North America. Everyone knows we need to change the university, partly because Clark Kerr’s articulation of the post–World War II multiversity is changing so rapidly that change itself becomes the grounds on which everyone in academia labors. But despite these institutional turbulences it was Kerr himself who reminded us that the university has historically been one of the most conservative institutions, the one most resistant to change among almost all modern social institutions. I attribute this persistence to the juridical power of the knowledge contract to legislate disciplinary hierarchies, even as the specific conditions for the production of knowledge have altered. As Ohmann explains, “The profession, however radicalized, is not well equipped to resist such developments. Organized as it is to regulate careers and maintain hierarchies of status among practitioners and institutions, the profession is all but unable to act in solidarity with its most weakly positioned members” (Politics of Knowledge 25). Thus, despite all the railings about the theory revolution, political correctness, and the politicization of the humanities, the modern university has remained unchanged in some pretty fundamental and resistant ways because of the resilience of the knowledge contract to adapt to those changing economic and legal conditions. In the face of these seemingly intractable circumstances, some academics have accepted Richard E. Miller’s proposal that we should confine our efforts to working within the terms of the bureaucracy we now have, thus “conceding the reality of academic working conditions” (22). Miller’s cautions are understandable, especially when it seems like the only alternative is to bang our heads against the wall. But imagining different futures means collaborative uses of the critical imagination to alter curricular and working life in more fundamental ways. As with any organized labor movement, negotiation consists not just of concessions to circumstances but of worker solidarity in protesting and changing the reality of unjust working conditions in academia. 20 In “The Post-Work Manifesto” Stanley Aronowitz, Dawn Esposito, William DiFazio, and Margaret Yard explain the necessity of the critical imagination for such social activism: “To imagine is to entertain not only the possibility of a future, but to acknowledge that indeed the present has the potential to be shaped as we dream. To imagine 44

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means to dream, to move beyond the boundaries of what is routine and practical. Imagination is lodged not only in the individual creative dream, but in cultural movements that create new ways, new dreams enacted in social solidarity, hope and trust” (70). The creation of such new meanings takes place in what Cornelius Castoriadis called the “social imaginary,” where innovation and change can call forth new forms of autonomy that are not just reductively determined in advance by the current cultural system, whether of capitalism or disciplinarity. And his vision of autonomy for individuals can only happen in social solidarity by “striving simultaneously for the autonomy of others” (Gaonkar, “Toward New Imaginaries” 8). Changes to higher education are vital public concerns. It is deeply in the interest of a wide range of citizens to make sure our culture produces and creates domains of jurisdiction that are not meted out according to the dictates of private, corporate capital or at the hands of an elite band of researchers whose paradigms justify the exclusion of others from important decision-making practices. Realms of decommodification and notcapital are crucial, especially as the spread of global capital reaches into all domains of the “life world” (Habermas). Our only possibility is to collectively define, justify, and negotiate such socially valuable educational spaces within, in relation to, and often against the pressures of shortterm market need. The disciplinary habitas (Bourdieu) cannot be the only contractual spaces in which to entertain realms of relative autonomy. That very habitas has produced and reinforced professional stratification and inequality throughout educational institutions as a replication of those differences in the social world.21 During the nineteenth century professionals struggled to wrest authority for their expertise away from other social classes and nonprofessional spheres of labor. Now the battle is within professional strata, at least to the extent that “the internal divisions among professionals are larger and more important than the divisions between professionals and other classes” (Brint, In an Age 13) because, for example, the gaps between high-paid faculty and temporary instructors have led to unhealthy divisions among colleagues. No theory of professionalism and disciplinarity that ignores these institutionalized forms of inequity in labor and prestige and power can hope to ameliorate larger arenas of social injustice. To this extent, this study tries to imagine new relations and new possibilities between disciplinary and nondisciplinary, scientific and humanistic forms of inquiry, and Western and non-Western rhetorics, but it does so not just as an epistemological problem but as a labor problem that cries out 45

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for new ways to alter the latest versions of the knowledge contract. Disciplinary jurisdictions can be both necessary and essential, especially in times of retrenchment, at the same time that the transformations of the culture and the academy now call for more significant kinds of interventions in the conditions of knowledge, disciplinarity, and labor. As Tony Becher and Paul R. Trowler put it in the preface to the second edition of Academic Tribes and Territories, “Changes to the higher education system . . . have resulted in a highly differentiated, more permeable, system in which close engagement with the disciplinary knowledge core through research is only one academic activity among very many” (xiii; see also Clark, Places of Inquiry 248). We have a much bigger task than talking about new forms of cross- and interdisciplinary forms of knowledge, socially constructed epistemologies, and postmodern rhetorics: academic “activities” now, even more so than in the past, involve an array, a continuum, and a network of practices, only some of which can be identified as disciplinary and paradigmatic in their organizational structure and purpose. Disciplinarity simply cannot accomplish in its own terms Kerr’s recommendation that “the universities need to find ways also to accommodate pure creative effort if they are to have places on stage as well as in the wings and in the audience in the great drama of cultural growth now playing on the American stage” (Uses 85). To decenter disciplinarity, to acknowledge other obligations alongside the knowledge contract’s explicit valorization of disciplinary kinds of linguistic performance, we have to theorize against the pressures of dualistic thinking. It cannot be a question of whether one is inside or outside disciplinarity, even though the terms of analysis so often slide into exactly such dialectical formulations, even when the dialectic can be heuristically quite powerful in generating new insights. Metaphors of a continuum or array can be helpful, but in this study I am going to borrow Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s proposal that we need a new vocabulary of “beside.” 22 Her primary concern in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity is to find ways to talk about feelings, affect, intuition, and nonverbal awareness— dimensions of human experience that so often get either discredited or denied a place in epistemological discussions. Her proposal deserves an extended quotation: Invoking a Deleuzian interest in planar relations, the irreducibly spatial positionality of beside also seems to offer some useful resistance to the ease with which beneath and beyond turn from spatial descriptors into implicit narratives of, respectively, origin and telos.

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Beside is an interesting preposition also because there’s nothing very dualistic about it; a number of elements may lie alongside one another, though not an infinity of them. Beside permits a spacious agnosticism about several of the linear logics that enforce dualistic thinking: noncontradiction or the law of the excluded middle, cause versus effect, subject versus object. Its interest does not, however, depend on a fantasy of metonymically egalitarian or even pacific relations, as any child knows who’s shared a bed with siblings. Beside comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations. (Sedgwick 8)

Sedgwick’s articulation of the relational consequences of the preposition “beside” serves well to designate the position of often-devalued academic labor that needs to exist beside and not just beneath or beyond the more strictly disciplinary domains. Readings also adopts exactly this preposition in articulating what I see as one of my strongest points of agreement with his analysis: “To listen to Thought, to think beside each other and beside ourselves, is to explore an open network of obligations that keeps the question of meaning open as a locus of debate” (165). For this reason I have tried to avoid overuse of the term postdisciplinary, since it seems to suggest a realm of emergent, or “post,” activity that has gone beyond or after the disciplinary configuration of knowledge. In her critique of the interdisciplinary limits of cultural studies, Constance Penley has objected along these lines that, while sympathetic to the impulse on the part of many academic reformers, “postdisciplinary” to her ears “sounds, at least for now, too smugly transcendent” (236). Of course, most of us who have used the term have meant just the opposite of transcendence: the local, ad hoc, often provisional working out of specific problems that often adapts disciplinary kinds of knowledge as well as lore in quite undisciplinary ways that can be seen to operate beside and in tension with the disciplinary rhetorics. And, indeed, much of what we’ve called postdisciplinary includes work that has long preceded even the advent of disciplinary formations insofar as groups of individuals seek to share their understandings as they work toward tentative resolutions of specific problems. Other alternatives such as anti-, trans-, and interdisciplinary knowledge have similar kinds of conceptual locutions that make it difficult to avoid binary ways of thinking, but in the course of this book I refer to some of these terms as ways to designate different kinds of work within the 47

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array of academic labor. I certainly have not escaped the dualistic problem, especially to the degree that it has been built into the etymology of our language when the “non” negates its opposite despite the obviously multidimensional nature of the worlds we inhabit. My habit in this book is to refer to “nondisciplinary” or “nonmodern” kinds of work (drawing on Bruno Latour’s sense of the nonmodern, as I explain in chapter 2), hoping that what I mean designates kinds of tasks that occur besides the powerful versions of academic disciplinarity, which is itself never a pure form but an array of differential practices, some of which more fully meet traditional definitions meted out by the knowledge contract. The significance of “besides” in this formulation is one rhetorical way to mediate the unfortunate consequences of the dualistic position, whereby “the nondisciplinary position is more scornful of the disciplines” (Klein, Interdisciplinarity 106). Scorn can be rightfully heaped on unjust uses of disciplinarity, just as it can be on nondisciplinary forms of injustice. On the other hand, interdisciplinarity does not interfere with disciplinarity but has always been, to varying degrees, a supporting dimension of the disciplinary economy of value insofar as it stretches and partakes of neighboring disciplinary bodies of knowledge. 23 Interdisciplinary paradigms of normal research emerge, and “interdisciplinary paradigms are to the traditional disciplines as queer paradigms are to the hegemony of heterosexual norms” (Lauter 19). In order to work out these differences it is necessary to sort out some of the familiar terms used to describe university labor. In the next chapter I therefore reflect on some of the confusions and possibilities that emerge from key terms such as the modern, the disciplinary, and the professional. Some of the distinctions I make, such as the differences between the “profession” and the “discipline,” some readers will undoubtedly find to be counterintuitive, even though I don’t think they are entirely of my own making. We owe a great deal to the critique of disciplinarity developed by Foucault, but here I believe it is necessary to distinguish academic disciplinary formations under the knowledge contract from other kinds of surveillance within the disciplined society. In these instances I try to sort out these differences. But the crucial matter here is that we need to be able to name professional jurisdictions over nondisciplinary domains of work. While granting the Foucauldian premise that “university professors are disciplinary subjects” within the general disciplinary society, I think it is crucial to avoid essentializing this premise so that “there is no place outside disciplines” (Leitch, Theory Matters 165, 166). As developed by and for the 48

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rising professional-managerial class, academic disciplines are specialized instances of the disciplinary society, not always identical to other disciplined forms of social institutions, particularly those that affected other social classes. But, more important, to close off any sense of work, activity, and experience that might conceivably be outside or beside the disciplines is both unwise and unnecessary because it conceptually excludes significant domains of human activity not always determined in the first instance by discipline or capital, for that matter. With an eye to these semantic difficulties I use “nondisciplinary” with great caution and primarily as a theoretical concept to generalize about activities that do not easily correspond to disciplinary criteria. In practice it may typically be more politically expedient to contractually specify the particular forms of nondisciplinary labor, primarily so as to avoid the inevitable hierarchical devaluation signaled by the apparent dualism of this “nonterm.” But it is of no use to articulate rationales for nonprofessional or antiprofessional domains of work, if only because disempowering our professional life will serve no interests other than those who wish to disempower higher education. “The choice, then, is not between professionalism and antiprofessionalism, but between different versions of professionalism, and different ways to act within institutions.” The task is to “stake out an alternative model of professionalism” (Williams, “Life of the Mind” 218), responsive to the dramatically changing circumstances of the pmc, and this book is devoted to that task. We live in an enormously stratified, hierarchical social world of disciplined bodies where the triumphs of global capitalism have failed to alleviate the impoverishment and suffering of much of the world’s population. The ultimate discipline, in the Foucauldian sense of biopower, is the destruction of the bodies whose needs and desires can find no avenues of articulation and enunciation, whose voices and sufferings go unheeded if not unheard. There are many of those bodies within the United States, not just in the trouble spots of the world. One of the contractual obligations that must be negotiated into the public rationales for higher education ought to be the creation of domains of exchange where other voices, besides the ones speaking with disciplinary authority, can be heard. This means that educators must bring all their disciplinary expertise and nondisciplinary wisdom to the collective tasks of actively constructing the kinds of intellectual and cultural environments we wish to inhabit as models of decent public life. We now need much more than a retreat to the protections of our disciplinary terrain to create such models. 49

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2. PROFESSIONS, DISCIPLINES, AND PARADIGMS Reconstructing Academic Labor within the Nonmodern University

It is not only the Bedouins and the !Kung who mix up transistors and traditional behaviours, plastic buckets and animal-skin vessels. What country could not be called “a land of contrasts”? We have all reached the point of mixing up times. bruno latour, We Have Never Been Modern We need (maybe more than ever) new knowledge of this difficult world in order to try changing it; that knowledge will have to be in part abstract because real relations are not evident on the surface of things; and we can’t get there without working through the impossible ideal of objectivity. richard ohmann, Politics of Knowledge

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Working out the Local in the Legitimation of Intellectual Labor Here’s one way of thinking about where we are in the Education Management Organization (emo; see Bousquet, “The Informal”; Noble): a small cadre of “academostars” enjoys affluence, mobility, and prestige at the expense of a rapidly expanding labor force of part-timers, adjuncts, and temporary instructors. 1 In “higher education’s increasingly ruthless caste system,” as Cary Nelson explains,

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the gap between the salaries of administrators, academic stars, and the wealthiest disciplines on the one hand and the salaries and benefits of contingent laborers and marginalized disciplines on the other hand continues to widen. . . . For every person earning $50,000 to $100,000 or more for teaching a course there are hundreds earning about $1,000. The hourly pay for an assistant to the university president may be as much as $150; the hourly pay for part-time teacher may be barely more than $1.50. (“Between” 714–15)

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What’s happening in higher education mirrors what’s happening in the global economy. Those of us in the humanities have been targeted by global organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. 2 For example, in 2003 the educational reform portion of the World Bank Website showed up as a prominent link on its home page. It appeared initially to have adopted progressive educational goals addressing local needs such as diversity, “quality,” and “equity.” As the site stated in its 50

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initial rationale, fundamental to educational enhancement are the “ethical underpinnings of reform, underscoring how policies adopted and overall reform choices closely reflect and express the diverse ethical views of the multiplicity of individuals and groups that comprise any society” (World Bank). But a closer look at the entire site reveals how the apparently progressive agenda presented at the outer fringes of the Website is entirely misleading. Beneath the attractive electronic facade the real intentions surface: the language of local diversity disappears into the terms of outcomes assessment, national standards, information management, efficiency, and the advocacy of vouchers. What the World Bank calls the “basic economic concepts” now become “efficiency, choice and incentives,” and the “key analytical tools” become “demand and supply analysis” (no Marxists, Foucauldians, social constructivists, or collective bargaining representatives welcome). The “decentralization of education financing” leads directly to the “introduction of choice and competition between schools within education systems, including the use of vouchers.” Excellence fits right into this right-wing agenda for educational reform. The power of these international groups taps enormous resources for funding an ideologically charged rescripting of the knowledge contract so that the humanities get reduced to vocationalized training serving the corporate workforce. The list could go on, but there are, indeed, an awful lot of users and abusers of the university in these times. No wonder the inequities of academic labor are “the single most serious problem in higher education” (Nelson, “Between” 712). Under the wings of technoscience and fast capital we are indeed no ivory tower (Soley) but a workplace divided by a “dual labor market” whereby the privileged faculty serves “as the intellectual conscience of the nation” and the rapidly expanding “flexible workforce” serves as “a silenced group within the new sweatshops of academic labor” (Shumar and Church 21). So what possible role can be left for the disciplinary economy of value that supposedly assured degrees of academic freedom and independence from market forces? What else but disciplines could possibly provide a sense of intellectual identity if not unity? What should count as professional work? And who gets to determine the criteria of legitimation? Although the disciplinary economy of value still remains dominant, the proliferation of differences has begun to force institutional changes that can go either left or right. James Paul Gee, Glynda Hull, and Colin Lankshear have argued that there are some promises “amid these perils” (xii). 51

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Under what they call the “new work order,” characterized by a high-stress workforce of low-paying, temporary jobs meeting the need for local, nichemarketing strategies, the economic valorizing of the local and adaptable has put pressure on less flexible disciplinary models for the production of knowledge. The modern epistemological rationales based on the knowledge contract are being “pushed from the center of education” (Gee, Hull, and Lankshear 163) in the contemporary university. Individuals can use this decentering for exploitive purposes when all education gets instrumentalized as job-skills training (Noble). The alternative emerges when the decentering of disciplinary practices can be potentially adapted to suit a wider range of users so as to diminish the exploitation of labor and sustain more collaborative, less individualist models of learning, teaching, and research. In these circumstances “the very resources which have brought a global existence into being have also made possible in principle a new form of political existence” (Eagleton 161). The key distinction depends upon seeing through the initial appearance of a remarkable convergence: the local agendas of corporate marketeers appear to align themselves with the progressive educational goals formulated by the many theorists of situated learning, distributed knowledge, interpretive communities, and rhetorical contexts. The apotheosis of the local seems to work both for capitalism and for postmodernism, which is why Fredric Jameson could write a book called Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Global capitalism favors postmodern, fluid, adaptable, local, and tactical knowledges. Whereas the older industrial models of capitalism required rigid and strict disciplining of labor to match mass production models of efficiency, as Jameson explains, the “postmodern logic” of transnational capitalism promotes, as it were, the very critique of universalism and foundationalism that supposedly liberates us from the old disciplinary and exclusionary models for the production of knowledge. But there are enormously significant differences between some of the late capitalist versions of the local and the contextual learning versions of the local that emphasize self-knowledge, understanding, and critical thinking. Just as the World Bank Web page initially seems to register this convergence only to sever it with another agenda, critical analysis reveals that the corporate valuing of the local can be deceptive. Gee, Hull, and Lankshear warn us to beware of what they call the “faux local”: it is false because the real centers of power remain perhaps even more deeply held by management, which controls the flow of profit toward quite centralized pockets of wealth—very large pockets of the empire, as it were, located in 52

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the North Atlantic corporate world often far from the “local” manufacturing spheres in the Southern Hemisphere. In short, and this is crucial, “the global politics of difference established by the world market is defined not by free play and equality, but the imposition of new hierarchies, or really by a constant process of hierarchization” (Hardt and Negri 154). Nevertheless, just as Hardt and Negri claim that “the passage to Empire and its processes of globalization offer new possibilities to the forces of liberation” (xv), Gee, Hull, and Lankshear advocate interventions that can create genuinely local forms of empowerment serving a wider range of educational users than the faux local operations that benefit primarily the managers of capital interests. Since, as Marx explained long ago, capitalism is “constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production” (McLellan 224), the material instantiation of differences, subtle as well as revolutionary, does not always operate as exploitation. Careful distinctions can be made between the more exploitive and the more ethical modes of production under late capitalism. Discourse analysis can help to sort out the different uses of the quite variable discourses that invoke the local. In higher education this allows us to understand that traditional “academic discourses are but one large class of Discourses among many others” (Gee, Hull, and Lankshear 163). Alternatives can then become more identifiable and potentially, therefore, more legitimate. Gee, Hull, and Lankshear imagine a transformed university that organizes itself not exclusively around disciplinary enclaves: “From this standpoint, education would be organized not around disciplinary titles, like ‘physics’ or ‘literature,’ but around themes, systems, problems, and/or sites. As universities and academic disciplines themselves are reorganized by the new capitalism, there may well be an increasing convergence in these matters, a process already in motion” (165). 3 In other words, the convergence can lead to genuine possibilities as well as deceptive manipulations. The challenge is how to sort out which way the local turns. For anything like Gee, Hull, and Lankshear’s imaginary reconfiguration of higher education to happen, the decentering of the knowledge contract of the disciplines will have to be carefully situated beside other contractual obligations that answer exclusively neither to capital efficiency nor to disciplinary stability. Evaluation of labor practices will have to be modified to better include, rather than merely subordinate, the broad range of nondisciplinary (what Latour calls “nonmodern”) work we perform. This will mean that whereas paradigmatic forms of knowledge evaluation take place through peer evaluation and judgment according to the disciplinary 53

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exemplars and models of knowledge, nondisciplinary forms of evaluation will have to develop alternative criteria for ascribing value according to how well the work resolves the problems addressed by the local users themselves. For such changes to happen, academic workers will likely have to more fully affiliate with labor unions and collective bargaining. We cannot hope to continue to have, as Nelson puts it, “corporatization without representation.” In these terms we might then begin the project of “imagining new identities within a collaborative university” (Nelson, “Between” 718). Such “new identities” might transform our working conditions if disciplines and paradigms can be resituated within the university through some fundamental rewriting of contractual relations that can better protect, by more fully legitimating, the dignity of nonmodern, nontraditional forms of work. The institutionalization of modern disciplinary knowledge can be situated within a broader array of professional but nonmodern tasks that, like some of the best disciplinary projects, carry immense social significance in the long range even as they never measure up to the pressures of short-term cost-effectiveness. For this to happen we will have to sort out a few of the complex meanings that gather around the key terms of modern, disciplinary professionalism. Since these terms keep circulating in both troubling and helpful ways, it still seems that the only way out is through, which means we have to borrow them with as much clarity as we can muster. With that caveat in mind, I will first address the problem of the modern and its tensions with the postmodern and nonmodern. We Have Never Had a Nonmodern University The nonmodern university may be no more than a gleam in the eye of a few dreamers. But signs of its infiltration in the ruins of the modern university are everywhere around us if we look in the right places. Too often, I believe, we look in the wrong places, as if we could find hope in new paradigms or new kinds of knowledge production. Conversely, as we have seen, the dystopian worry is that the modern concern for standards, academic freedom, and the pursuit of disciplined forms of knowledge has been co-opted by raw capital and vocational self-interest. If the corporatized university were a manifestation of the “nonmodern” (in the same way that the former seems to manifest the postmodern concern for difference), nonmodern practices would hardly serve as either a form of resistance or an alternative to the ills of hypercapital. However, I believe that the dystopian marketplace of the “new work order” is not simply an abandonment of the modern tidiness in favor of the disorganized, nonmodern mess; instead, much of 54

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the force of the commodified university depends upon an intensification of certain key characteristics of the modern knowledge contract, not its demise. It all depends, of course, on what we mean by this slippery, overused term. The problem is that, at a minimum, there are positive and negative spins on each of the two faces of modernity. Dilip Gaonkar distinguishes the two general shapes as “societal modernization” and “cultural modernity” (“On Alternative Modernities” 1–2). The former, more sociological sense of the term refers to the material complex of state bureaucracies and the forms of rationalization and mechanization characteristic of the scientific enterprise, the apex of which emerged with the rise of the research university in the West but which has had diverse outcomes depending on the social and cultural contexts in which it has taken root. Magali Sarfatti Larson calls it the “great transformation” of social life in Europe beginning in the late eighteenth century, when capitalism began to shape all forms of rhetorical and institutional activity. To this extent, the prime movers of the societal face of modernity were the bourgeoisie, the owners of capital, in the shift from entrepreneurial to industrial-corporate modes of production. Cultural modernity, in contrast, “rose in opposition” (Gaonkar, “On Alternative Modernities” 2) to the bourgeois rationalizations of societal modernization and thus manifests itself in the aesthetic and artistic alternatives to mass culture and industrial mechanization. Advocates of the culturalaesthetic discourse produced by the rising professional-managerial class (pmc) positioned themselves between the owners of capital and the shopfloor workers. Thus, the new middle class often looked both ways, toward scientific advancement and cultural aestheticism in the same breath. But it has usually been an uneasy alliance. Indeed, there is a positive and negative side to each face of modernity: societal modernization produced an enormous expansion of technology, production, and material wealth at the hands of an often deadly routinization and dehumanization of labor; aesthetic celebrations of the cultivation of the self have their dark side in their fall into solipsism, nihilism, and narcissism. Because of “the divided, Janus-like character of both visions of modernity . . . virtually every scholar on modernity and its future feels compelled to address the dilemmas posed by its dual character” (Gaonkar, “On Alternative Modernities” 9). That duality also registers in the tension between politics and aesthetics so central to the formation of English departments, an issue I will address more fully in chapter 6. Of course, the complexities of such sweeping social processes means that there are 55

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contextually diverse manifestations of the modern, or the range of cultural adaptations means that it is more accurate to speak of “multiple modernities” (Taylor, “Modern” 91; see also Richard Bernstein). In the context of European and North American universities, societal modernization provided the material basis for the pmc’s carving out the spaces for disciplinarity. The primary institutional structures of higher education thus negotiated the tensions between both the positive powers of production and the negative forces of exclusion and limitation. That the disciplinary procedures derived primarily from the scientific models of societal modernity meant that the aesthetic discourse had to compete as best it could by creating departments, such as English literature, where practitioners could try to compete with the “hard” subjects by producing their own brand of research, their own legitimate objects and methods. My focus will be on this societal version of modernity as institutionalized in the university, always keeping in mind the links to the broad social arenas of production and labor. In its Eurocentric versions new social formations legitimating hierarchy emerged to replace aristocratic birth with a new kind of elite. In Hardt and Negri’s terms, “The myth of modernity—and thus of sovereignty, the nation, the disciplinary model, and so forth—was virtually the exclusive ideology of the elites” (249). The elite here included both the owners of capital and those members of the pmc who could ideologically buy into the project of societal modernity by adjusting their cultural cache accordingly. Bourgeois taste thus came to designate the specific set of middle-of-the-road aesthetic values that were not terribly disruptive of the plans for capital investment. Others, like Nietzsche, revolted against the vulgarity of those convenient sellouts and thus resisted the bureaucratic dues of disciplinary legitimacy. Nevertheless, disciplines, paradigms, professions all took shape under the different faces of what we have called the “modern.” One of the key ideological components of this project spins off from the effort to hail the positive versions of Enlightenment rationality at work in societal modernity even when it meant glossing and evading the consequences of alienation, exploitation, and meaninglessness. Used in this way, the modern then refers to the ideological tasks of, paradoxically, escaping ideology. The objects and methods of science could potentially create new knowledge that transcended the accidents of history by determining the laws of nature, just as classic works of literature became a domain of special objects that could accomplish a similar transcendent feat. Although the societal versions of the modern emphasized the “new” as opposed to 56

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the old order, the modern ideology is really a recasting of the ancient: the foundationalist, or essentialist, or postivitist (depending upon the context) thrust of the modern was a reworking of the binary logic of Western metaphysics into the institutions of disciplinary knowledge. Plato’s dialectical separation of subject from object, the knower from the known, the Self from the Other, the white from the black, the good from the evil was recast in an updated Aristotelian empiricism in which new methods could more accurately define new objects. Of course, the modern formulations were ramped up by the new technologies of methodology in which more precise kinds of instrumentation allowed for the recording of the methods of discovery that could then be repeated, tested, and verified under similar conditions. The miracles of the new technologies were based on an obsession (fetish?) with methodology. 4 The modern scientific spirit was not a spirit at all but a series of contextually identified methods made concrete in laboratories and examination rooms where objectivity could be measured. 5 It is this ideological component that served as the initial rationale for the modern knowledge contract. Under these terms, higher education gained an epistemological justification for its relative institutional autonomy to the extent that truth criteria demanded a separation from the political institutions of the culture. But as Kant first imagined this autonomy, it was always in relation to and in tension with the social and political fabric of the culture, because, as I suggested in chapter 1, he had to negotiate certain intellectual freedoms from the clergy and the ruling aristocracy. To this extent, the modern carries both the materialist and ideological senses of the term. 6 Or, even more forcefully, “knowledge and morality, then, are not finally separable, as the modern age has tended to assume” (Eagleton 132). But the important feature of the invention of modern disciplinarity under the empirical triumphs of scientific controls was less dependent upon the specific universalist set of beliefs than many have come to believe. Rather, the Kantian philosophical efforts to resolve the metaphysical gap between objective and subjective ways of knowing acquired a much more pragmatic resolution that, in a sense, bypassed the conceptual dilemma. A relatively coherent set of material practices became institutionalized in the research university (Hoskin’s “ecosystem”) whereby groups of departmentally administered practitioners could identify their methods and thus frame the specific objects defining their field of expertise. Of course, methodological rigor could not always predict the results of the research, so that one of the dramatic powers of these new disciplinary practices was the production of just that: new and even unexpected forms of knowledge. 57

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The material practices, of course, included contractually arranged funding sources, administrative structures, scholarly societies, and publication venues to house and share the production of knowledge. The universalist discourse of truth, objectivity, and reason provided an influential rationale for these material practices even as it tended to obscure the social function of an emerging new middle class, the pmc. But the remarkable power of disciplinarity is that we can shift to a social constructivist set of beliefs and carry out virtually the same disciplinary practices by identifying the methods that construct our field of objects. That was Thomas Kuhn’s point in his analysis of paradigms that served as exemplary models by which practitioners constituted their objects and methods according to criteria internal to the group, thus maintaining their autonomy from direct social and political intervention. Chapter 3 explores these issues more fully, but in this context the point is that disciplinary stability did not depend on the philosophical discourse of reason but on particular kinds of socially reinforced institutional practices of newly professionalized groups of individuals carrying out the work of credentialing, measuring, arguing, testing, writing, and publishing, all supported by particular kinds of contractual obligations for state or private funding. Of course, in recent years there have been a lot more forces than Kuhn disrupting the idealist discourse, but the resiliency of disciplinary hegemony depends on the remarkable ability of the epistemological rationales of the knowledge contract to adapt to changing circumstances. This is a crucial point in my analysis because, despite all the differences in the mode of production, I am seeking to identify strands of continuity between modern and postmodern, or industrial capital and late capital modes of production. There is indeed an epochal shift in the mode of capitalist production to flexible accumulation, global flows, and niche marketing. Structurally speaking, transnational corporations represent diversified conglomerates joining multiple products and multiple markets (e.g., media, pharmaceuticals, oil), whereas industrial corporations tended to link up research, production, marketing, and distribution in a more focused product area (e.g., automotive or soap products but not both). But “epochal” still registers for me in terms of degree and intensification. If it were a radical rupture, there would be no way to see continuities in the way modern disciplinarity has adapted to the new conditions of labor and profit rather than simply disappeared in some breakthrough to a new world. In the intensified forms of multinational capitalism many of the material practices of modern disciplinary knowledge still operate through hi58

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erarchization and objectification. But they have been so amplified through electronic networks and telecommunications media that we can no longer literally see many of those forms of rapidly shifting objects (bits of data) and disappearing subjects (subalterns) still being controlled by these modernist practices under the latest versions of the knowledge contract. Even when stripped of its universalist alibi, “informatics” reduces knowledge to data bits even more objectifiable than modern science’s version of the natural world. Sometimes it seems as if pure “hybridity” were everywhere in the new regimes of capitalism, but there are limits to capital, and some of those limits will exclude forms of difference that cannot be converted to profit (Harvey, Limits). To this extent, modern practices have not been fully ruptured and overturned but transformed, and these are crucial theoretical differences. The new regimes of flexible accumulation are still regimes, still orders, still empires, as Hardt and Negri insist. In short, it is still capitalism, but not always so completely devoted to difference as a focus on the rapidly shifting markets would indicate. 7 As Gee, Hull, and Lankshear have demonstrated in their case studies of various “progressive” corporate workplaces that ostensibly emphasize the local concern for horizontal management and worker initiative, there are real limits to the forms of hybridity that work within their factories. Thus, for instance, what ought to be progressive management directives to empower and educate workers in local communities often work through modernist models of authoritarian learning and passive indoctrination into the culture of the corporation. 8 There is less categorical difference between the older, industrial capital forms of exploitation and the new, global, postmodern forms of exploitation of cultural differences than might meet the corporate eye, even though they operate at different times and at different speeds. The converse is also true: the modern era was not so monological and universalist and dialectical as its proponents of idealized knowledge would have us believe: differences and social hybridity were a fact of modernist cultures even if the hybridity was repressed and kept out of view by the elites. Under the contradictions of capital, when women and children and ethnic minorities were needed for wage labor, there they were, inside and not outside the masculinized machinery of production. 9 The cross-gendered, cross-cultural interactions that inevitably occur in these circumstances could not help but alter the purity even of the ruling elites, as George Orwell so well understood about the British colonization of India and Frantz Fanon about the colonization of Africa. “The reflexive cultures and consciousness 59

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of the European settlers and those of the Africans they enslaved, the ‘Indians’ they slaughtered, and the Asians they indentured were not, even in situations of the most extreme brutality, sealed off hermeneutically from each other” (Gilroy 2). Improvements in these areas have happened not only because of the palpable improvement modernization brought to the material conditions of life for the fortunate but more often because of the class-based, race-based, and gender-based response on the part of those disempowered through revolutionary projects, collective bargaining, and labor movements. For Hardt and Negri “the world of modern sovereignty is a Manichaean world, divided by a series of binary oppositions that define Self and Other, white and black, inside and outside, ruler and ruled. Postmodernist thought challenges precisely this binary logic of modernity and in this respect provides important resources for those who are struggling to challenge modern discourses of patriarchy, colonialism, and racism” (139). But in their actual practices patriarchy, colonialism, and racism were, and are, never quite so pure and binary as the discourse would want us to believe. The binary formulations also tend to obscure the function of the emerging pmc, positioned between the poles of capital and labor, that could claim not only a reproductive function but a critical assessment of hegemony. Thus, for instance, as I argued in chapter 1, Kant’s discourse inaugurating the modernist epistemological project was never so Manichaean in practice as the terms of its own analysis might suggest. The conflict of the faculties meant that knowledge was immersed in messy relations of difference with church and state interests. Hardt and Negri know this: “Social identities and nations were never really coherent imagined communities; the colonized’s mimicry of the colonizer’s discourse rearticulates the whole notion of identity and alienates it from essence; cultures are always already partial and hybrid formations” (144). But their sense of an epistemic and economic rupture tends to neglect these commonalities. In a parallel sense disciplines were never so essentialized and purified as the epistemological justifications suggested, which is why I have referred to the knowledge contract as the set of legitimated relations between knowledge and other social forces of difference, including labor and management, state and capital powers, white and nonwhite races, male and female identities. Professionalization and disciplinization may have institutionalized structures that have tried to police strictly binary oppositions of inside and outside, black and white, but the material practices were always less neatly binary than the abstract language of justification might reveal, and they have 60

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always failed to achieve the purity they might have sought. The modernist hegemony was worked out in practice through control of those differences, just as, in intensified form, late capitalist hegemony is worked out through orchestrated control of the proliferation of differences in the name of profit (or empire). The powers of hegemony are not quite as different in terms of who runs the show as some theorists of postmodernism would have us believe. When you pass from modernist to postmodernist discourse or industrial capital to postmodern capitalism, the mode of production shifts quite dramatically, as Marx insisted all along that it must perpetuate crises to renew its own hegemony. Despite the theoretical and practical importance of describing these differences, the fact remains that, statistically speaking, the wretched of the earth still tend to be people of color in the Southern Hemisphere, even as the diaspora has spread throughout the globe. And especially in the university, modernist discourse does not evaporate, as in a rupture, just as orality did not completely disappear from literate cultures or textuality disappear from electronic environments. Modern practices still have their uses and abuses, often through what Arjun Appadurai called “alternative modernities” (Modernity), and they must be contractually regulated, since we cannot, and ought not, eliminate all of them. The critique of universalizing grand narratives is vital and necessary to the extent that such narratives have not been universal. Indeed, most deconstructive analyses show that the claims for universality have masked more particular agendas, typically involving combinations of Eurocentric, patriarchal, class-based, racially exclusive discourse. Derrida himself has recently argued that it is not universalism itself that is the problem: “I’m of course attached to a universalism which wouldn’t destroy the idioms. That is, how is it possible to keep the idioms—that is, the differences in language—alive without giving [away] the Enlightenment, the universalism—without, let’s say, instrumentalizing the language too much? . . . I would advocate a universalization which would be an experience of translation respecting the absolute singularity of the idioms” (Ethics 44). Perhaps this sounds like an awfully ethereal version of universalism in contrast to the more “materialist idea of universality, one based on our bodies” (Eagleton 160) that I prefer. Nevertheless, the point is clear: belief in universalism is not the problem but, rather, its betrayal by those who spout the rhetoric but flout its consequences. When these betrayals happen, it is indeed possible for disciplinary practices to constrict various singular61

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ities and idioms whose objective presence in the world might otherwise challenge the neat formulations produced by the disciplinarians. Indeed, it is quite possible for socially institutionalized forms of disciplinarity to perform objectifications—naming, identifying, and analyzing specific groups of apparent objects—while betraying the more fundamental but also more difficult tasks of objectivity. Marx called this process by the technical term of “reification,” but what it means in institutional settings is that disciplinary procedures can simulate objectivity through the instrumentalized production of objectifications, even as the objectified data bits produced defy rather than respect material realities. It is indeed convenient to have such objectifications if your goal is commodification and profit. 10 On this score, consider the academically legitimated discourse of right-wing researchers who provide “data” to demonstrate the inherent intellectual inferiority of people of African descent (see Herrnstein and Murray). Disciplines were designed, it seems, to prevent untruth from happening, so it may be ironic even as it is certainly true that academically rewarded disciplinary performances can produce patently false, misleading, and obfuscating knowledge, even as such knowledge provides a commodifiable exchange value for at least some of its producers. Under these circumstances it is wise to consider that, in Eagleton’s words, “objectivity is among other things a political affair: it is a matter of there being ways of refuting those who insist that all is well as long as we are feeling fine” (131). Such insights call for some creative and imaginative ways of reconsidering the discourse of objectivity and materialism after deconstruction and poststructuralism have destroyed its phony ideological imposters played by all the perpetrators of ethnocentric interests operating under the cover of a false rhetoric of universality. Objectivity is then not some cold, aloof abstraction that stands apart from the world but a harsh, hot reminder that we cannot deceive ourselves by avoiding hard truths and hard realities, especially when doing so means considering the material relations between our own and others’ forms of suffering and joy. From another perspective, the exclusively disciplinary economy of value can recapture even some of the most progressive efforts to inhabit the disciplines with alternative voices, different idioms, and other values, partly because disciplinarity does not require universalist discourse. Knowledge practitioners can believe they have abandoned the pursuit of “disinterested” knowledge yet still behave in fairly strict accordance with the material principles of disciplinary work. Within the context of the university, critics such as Paul Bové, Ellen Messer-Davidow, E. San Juan Jr., James Sosnoski, 62

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and others have therefore described how even movements like political criticism, feminism, postcolonialism, and postmodernism can be so recaptured within the disciplinary economy of value as to deplete their potentials for social change. I will here provide just a few brief examples within the material terms of the analysis I am offering in this book. For one thing, what sometimes appear to be postmodern forms of local knowledges can be disciplinized in the form of specialized paradigms where groups of individuals emulate the exemplary model of research; in such instances, the institutional structures of the modern university simply reassert themselves. As Latour describes the contemporary reaction to modern universalism, most forms of what we call postmodernism still manage to operate within the houses built by the moderns: “Postmodernism is a symptom, not a fresh solution” (46). While postmodern alterations in disciplinary objects, methods, and rhetorics are significant and important in their emphasis on political differences, they tend to work best against monolithic forms of discourse that repress difference and hybridity. When Vincent Leitch argues that “cultural studies is the postmodern discipline par excellence, meaning a crossover, hybrid field, an innovative pastiche” (Theory Matters 74), this seems exactly right given that the modern term discipline can be so easily combined with what some have claimed to be its contradictory sequel, postmodern. But when the knowledge contract adapts itself to the play of market differences by allowing objectifications to take place in increasingly specialized and fractured discourses, postmodern critiques miss their object and do not necessarily affect the institutional structures and distributions of concrete labor that, in fact, comprise the culture of the university. 11 We have to look more critically at all those projects devoted to the task of trying to “critically assess dominant . . . and to disrupt universal versions of reason” (Shroeder 90). When neither the universities nor disciplinary paradigms function according to shared beliefs in “universal reason,” such efforts can be quite fruitless in attaining their own admirable goals of bringing about “the emerging reorganization of cultural hegemony” by “integrating competing discursive practices within the practices of the academy” (Shroeder 3, 31). Power no longer works by univocality, although it did under feudal and aristocratic forms of social organization, and it did to a lesser degree than many theorists acknowledge under the early phases of capitalism. In late capitalism exploitation of hybridity and difference becomes the rule of empire with its unequal distribution of those differences. “Power has evacuated the bastion they [the postmodernists] are attacking 63

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and has circled around to their rear to join them in the assault in the name of difference” (Hardt and Negri 138). Without attention to the disciplinary mechanisms and altering the procedures for the distribution of labor under the material conditions licensed by the knowledge contract, a critique of universal discourse can just be reinscribed as another paradigmatic critique, another (different) object of excellence, evaluated by peers in terms of its contribution to disciplinary knowledge. No doubt, disciplinary argumentation can be highly provocative and productive, since it often produces valuable new kinds of knowledge. But such innovations occur in the context of working conditions that prove especially beneficial for those individuals who can position themselves in such a way as to have a voice in those adversarial debates over what should [64], ( count as disciplinary knowledge. Even as it produces new knowledge, disciplinary stability has many more social uses in the sciences than in the humanities, where the liberal ironist position advocated by Richard Rorty Lines: suggests that we simply need to shift vocabularies: new vocabularies allow —— us to do new things. This is true, so far as it goes. But academic vocabu12.6p laries operate within disciplinary constraints that distribute labor primarily ——— according to those who can most quickly adapt the new vocabulary into Norma identifiable methods framing new objects of study. In short, new vocabu* PgEnd laries can become new paradigms. Thus, for example, a modern Marxist vocabulary can be replaced by a postmodern Lyotardian vocabulary. A new paradigm emerges: the theory becomes a method (one of the keys to dis[64], ( ciplinary status) that frames the objects referred to in the new vocabulary. Disciples imitate the exemplary figures whose work provides clear models and generalities that can, indeed, be reiterated with variation, of course. The new practitioners of Lyotardian paralogy inevitably have to reduce or eliminate some of the most paralogical forms of discourse in order to make their own research identifiable within disciplinary parameters. In short, not everyone’s paralogy is going to count in the discipline. The proliferation of token professionals at the expense of an elite band of disciplinary “Magisters” perpetuates some very troubling labor problems that we need to confront in our intellectual debates (Sosnoski, Token Professionals). Despite my schematic simplification of complex institutional processes, when the institution reasserts itself as another paradigm, a new patterned isolation takes place in the form of a new subspecialty, and sometimes the only significant consequence is that a new set of scholars gains some relative power over a previous group still operating according to an older paradigm. 64

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Shifting paradigms need not be the only way to evaluate new forms of labor, but only if we recognize that we have to professionalize some (but not all, since capitalism already legitimizes many of these differences) forms of paralogy, lore, hybridity, open-ended inquiries, performing arts, dialogical networks, local intellectual projects, alternative discourses, vernacular exchanges, community service, and collaborative projects without, strictly speaking, disciplining them under the terms of the dominant forms of the knowledge contract, which commonly requires specification of objects and methods. The irony is that, much more so than in the sciences, the wide spectrum of work performed within the humanities has always meant that educators in these fields have had to negotiate the tensions between the disciplinary discourse and the colloquial idiom, the academic and the popular, the modern and the nonmodern, even though the disciplinary economy of value grants privilege to each of the first set of terms. It is a tactical mistake to think that the traditional fallback position of relying exclusively on intensified disciplinary criteria can protect from capital exploitation those domains of work not so easily assessable by strictly disciplinary criteria. For exactly this reason the continuum of alternative domains that range from close imitations of disciplinary practices to more local, ad hoc, sometimes even antidisciplinary projects must be protected from their exclusive determination by the faux local powers of the new capitalism. These protections require contractual revisions in labor relations that emerge not only from resisting capital but from redirecting it to meet new ends and different users. By itself a discourse of difference and diversity will not secure these domains. As Hardt and Negri explain, “Difference, hybridity, and mobility are not liberatory in themselves, but neither are truth, purity, and stasis. The real revolutionary practice refers to the level of production. Truth will not make us free, but taking control of the production of truth will. Mobility and hybridity are not liberatory, but taking control of the production of mobility and stasis, purities and mixtures is” (156). Taking such control, gaining such protections, at the level of labor and production requires contractual relations worked out with great care. Such changes are grounded not only in epistemology but in the politics of caring, in the sense that Foucault talks about “care of the self ” or Nel Noddings talks about caring both for others and by others. 12 In its early Greek and Roman formulations cultivation of the self “constituted, not an exercise in solitude, but a true social practice” that included “the possibility of a round of exchanges with the other and a system of reciprocal obligations” 65

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(Foucault, Care 51, 54), not a retreat to solipsism or narrow self-interest. 13 To this extent, even objectivity becomes a part of the practice of considering and caring for others through recognition of our material and cultural interdependencies. As Eagleton so eloquently puts it, “Objectivity can mean a selfless openness to the needs of others, one which lies very close to love” (131). Collective action on behalf of trying to create institutional spaces for such justifiable knowledge practices requires an active form of caring for alternative domains of work: “Educating oneself and taking care of oneself are interconnected activities” (Foucault, Care 55). In other words, this kind of institutional change requires a “turn toward ethical practices—care of others as care of the self—that were ‘defective for capitalism’ ” (Spivak, “From Haverstock” 7). Not everyone cares to make such changes, of course. For others such as Stanley Fish the institutional stasis is also a great point of triumph. He realized early on in these debates that he could champion the neopragmatism of socially constructed disciplines without ever having to change material conditions: modernity and postmodernity could walk hand in hand (Doing Things). Fish could comfortably live on the ideological Left and the political Right at the same time without having to bat a contradictory eye. 14 He is certainly right that, by itself, “social constructionism is a threat to nothing” (Fish, Professional Correctness viii), so that the business of the modern university could go on just as before only slightly modified by the postmodernist versions of relativism. His version of interpretive communities championed the self-enclosed nature of disciplinary paradigms: as Giles Gunn puts it, for Fish, “no theory attempting to call the terms of that consensus into question, or to revise them, can do so from a position outside their range of governance” (141). The distinctiveness of an academic enterprise can happen for Fish only in disciplinary terms. Actually, he tries to play it with both hands when he describes the double function of “interpretive communities” as a “bulwark against change” at the same time as an “ ‘engine of change’ ” (Bérubé, Employment 184). He gets both stability and fluidity in one swipe through his enforcement of the double function of the modern knowledge contract to preserve the old and create the new. Interpretive communities are “homogeneous with respect to some general sense of purpose and purview, and heterogeneous with respect to the variety of practices it can accommodate” (Fish, Doing Things 153). But, of course, heterogeneity takes a pretty sharp cut when disciplinary push comes to shove. As Fish exults, those who still don’t measure up to the socially constructed disciplinary criteria, “Them we burn” (“Them” 172). 66

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His reference to Milton’s phrase in Areopagitica about excluding Catholics from enjoying freedoms of the press speaks volumes to the contempt with which Fish greets the performances of nondisciplinary practitioners and educators. And since he successfully fulfills his version of the disciplinary master critic, he is no doubt correct that those in academic positions of power can burn those who don’t measure up. Nevertheless, many individuals in the latter category bring to the academic world certain kinds of discourses, literacies, street knowledges, home discourses, and idiomatic voices that contribute to the professional work many of us perform without ever forming a paradigm or participating directly in disciplinary discourse. There is, indeed, a very material objectivity to the presence of other voices, other bodies within the academy, and assimilating them all to disciplinary discourse cannot be the only form of truth produced by university labor. No doubt, as some will argue, writers like Fish are masters at deploying ordinary language, vernacular speech, in their own arguments for disciplinary rigor. Such flexible boundaries in the discourse of the humanities points in the direction we need to move in reforming disciplinary dominance and further legitimating nonmodern practices and innovations. But the significant opening to the vernacular hardly signals a dramatic alteration in the institutionalization of disciplinary hierarchies with respect to issues of labor. Rewarding some of the more intellectually provocative forms of genuinely nondisciplinary labor (and thus the individuals who perform it) and making it professionally distinctive are not always possible under exclusively disciplinary measures of value (or univocal “standards”) that seek to separate the modern from the nonmodern domains of work. While Gerald Graff is no doubt right in arguing that the many forms of what he calls disciplinary “arguespeak” exist in the tension between academic and vernacular voices, he is also right to argue that much work needs to be done to bring “voices into conversation that are so insulated from each other in the culture and the curriculum that they do not converse inside our heads” (Clueless 133). Disciplinary exclusions indeed insulate, but the ethical question of whose interests are best served by those insulations cannot be answered on exclusively disciplinary or epistemological grounds. Furthermore, much of what happens in nonmodern interactions can be made highly distinctive, justifiable, and valuable, as is, of course, necessary when contractual relations establish the basic parameters for labor in the corporatized university, but we have to create alternative criteria that don’t just replicate the disciplinary criteria legitimized by the knowledge contract. Nonmodern forms 67

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of labor can be designated as working domains of investigation, creativity, service without following disciplinary models of identifying paradigms that mediate the relations between objects and methods. Epistemological distinctiveness in the form of propositional knowledge, as Fish demands, cannot be the only criteria for establishing educational contracts that better serve more users of the university. Nevertheless, Fish is no doubt correct that under traditional epistemological rationales, the modern practitioners could never completely realize in practice their goals of purification: pure, untainted, ahistorical, unsocial truth never has happened in practice despite the moderns efforts to bring it off. 15 The French sociologist and one of the leaders of the sociology of scientific knowledge movement Bruno Latour makes just this point in We Have Never Been Modern. My inversion of his title in my section heading suggests a critical modification of some of his formulations, but I borrow heavily on his sense of the nonmodern even as I remain skeptical of significant phases of his analysis. Latour offers a provocative account of how the scientific recastings of Kantian universalism constitute the modernist aim to purify truth and knowledge from the contaminations of history and society by conceptualizing an absolute separation between Nature and Society. 16 Of course, the moderns have always failed in this effort to attain absolute incommensurability, even as their practical achievements reshaped the modern world, and the many faces of modernity are much larger and more diverse than the version stipulated by Latour’s “modern Constitution.” Nevertheless, it seems fair to say that we have never been modern to the extent that we have never attained the purification of knowledge despite all the efforts of trying to do so. What he calls the modern Constitution renames the doctrine of incommensurability between epistemology and politics: “The modern Constitution invents a separation between the scientific power charged with representing things and the political power charged with representing subjects” (Latour 29). My amendment to this doctrine was the one I suggested in chapter 1, where I said that even for Kant the autonomy of the principle of reason was never completely severed but always in relation to and often in tension with other social formations such as the church and the state. Recall that the role he assigned to the “lower faculty” of philosophy was ultimately the higher one of arbitrating critical judgments of truth made by the other faculties and, to a more limited extent, state proclamations, as witnessed by Kant’s protesting forms of censorship. That’s why I have used the term knowledge 68

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contract to suggest the relations and ties of epistemology to politics. The “modern” was never, in this view, just a set of ideas extending outward from some imagined center of objectivity but a range of complex social and institutional formations whose ideological variability has proven to be quite adaptable to a range of state and legal conditions as well as it has been differentially appropriated by different cultures. Modern disciplinary practices name those activities devoted to the material set of tasks aiming for epistemological purification even as they always had to settle for relative stability rather than a pure form of knowledge. Even in his studies of concrete laboratory practices Latour tends to radically separate those material practices from the set of modern ideas justifying those labs. He thus describes the ideological content of the modern Constitution itself as enacting an absolute breach whereby “the representation of things through the intermediary of the laboratory is forever dissociated from the representation of citizens through the intermediary of the social contract” (Latour 27). I think it is a huge overstatement to say they were “forever dissociated,” since the “great transformation” of modernity was based on relations between epistemology and politics that were more mediated than many ideological purists would have it. 17 Otherwise, a modernist like Marx could never have even begun to claim scientific status for his interpretation of the class struggle while simultaneously aiming for revolutionary social change. Toward the end of the book Latour himself advocates such an amendment to the moderns’ absolutist Constitution so that we don’t simply have to negate or destroy “what has always been most interesting about them: their daring, their experimentalism, their uncertainty, their warmth, their incongruous blend of hybrids, their crazy ability to reconstitute the social bond. We take away from them only the mystery of their birth and the danger their clandestines posed to democracy” (142). The “clandestines” configure the cold, aloof, reductive versions of modern disciplines that seek to dominate knowledge and thus nature through the practices of objectification and purification. Of course, achieving such a reconfigured university culture requires considerable collective action in altering the domination of disciplinary practices at all levels—no mere shift of ideas about the modern Constitution will achieve those ends. What is most attractive about Latour’s formulations is his understanding of the roles of mediation, translation, and hybridity in the ongoing tasks of negotiating complex networks that extend far beyond any ability to control the proliferation of differences. 18 Whereas postmodern formulations of difference tend to be difficult to conceptualize apart from late capitalist 69

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modes of exploiting difference, the nonmodern designates a domain in excess of the structures of modernity, not just in reaction to modernist disciplines. These lived environments are amodern or nonmodern because human interactions with local and global ecosystems simply do not operate exclusively according to the institutionalized variabilities of modern disciplinarity. We inevitably inhabit mixed, contingent networks where we must mediate the more idiomatic relations between whatever we call nature, society, discourse, and reason. And it is in our material relations and networks where affect has its effect: we experience joy, enthusiasm, humor, curiosity, intuition, love, spirituality, as well as cruelty, jealousy, hatred, envy, guilt, and the many forms of suffering. Nonmodern practices do not, therefore, represent a categorical good the way, say, postmodern difference in its ludic formulations can sometimes be seen to be a virtue unto itself (see Ebert). We have to carefully evaluate the differences between desirable nonmodern and oppressive nonmodern practices, just as we have to evaluate the differences between the genuinely local and “faux local” forms of labor. There is no single discursive formula, discourse, or theory that gives us access to these affective dimensions of social life under late capitalism. 19 By more fully acknowledging the practices of mediation, intervention, and translation we can understand that “the networks are simultaneously real, like nature, narrated, like discourse, and collective, like society” (Latour 6). Under Latour’s formulations, we do not need to abandon the obvious advantages in the material practices of some forms of disciplinarity. The disciplinary tasks of trying to purify and objectify domains of knowledge can therefore be seen as a particularly important kind of mediation, always in tension with diverse mixes of modern and nonmodern practices. As Graff argues, we need to embrace such “bilingual” skills, negotiating between specialized academic vocabularies and more popular, vernacular voices. Disciplinary paradigms have materialized as modern inventions, but they become just one among numerous kinds of practices available within our social repertoire for negotiating the hazards of living in a globalized network of stresses and fractures that now threaten the habitability of the planet. The disciplinary work of seeking laws, constants, and predictions can be, at best, a socially useful way to analyze “stabilized objects that circulate widely, to be sure, but remain within well-laid-out metrological networks from which they are incapable of exiting—except through branchings, subscriptions and decodings” (Latour 119). The material world does not disappear, as in textual idealism; rather, the language and discourse emerging 70

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from the spectrum of disciplinary and nondisciplinary decodings is in and of that material world, not something that stands over and above it. The scientific discovery of “universal laws” rarely achieves the universality dreamed of by the epistemologists of purity; rather, Newton’s or Boyle’s laws become claims that extend across a portion of the network and create domains of stability. Indeed, when modern science investigated Newton’s world, it turned out that there were dimensions in it unobservable to him but that nevertheless did not work exactly according to his laws. To this extent, disciplinary work always has a kind of provisional status. The “network of standardized practices” (Latour 24), like Kuhnian normal science, can often reduce unnecessary labor when a succeeding group of workers need not repeat all the stages of verification worked out by predecessors: replicability of results is then a great virtue. We might then be better able “to look at networks of facts and laws rather as one looks at gas lines or sewage pipes” (Latour 117). In other words, disciplinary labor that seeks to formulate methods that provide interpretive frameworks for specific groups of objects becomes one particular kind of mediation for establishing what Latour calls a “degree of stabilization” (85). The social or political benefits as well as hazards of that labor cannot be determined independently of the networks, the material relations of parties having vested interests in the work being performed under the knowledge contract. You simply cannot tell in advance of an inquiry who is profiting from the gas lines and what part of the landscape is being polluted by the sewage. The irony is that the truth about the uses and abuses of the gas lines means that sometimes the disciplinary lines are “untruthful” in their mystifications about the nonmodern network. Latour tends to discredit any possibility that truth or transcendence might emerge from the nonmodern practices, and I think that it is an “absolutist” or categorical mistake to think that we cannot think about truth outside the modern discourse. Of course, the historical narrative reveals that modern forms of disciplinarity did not just become one educational option among other equally strong competitors. The social formation of the disciplinary ecosystem became the dominant principle for organizing the material set of relations in higher education: that’s the real social history of modernity. That’s why I began this section with a heading that suggests that in terms of practical operations it would be more accurate to say that we have never had a nonmodern university. Latour offers his appeal to the nonmodern as an alternative to the dominance of the modern disciplinary system, which then 71

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seems to shrink in size: “Seen as networks . . . the modern world, like revolutions, permits scarcely anything more than small extensions of practices, slight accelerations in the circulation of knowledge, a tiny extension of societies, minuscule increase in the number of actors, small modifications of old beliefs. When we see them as networks, Western innovations remain recognizable and important, but they no longer suffice as the stuff of saga, a vast saga of radical rupture, fatal destiny, irreversible good fortune” (48). This passage out of the dominant stage of modernity promises a great deal: what might university life be like if we opened up evaluation practices so that the “Western innovation” of academic disciplines remains “recognizable and important” but only one kind of practice beside and among an array of nondisciplinary, nonmodern practices that serve many different kinds of users with whom we share the space of the university and the ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes (Appadurai, Modernity 33) that constitute our locations on this beautiful but imperiled planet? The problem with such an attractive vision of the future is that, although to some extent it is happening by default anyway through the emergence of various alternative modernities around the world, the fulfillment of such a vision won’t come about by an act of “seeing” alone: neither modern institutions nor postmodern capitalism shrink all that much just because we see things differently. The reorganization (if not disorganization) of higher education calls for more changes in working conditions and labor relations than Latour seems willing to recognize, and the resistances to those changes are greater than he theorizes. In the end it seems that for Latour we will regain a freedom we have never lost: “If there are more of us who regain the capacity to do our own sorting of the elements that belong to our time, we will rediscover the freedom of movement that modernism denied us—a freedom that, in fact, we have never really lost” (76). It is crucial, indeed, for more of us to “regain the capacity to do our own sorting,” but this is a much more difficult political task than changing ideas about modernism. And it is often less a case of regaining some lost powers than gaining new contractual grounds of leverage for more diverse kinds of labor. The power of many academic workers to do their own sorting has been eroded when so much of the university is reduced to and evaluated by the mix of disciplinarity and capital legitimized by the modern knowledge contract. Without the mediations of collective bargaining, whether through unionized activities or collaborative groups actively working against the dominance of the disciplinary exclusions, changes will be marginal at best. 72

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Latour tends to see the network as less a web of asymmetrical power relations than a more horizontal field of interactions. The visual diagram he provides reveals a neatly dualistic division: the top half depicts circles of nature and society, and the bottom half, which divides the modern from everything else, shows a random crisscrossing and hatchwork of lines that represent the networks. The network needs to be visualized with varying centers of social, political, and economic differences, however crisscrossed and permeable they might be. Modern disciplinary practices are not just neatly circled ideas rising above the fray but powerful clusters that sever many of the relations in and out of the networks by contractually regulating the powers of workers and management. Latour himself admits as much: “Yet these ‘networks of power’ and these ‘lines of force’ do extend across the entire world. The markets described by the Economy of conventions are indeed regulated and global, even though none of the causes of that regulation and that aggregation is itself either global or total” (122). He acknowledges the network of global capital, and, despite the vast differences in the way it is put to use in local contexts, it remains a very imbalanced network controlled by great wealth and profit in the Northern Hemisphere, especially the United States, and a few other oil-rich nations. That is a big part of the objective world we inhabit that cannot be washed away by changing ideas alone. Reconfiguring the dominance of modern practices in the university inevitably confronts the political realities shaped by contractually specified but often competing visions of social life. When Latour concludes by asking, almost as a rhetorical question, “What are we going to retain from the moderns?” his answer comes a bit too easily and confidently: “Everything, apart from exclusive confidence in the upper half of their Constitution, because this Constitution will need to be amended somewhat to include its lower half too” (132–33). I part company here, because the material modes of production that affect class, race, and gendered relations slip out the side door at this point of his analysis. Revising the dominance of disciplinarity, expanding some of the missions of higher education, calls for more substantive bureaucratic and political alterations in the knowledge contract than changing the “upper half ” of a set of modernist beliefs. 20 Even more, many of the forms of commodification registered by capitalist expansion work according to the modern principles of objectification and domination of nature, not the nonmodern practices of mediation and dialogue. As I suggested above, the rapid objectification, information transfer, and commodification suitable for the fast capitalism of niche markets 73

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depends not just on exploitation of differences but also on an intensification of the modern practices of objectification without the universalist rationales. These are vital distinctions to make if we share any hopes to alter modern contract laws so that they can better protect more collectively produced nonmodern educational environments that inhabit institutional spaces adjacent to and often in tension with modern practices but that do not simply efface the modern or go “beyond” it in some new “post,” whether postmodern, posthistorical, or poststructural. Collective action, labor movements, and solidarity despite differences will be necessary, just as they always have been, to improve the lots of most workers who live in less privileged locations on the network. Nevertheless, despite these differences, Latour’s sorting out the terms modern, nonmodern, and postmodern can potentially lead to more substantive changes in the relations between knowledge and labor than he himself imagines, and so I will continue in the next section to rearticulate some key terms in which we organize our lives in higher education. Disciplines within Professions: The Labor of Working Terms In order to alter the institutionalization of the modern Constitution Latour describes, we must theorize practical ways to accommodate some of the amodern or nonmodern practices that can serve important needs within the academic network despite their devaluation under the terms of the current knowledge contract. Altering modernity means that we negotiate modern contract laws so that some of the nonmodern practices can be better legitimated in their various relations along a continuum with more strictly disciplinary forms of labor. This can be accomplished by identifying as clearly as possible the strengths as well as the limitations of modern forms of discipline and profession so that we can likewise identify the alternative domains of work that we can then revalue within our professional activities. This work calls for sorting out some of the different meanings of the key terms discipline and profession. These commonly used nouns acquired their modern meanings through the deeply linked historical processes of societal modernity that, as I sketched in the first chapter, institutionalized disciplinarity as the material procedures for fulfilling the knowledge contract. Of course, the meanings of any such abstract terms will vary considerably depending on the contexts of use, but confusion regarding the disciplinary status of various academic fields often arises because the two terms are conflated. Indeed, they are so interdependent that many people use the terms almost interchangeably, as when they speak of professional74

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ization and disciplinization as synonyms, with different emphases, of the same process of modernization. 21 Besides such casual uses, there are significant theoretical reasons for the overlap of these terms: as a complex social process that began during the late eighteenth century, Foucault described this rupture as the emergence of the disciplinary society, whereas Marxist critiques have focused on the emergence of professionalization. Both speak to conditions constructed by the emerging knowledge contract, but the former highlights the political-philosophical uses of the powers of surveillance, whereas the latter highlights the economic battles of the pmc to gain class status and market control of specific forms of expertise. They clearly are alternative descriptions of the same basic process of societal modernity, and as such they are often complementary accounts, but there are also some significant differences. Foucault focuses on Europe, where academic disciplines began to form in Germany during the late eighteenth century. In the United States professionalization and disciplinization took place during the late nineteenth century, as Larson, Veysey, Bledstein, and others have documented the simultaneous rise of professionalization, the modern university, and industrial capitalism. These distinctions are worth trying to sort out before we head into a more detailed analysis of the role of disciplinary knowledge as the contractual basis for higher education. For my purposes, academic disciplines are dependent spheres of work that operate within, coextensive with but not always identical to, the larger domains of the professions. 22 That is, one enters the profession by engaging the disciplinary tasks of learning the methods and objects particular to the given field and vice versa; one passes through the microevaluations of exams, training exercises, accumulation of credit hours, certification procedures, and so on, all orchestrated around the core of objects and methods that distinguish one field from another in the passage to disciplinary status as a professor. This narrower sense of discipline refers specifically, then, to the institutionally established mechanisms for the production of legitimate kinds of knowledge within higher education. 23 That the social formations that characterize academic disciplinary work in America over roughly the last 130 years have a systemic character despite all the variations enables Keith Hoskin to call it the knowledge “eco-system” of the modern university. From a Foucauldian perspective Hoskin explains how the educational shift toward disciplinarity was first characterized by new uses of writing, grading, and examination carried out in the emerging spaces of the seminar, the laboratory, and the classroom beginning in the last half of the 75

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eighteenth century. These historical antecedents were, indeed, crucial insofar as they provided the grounds for the dramatic institutional, curricular, and administrative changes accruing to postsecondary education in the period from 1870 to 1914 with the rise of the modern university in America. The academic ecosystem of disciplinarity is therefore a specific instance of the larger history of the emergence of the disciplinary society, as I elaborate in what follows. The departmental organization of the university sustains this disciplinary system through specific institutional constraints whose juridical power to legislate among competing interests depends on the terms of the knowledge contract. Louis Menand articulates the power and influence of this ecosystem insofar as it fulfilled the obligations of the knowledge contract: “Virtually all the essential elements of this system were introduced between 1870 and 1915; developments since 1915 have served chiefly to reinforce the design of the original model” (“The Demise” 201). At first departments corresponded to disciplines, but this is no longer the case: increases in knowledge proceed through increasing specialization, so departments now serve as administrative units that house affiliations of related disciplines and subdisciplines. These mechanisms are historically variable and adaptable kinds of social formations, as suggested by Kuhn’s notions of paradigm shifts by which many academics identify new intellectual movements (see chapter 3), but they also share discursive and institutional regularities that cut across all the academic fields. The most highly valued forms of academic labor accrue to the successful applications of discipline-specific models even as the degree of specialization and growth of knowledge produces a huge range of such practices. As David Shumway succinctly puts it, “Success in the academy is measured by the standard of disciplinarity” (“Disciplinarity” 9). We have to keep an awareness of the domination of this disciplinary economy of value in mind, even as we value the multiple forms of dynamism and diversity that also now seem to characterize the university more than ever. No doubt, many educational theorists such as Paul Trowler and Peter T. Knight have been describing and championing the dynamic range of educational practices: “Universities consist of multiple cultural configurations which are dynamic in character. The lived reality in one department or service section is quite different from that in another” (28). But those differences do not occur in an undifferentiated network but in a hierarchical system of privileges legitimated by the general conditions of the disciplinary form of the modern knowledge contract. Trowler and Knight simply make no distinctions 76

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between the dynamism of a market economy that may exploit many people and the dynamism of new forms of social and intercultural exchange that ameliorate suffering. For example, cultural modernity represented by the arts and humanities never fit well within the “dynamic” but disciplinary forms of societal modernity, even though the former have been forced to adapt in order to survive in the institution. Thus, for example, since what Stephen Toulmin calls the “compact” disciplines of the hard sciences can more easily sustain stable models and paradigms, many practitioners in the social sciences and humanities labor under what some have called “science envy” when their efforts to attain the disciplinary status of the sciences so often seem to fall short. In the professional culture of expertise the envy can be intensified when private business interests can profit from the discoveries of disciplinary experts, often at the expense of more general public interests. “Profession” constitutes the much broader term with which to designate not only domains of academic work but the entire set of social relations constituted by the emergence of this new middle class, the pmc. In higher education disciplinary practices form the most highly prized labor and as such form the core of the academic professions. Historically speaking, professions emerged as part of the process of societal modernity before the academic disciplines became institutionalized. As John Higham reminds us, “The professions already comprised an influential sector of American society before scholarly disciplines became professionalized” (3). An academic “discipline,” in the strict sense of a specified domain of knowledge, serves as the dominant marker of the territory (Becher and Trowler) of expertise that separates professional practitioners in higher education from the lay public. The discipline became the meritocratic core of expertise that justified professorial authority: “The jurisdictional claim of that authority derived from a special power over worldly experience, a command over the profundities of a discipline” (Bledstein 90). But professionalization includes a much broader range of work, including most of what Latour has called the nonmodern practices, than the more narrowly defined disciplinary practices for the production of knowledge. 24 And, as Andrew Abbott insists, these ranges of professional work call for a “loose” rather than narrow definition. Indeed, the risks are that “a firm definition of profession is both unnecessary and dangerous; one needs only a definition strong enough to support one’s theoretical machinery.” 25 As he goes on to say, a “loose definition—professions are somewhat exclusive groups of individuals applying somewhat abstract knowledge to particular 77

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cases—works well enough” (Abbott, System 318). In order to work with this “loose definition,” the emphasis should be on the economic and ideological dimensions of the “exclusive groups” so that we do not lose track of how differences of class, race, gender, and ethnicity play within the determinations of who gets to work within any given field. The more restrictive disciplinary domains of “abstract knowledge,” or propositional knowledge, characterized by the historical formation of academic paradigms operate within the loosely defined but often powerfully enforced realms of professionalism. At the same time, I want to resist the common distinction whereby disciplines are seen as the “cognitive” core and “professions” refer to the social and economic contexts: the social and economic and political extend throughout all disciplinary and professional work as the knowledge contract determines the hierarchies of value. 26 Implicit contractual obligations legitimate disciplinary labor as the most highly prized form of professional work while devaluing the nonmodern. Of course, in practice this is a much less dualistic process than my theoretical formulations suggest, since there is a range of practices closer to the disciplinary end, spreading through the interdisciplinary and beyond to those more genuinely nonmodern practices. Given these qualifications, professions were thus created out of the modern knowledge contract, but they accommodate a much wider range of nonmodern practices than the more limited spheres of the disciplines. By distinguishing between the relatively narrow definition of discipline and the loose definition of profession, we can better recognize that many professions are not based on academic forms of disciplinarity, as evidenced, for example, in the establishment of all kinds of state and federal accrediting agencies that now legitimate through license the professional status of a wide range of fields such as undertakers, plumbers, and dog breeders that have little to do with academic disciplinary practices.27 Likewise, during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the “professional” status of the clergy did not depend upon academic disciplines to authorize its knowledge and traditions, because the institutions of the churches provided alternative configurations of knowledge and authority. In short, whereas academic disciplines determine epistemological domains for producing certain forms of knowledge in higher educational institutions, professions operate across a much broader spectrum of state, public, and private arenas. Although dependent upon higher education for certification of professional status, the classic professions of law and medicine provide direct services to clients that extend professional work far beyond the reach of academic disciplines. Unlike the more focused labor of disciplinary efforts to purify 78

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objects for analysis, “professional discourse . . . cannot be purified; it can only be saved by its ironic self-consciousness of its impurity” (Robbins 192). Within higher education professional work includes the administrative, departmental, and committee work performed by academics; the tasks of peer evaluation and hiring; the informal advisory and community outreach work of many professors; the particular design and implementation of accreditation programs and degrees, including curricular design; and the teaching practices that disseminate but are rarely seen to participate in the production of new knowledge. 28 Yet “much professional learning is social, provisional, situated, contingent, constructed and cultural in context” (Trowler and Knight 37)—local in the best sense of that term. Nevertheless, such crucial tacit and experiential domains of labor often get discredited under the knowledge contract, which values rational-cognitive, explicit forms of propositional knowledge production. Professional work often includes forms of textual and multimedia production that are nondisciplinary, as in the composition of various kinds of mixed genres, poetic experimentations, hybrid or nonacademic writing, non-Western rhetorics, multimedia documentaries, Web-page design and innovation, collaborative projects, community service, and other tasks that get devalued by the disciplinary hierarchy. Compositionists, creative writers, musicians, artists, and social activists work in academic departments, and to the extent that they produce “nonacademic” or hybrid kinds of texts or perform nondisciplinary, nonWestern, or nonmodern services, they often occupy subordinate positions within the academy. When we protest in the humanities that we need to make our work accessible to the public at the same time that our institutions devalue nondisciplinary forms of publication, we are in a double bind. Working ourselves out of these double binds through collective renegotiations of labor contracts has often been trivialized by the opponents of educational reform. Through right-wing lenses the nonmodern domains appear inessential, lacking in rigor, unstable, irrational, and often trivial compared to the hard knowledge produced by the disciplines. But, to take just one example, rigor and thoroughness are not just properties of disciplines. The recognition of the nonmodern need not operate as a dualistic opposition to the rationalism of disciplinary work. An expanded domain of professionalism better accounts for the “impure” diversity of people, cultures, and ideas that move in and out of the borders of higher education. With such a revaluated domain of professional work we can “transform 79

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the modes of writing, approaches to pedagogy, the procedures of academic exchange, the relation to languages, to other disciplines, to the institution in general, to its inside and its outside. Those who venture forth along this path, it seems to me, need not set themselves up in opposition to the principle of reason, nor need they give way to ‘irrationalism.’ They may continue to assume within the university, along with its memory and tradition, the imperative of professional rigor and competence” (Derrida, “Principle of Reason” 17). The nonmodern is not the “irrational,” even though it may not fall under the yardsticks of disciplinary evaluation. Such labor can, nevertheless, be just as highly “professional” and rigorous in the sense of involving considerable care, understanding, skill, and wisdom. The problem is that the economic conditions of the “new work order” have intensely exacerbated exactly this split between the exploitation of professional but “nondisciplinary” flex labor and the shrinking cadre of elite disciplinary workers. We have to invent ways to evaluate nondisciplinary labor without exploiting it, which means we have to carefully distinguish academic disciplinarity from the more general Foucauldian sense of the disciplined society. Disciplinary Discipline, or How Not to Empty Foucault of Meaning When in Discipline and Punish Michel Foucault offered his vivid interpretation of Jeremy Bentham’s plans for the “panopticon” prison, the world acquired not a new kind of architectural design but a powerful configuration of what disciplines as a form of surveillance might mean. 29 Although I share many of his influential articulations about power and knowledge in a disciplined society, it remains crucial to be able to make some careful distinctions, because the Foucauldians offer the most sophisticated conceptual objections to my distinctions between discipline and profession. For example, David R. Shumway and Craig Dionne recommend that we simply view “disciplines as professions”: “To understand disciplines as professions is to recognize that they exist in the real world and not in the proverbial ivory tower” (7). This equivalence acknowledges that disciplines “are subject to the demands of the larger culture and society,” and these demands are the conditions of the knowledge contract. Nevertheless, there are good reasons to provide some degree of specification of what constitutes the academic discipline and what the more extensive social discipline of the profession: disciplines are the specialized set of practices within the academic professions, the backbone of the academic caste system, the legitimator of the knowledge contract. 80

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For Foucault, like Latour’s analysis of the modern Constitution and Gaonkar’s version of societal modernity, the rise of the disciplinary society began in the late eighteenth century with the rise of prisons, mental institutions, formal schooling, and industrial factories. John Mowitt argues, “Foucault is arguing that the emergence of discipline has been fundamental to a massive historical transformation of the ‘nature’ of power” (32). 30 Foucault’s genealogical studies of these institutions document the formation of societal modernity through the new processes of “individuation,” which mark the positions of various individuals within the social arena. The administration of highly evolved surveillance mechanisms such as exams, diagnosis, and assessments, paradoxically, created the individual, or subject, by locating him or her through increasingly complex objectification processes and depersonalized evaluation techniques that did not depend on a centralized figure of authority such as the king or the landowner. These techniques are anonymous to the extent that they do not depend on any one individual, but they are not neutral, especially with respect to class, race, and ethnicity. Although, as Rey Chow explains, the Eurocentric focus of most of Foucault’s work did not address the relations of disciplinarity to race and ethnicity, recent work has developed this connection. 31 Now we can see more clearly that the increasing objectification of the world that Foucault so eloquently elucidates can be historicized as part of an ongoing imperialist agenda for transforming the world into observable and hence manageable units, and the intensification of abstract theoretical processes, likewise, must be seen as inseparable from the historical conditions that repeatedly return the material benefits of such processes to European subjectivities. . . . [S]ome humans have been cast as objects, while other humans have been given the privilege of becoming subjects. (Chow 2)

This orchestration of bodies in hierarchical social systems is what Foucault meant by biopower, as he defined it in The History of Sexuality, volume 1. Disciplinary forms of surveillance became the primary mechanisms for controlling human life in the modern world, and it is a “bio” power because it operates by “subjugating bodies and controlling populations (through the surveillance of birthrate, longevity, public health, housing, and migration . . . )” (Chow 13). Biopower controls bodies, sexuality, gender, race, class, and ethnicity in comprehensive, although not totalizing, ways. The latter qualification is crucial because otherwise biopower becomes so es81

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sentializing that there seems to be nothing outside of it, mirroring some versions of poststructuralist theories of textuality. Biopower names the culturally dominant forms of disciplinary surveillance, but it does not name all forms of human interaction. This is a crucial shortcoming because Foucault’s notion of power seems unable “to provide a critique of ‘power’ relations. He can do no more than describe power relations because he cannot recognize any alternatives to the motive to attain a steady state within a closed field of play” (Yarbrough 38). So it is crucial to make some strategic modifications in this theory of biopower. In Discipline and Punish Foucault offered Bentham’s model of the panopticon as a configuration of such surveillance techniques. Bentham’s architectural design for a labor-efficient prison included a central observation tower that could potentially view all prison cells around the walls without the prisoners ever knowing if and when someone was actually observing them. Consequently, prisoners had to internalize discipline, since they could never know when they were being observed. Although Bentham’s model prison was never actually built, it has played an enormously influential part in configuring the threatening aspects of a Kafkaesque kind of fearful disciplinary system whose powers of exclusion and inclusion can only be negotiated but not eliminated. But “Foucault did not recognize the importance schools played in the spread of discipline, nor did he observe that academic disciplines are creatures of the disciplinary technologies he analyzes” (Shumway, “Disciplinarity” 3). Even though Foucault emphasizes how discipline takes place at the microlevel of particular sites of evaluation and control, his analysis of the disciplinary society includes academic disciplinarity but does not distinguish it from the discipline he described in his genealogy of social life in the modern world: the two phenomena are coincidental, but they are not exactly synonymous. Without making such distinctions it is difficult to avoid some crucial theoretical contradictions. In Disciplining English Shumway and Dionne want to avoid any sense that some fields are more disciplinary than others, because this just means using discipline in an “honorific” sense. Used in this way, some argue that loosely organized fields like English do “not live up to the standards of ‘real’ disciplines, the most real of which being those in the sciences. Used in this way, discipline is an honorific, a rating attained only by some academic fields. It is important that the reader . . . understand that the term is not used in this way” (Shumway and Dionne 1). In short, they argue for the more general sense of Foucauldian discipline as a social formation 82

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so that English becomes as much a discipline as biology—the particular characteristics of the discipline vary from field to field, from “tight” to “loose,” from compact to diffuse, from hard sciences to soft humanities. There are some advantages to seeing things this way, because it’s certainly comforting to be a humanist knowing that your field is as much a discipline as any other, even if the specific practices of the discipline are different from the sciences. And, indeed, many people do use the term in such an “honorific” sense. The problem with adhering to the Foucauldian sense of “discipline” as a generalized account of how modern societies produce individual identities within social hierarchies is that it then becomes difficult to categorize nonmodern professional work that does not create specialized disciplinary knowledge as anything but a devalued, ancillary appendage to the primary sites of research. It is also nearly impossible to understand motives and causes for any kind of behavior that does not simply seek to gain disciplinary power by playing according to the rules of the game. It is like saying, Get into the pmc (if you are not already there) and improve your position, no matter what the personal costs, since there is nothing else to do. The corollary: your own success through individual competition at the game of excellence will harm no one else. These are theoretical liabilities comparable to seeing nothing but biopower and empire everywhere. Reconfiguring the university means altering the primacy of academic disciplinarity, redistributing biopower, even as we continue to work within a society so disciplined that “public investments in prisons continue to take a higher relative priority than investments in universities” (Kerr, Uses 196). Many academics, especially those in research universities, are, of course, happy to see the spectrum of labor measured exclusively by these disciplinary yardsticks. 32 But the point is that the system itself creates the “honor” and value and prestige: it isn’t just a matter of someone calling it an honor, as if that were somehow a distortion of the way the system actually works. And to the extent that such hierarchies are socially constructed institutions, they can be altered without eliminating the discipline. Nor, in the Foucauldian sense, can we idealistically aim to eliminate the disciplined society in any general way, although modifying the centrality of academic disciplinary practices within professional operations is crucial to institutional reform, just as modifying the centrality of biopower is crucial to ameliorating some of the more destructive consequences of the disciplinary society. Professional but nonmodern forms of academic work that do not strictly adhere to the terms of the disciplinary knowledge contract 83

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can and must (especially in the humanities) be differentially evaluated. To the extent that some of this nonmodern labor will be excluded from the academy means that it will be “disciplined” in the general Foucauldian sense insofar as biopower operates within our professional domains of evaluation practices. But we can contractually specify domains that exceed the operation of biopower or operate with degrees of autonomy within its general systemic forces. Foucault’s notion of biopower only accounts for one kind of motive, “an urge toward achieving a certain kind of coherence and continuity that desires totality and therefore leads necessarily to agonistic social relationships” (Yarbrough 38) as individuals and groups compete for power and control within the discursive terrain of the disciplinary fields. Even though we cannot simply get beyond the multiple versions of modernity, we can alter some dimensions of its operations so as to ameliorate some of its harmfully exclusive effects. But we can only accomplish those goals by altering social relations and values within the academy by displacing the dominance of the knowledge contract, thus redirecting some of the forms of biopower to legitimate new domains of work. There are significant consequences to the distinctions I am drawing here, and they can be illuminated by elaborating a bit more on the problems Shumway and Dionne encounter in their analysis. They begin with the same Foucauldian premises that I share: “Disciplines are historically specific forms of knowledge production, having certain organizational characteristics, making use of certain practices, and existing in a particular institutional environment” (Shumway and Dionne 1–2). The issue, then, is of specifying what is “certain” and “particular” about academic disciplines as distinguished from the general social formation of the disciplinary society. It becomes problematic, however, when the Foucauldian generality allows them to conjecture in ways that lose a sense of the particular history of academic disciplines. Thus, they suggest that “any field could potentially be a discipline, even, say, astrology, if it had the requisite professional association, peer-reviewed journals, and institutional recognition” (Shumway and Dionne 2). From some kind of ideal perspective this might indeed be true, but it begs the historical question: why hasn’t astrology gained disciplinary status? And the reason is that it’s very unlikely, given the historical form that disciplinary knowledge production has taken since its institutionalized invention in research universities in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. That is, despite the widely varying shapes that different disciplines take, they all operate under some shared constraints 84

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of the disciplinary ecosystem that valorizes the work of purifying objects using specific methods. One of those constraints has to do with paradigms that provide exemplary models for how the processes of purification—naming the objects and the methods for framing those objects—can be competitively adjudicated, evaluated, and disputed. Disciplinary discourse calls for general expository forms of argumentative rhetorics, typically deploying various forms of refutation, verification, and falsification, even in the hermeneutic fields of the humanities. Astrology would be extraordinarily unlikely to attain these kinds of characteristics if only because there is no clear way to stabilize through diagnosis, inference, and treatment (see Abbott, System 40) astrological predictions and claims. It is too hard to purify and objectify [85], (36) a discernible academic field for astrology under the terms of the knowledge contract legitimating the modern disciplines. It will lose, as it always has, the competitive battles for disciplinary jurisdiction in every encounter with Lines: 385 to 391 the modern academic. If it were disciplined, astrology would simply not be ——— within the historically emerged forms of academic disciplinarity. 33 12.6pt PgVar English, too, is hard to purify and objectify but easier than astrology, as ——— the historical development of the social formation attests: literary objects Normal Page and interpretive methods could work pretty well, even if they cut out an aw* PgEnds: Eject ful lot of what happens in language uses pertaining to English (see chapter 7). On the other hand, it would be much more possible for astrology to achieve professional status, even if it hasn’t become an academic discipline [85], (36) (those are the characteristics Shumway and Dionne cite: professional associations and peer-reviewed journals), just as, for instance, it might now be fair to say that there are “professional” astrologers who write columns in newspapers. Newspapers don’t ordinarily hire just anybody to write those columns unless they can claim some background in working with astrological mappings and forecasts and planetary “signs”; in short, however loose and weak they may be, some astrologers have certain professional claims to delimit and control a domain of knowledge restricted from the general public, and these kinds of restrictions reflect the nature of how the pmc has historically secured a recognizable degree of privilege. (Indeed, in a parallel example, when one of gm’s advertising slogans is “We are professional grade,” we are witnessing the spread of pmc status far beyond the academic disciplinary terrain.) Nevertheless, social prejudices against astrology persist so as to make it unlikely, but certainly not impossible, for it to achieve professional status. 85

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On the other hand, astrology, alchemy, and phlogiston have histories that make them not very likely candidates for an academic discipline. The historically specific varieties of disciplinary formations have had to respect certain material objectivities that do indeed put a squeeze on some subject matters much more than others, and this is not an insignificant point of difference. Not just anything fits equally well into academic disciplines, and without these distinctions it remains difficult to see why, besides their obvious technological uses in advanced capitalism, the sciences enjoy more prestige or “honor” than the humanities (“professional” in the gm example, above, means that the company is “scientifically” precise and reliable) or that certain practices in the humanities can more successfully attain disciplinary, paradigmatic status than other kinds of work. These distinctions also enable us to better explain why some activities that ostensibly seem to challenge disciplinary boundaries, like cultural studies, can be much more easily reincorporated into disciplinary economies of value in ways that astrology cannot or could not: they can often, although not always, identify specialized objects and methods that can be stabilized in identifiable paradigms in ways that no astrological prediction could. 34 Strangely, then, Shumway and Dionne’s analysis leads them into a few claims that seem to contradict their own Foucauldian premises. For instance, they suggest that “to call English a discipline is neither to criticize nor to praise it. Moreover, to identify particular practices within English as more or less ‘disciplinary,’ is not to comment upon their validity or value; but to make a judgment about their form and their relative power” (Shumway and Dionne 2). This seems like an odd distinction for Foucauldians to make. First, it implies that “discipline” in the general sense is some neutral kind of descriptive term that escapes all conditions of criticism or praise, but Foucault was a key source of our understanding that enunciation never takes place outside those networks of value, criticism, and praise that make up social life generally: validity is a form of power. The separation of validity/value and form/power is a traditional kind of epistemological idealization, as if the value of any given practice could be entirely divorced from its “relative power” as legitimated by its contractual relations to the institutional and social world. 35 In short, to call English a discipline is inevitably to praise it as a domain of academic legitimacy without which it would flounder even more than it historically has in trying to secure a role for itself in higher education. To call, even if it is a misnomer, the general departmental affiliation of “English” a discipline is to credit it with a recognizable form of rhetorical power even if much of the actual force 86

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of most English practitioners’ intensive labor gets “cheapened” precisely because it doesn’t quite fit within the disciplinary economy, at least under the dominant terms of the knowledge contract. So when Shumway and Dionne make the following claim, with which I can completely agree, it seems to fly in the face of their earlier disclaimers: “The disciplinary object and practices devoted to it were narrowly defined, so that much of the labor that was performed under the name of English was not disciplinary” (8–9). To the extent that English has more kinds of labor that do “not live up to the standards of ‘real’ disciplines” (Shumway and Dionne 1) would seem to imply that the field is not quite as “honorific” as the sciences. Even if English professors are less honored, their “nondisciplinary” forms of professional labor certainly are “disciplined” in the general Foucauldian sense of biopower: poor rhetorical inventiveness, poor creative work, poor community service work, poor teaching can be and are evaluated, even if in already diminished value, as socially less significant kinds of work. A great deal of time, labor, and actual force to get things done is invested in these domains, even as very little rhetorical and institutional power is granted to that work. And it certainly still is professional to the extent that doing a good job at these alternative tasks can benefit from extended periods of training and interaction with others in the field. Sloppiness in the nonmodern practices can be disciplined within professional spheres, and, potentially at least, such evaluations need not operate according to strictly academic disciplinary criteria based on epistemological concerns for objects and methods. Shumway and Dionne’s formulation here would thus seem to also contradict their earlier statement that it is not useful to distinguish between disciplinary and professional labor. Indeed, they now seem to agree that much of the professional labor of the humanities is not disciplinary, even though nondisciplinary labor often requires the kind of experience and tacit knowledge and lore that only come from extended periods of training, teaching, and learning— characteristics of any profession. But at times of professional evaluation the disciplinary work almost always gets the “honorific” status, the value, validity, and prestige under the knowledge contract. This doesn’t mean that the nondisciplinary doesn’t get disciplinized. It surely does, but in mostly negative ways by failing to measure up to the strictly academic criteria for disciplinary knowledge production. By thus maintaining the heuristic distinction between profession and discipline within higher education, it becomes possible to contractually resituate forms of academic disciplinary work within a broader spectrum 87

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of professional work that can exist beside, not just below, the disciplinary. This transvaluation becomes essential to bring about meaningful changes in higher education at the same time that these changes are already happening, but they are often dictated by economic forces and the power of management rather than by the collective action of faculty and students. According to Evan Watkins, “ ‘Profession’ . . . identifies a pathway of incorporation by which agents engaged in market organized economic practices can also attempt to secure at least some visible authority within the organization of corporate capital politics” (“Educational Politics” 282). Our efforts to secure such “visible authority” must take place not only through the exercise of disciplinary measures of that authority but also over the wider domains of nonmodern labor that remains essential to our educational tasks. Conversely, by examining the detailed contractual relations between discipline and profession, institution and society, it becomes possible to see how even the most “pure” forms of academic labor were always tied to social, racial, economic, and political conditions maintained by their professional status. As Abbott puts it, “Commodification pervades the history of professions” (System 146), no matter how much such pressures have intensified in recent decades. The knowledge contract assured that even the purified ideologies of reason and universality had a material basis: university presidents could hire those idealists of reason and thus provide material resources for this kind of labor rather than alternative forms. Samuel Weber’s analysis of the “incommensurability” between knowledge and capital depends on just this kind of mystification. The distinction allows for the possibility that disciplinary practices can be located among or situated beside but not always above a broader range of professionally acknowledged forms of nonmodern and often non-Western academic labor. It makes sense, therefore, to argue that we can do various kinds of nondisciplinary work, but it would be disastrous to suggest that we should try to be nonprofessional. 36 Watkins argues, “It’s not at all a good time to abandon whatever leverage is possible from within shifting conditions of professional work in the university” (Everyday Exchanges 188). Acquiring professional status is crucial to the continued well-being not just of faculty but equally of students and the general public not directly affiliated with the university. Trust in the professional domains must establish new contractual relations besides the current terms of the knowledge contract so as to serve more users of higher education. That most of the processes of professional legitimation have taken place in the academy 88

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through the continued dominance of disciplinary criteria determined by the knowledge contract is, however, a contestable historical contingency. I have elaborated on these distinctions at some length because the confluence of the disciplinary and the professional is so often taken for granted that, for instance, Robert Scholes can unblinkingly ask what for him and many others is a merely rhetorical question: what is academic work if not disciplinary? However, this is not a rhetorical question but a substantive one, and we have alternatives. My often critical assessment of disciplinary history may at times inevitably conceal a deeper ambivalence that registers a kind of love-hate relationship that no doubt many other academics experience as well. Disciplines are, after all, both enabling and constraining, so it’s a question of who and what they are enabling and who and what they are constraining. But working as an academic in the humanities means we are often, in John McGowan’s words, “bedeviled” with our inadequacies: “The intellectual is constantly bedeviled, no matter what she is doing, by the thought that she has undertaken the wrong work at the wrong time and in the wrong place” (4). I suppose this ambivalence could reflect the difficulties of asking such a simple question about the university as, What kind of changes are both necessary and possible so that a wider range of users can love it more and hate it less? This means greater educational opportunity for everyone, not just the elite cadre of university users. Such an admittedly utopian gesture is tempered not by a blind idealism that we might eliminate hierarchy and prestige in the academy but by the notion that we can modify the institutional hierarchies in ways such that they can be more equitably distributed for a wider spectrum of users. Of course, this is a risky business, institutional change for the better, and operates in what Watkins, following Gramsci, calls a “war of position” (Work Time 27), just as most of the collective battles of organized labor have always been conducted. Some critics of professionalism caution us that, in Abbott’s words, “no university can challenge the disciplinary system as a whole without depriving its Ph.D. graduates of their academic future” (Chaos 126). My revaluation of nondisciplinary practices still encounters an entrenched hegemony that many wish to retain. “Nondisciplinary intellectuals have difficulty reproducing themselves because the American open market for public intellectuals is incapable of supporting more than a tiny handful of nonacademic writers and has no organized means of reproduction and exchange beyond some tenuous referral networks. Academia is, to all intents and purposes, the only practical recourse for American 89

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intellectuals. And being an academic means, willy-nilly, being a member of a discipline” (Abbott, Chaos 130). However true these sobering views about the academic entrenchment of its disciplinary core, such a view caves in too readily to the passive acceptance of the status quo, and there’s much more room for maneuver than this picture lets on. Abbott confesses in his preface that he is “simply less committed to changing various aspects of the world than are many friends and colleagues” (Chaos xii). This book is devoted to friends and colleagues who are committed to changing our working lives more than accepting them as they are. Besides, professions and disciplines are changing in dramatic ways. Challenges to the disciplinary system happen at all levels, and preparing our graduate students to work in these changing [90], ( environments is in fact better preparing them for rather than depriving them of their academic futures. There is a potentially new breed of teacherscholars emerging out of some of the more progressive graduate schools Lines: where experiments with different media, alternative rhetorics, and multi—— ple literacies have already had a significant impact on altering the forms of 12.6p societal modernity in which our professional lives unfold. ——— Innovation and experimentation can be destabilizing forces, but only Norma when so much emphasis has been placed on the disciplinary construction * PgEnd of stability. The institutional domination of disciplinarity under societal modernity has been too costly, especially for English, the humanities, and the performing arts. Too much of what we do does not call for paradigmatic [90], ( forms of research, and the effort to constrain our discourse and labor along paths of disciplinary paradigms only makes us look confusing and destabilized in the eyes at least of the more positivistic fields in the natural sciences. We have then to develop a sense of when and in what circumstances disciplinary forms of argumentation and debate can be shown to be useful and necessary for some very important users of the university. Many progressive scientists as well as humanists are already doing this. As Paul Feyerabend explains, “Physicians, anthropologists and environmentalists are starting to adapt their procedures to the values of the people they are supposed to advise” (4), and by “people” he does not just mean the owners of capital. For this to happen well in the university, those who negotiate union contracts will have to be knowledgeable about these alternative forms of labor so that the intellectual and contractual domains of mapping out professional jurisdictions and powers can be done with more equity than we now find in higher education. 90

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A common complaint about the territorial jurisdictions of the modern university is its relentless fragmentation in specialties. 37 But Thomas Kuhn demonstrated that specialization was the inevitable consequence of disciplined paradigms: the breaking into subdisciplines is, as he puts it, the price we pay for the spread and expansion of knowledge. 38 The lesson of this book is that you can’t solve problems of specialization by changing the disciplines, since epistemological specialization is an inevitability of disciplinarity. The only recourse is to resituate disciplinarity within the broader spectrum of labor practices that do, in fact, stretch across, between, and beside all the subspecialties. To lament the epistemological fragmentation without altering the distribution of labor indulges a false nostalgia for some predisciplinary unity of all knowledges that never really existed in any case. In short, paradigms are disciplinary inventions for stabilizing propositional forms of knowledge, even when stability can rarely be achieved in any absolute way and even as the procedures for making new discoveries vary considerably between disciplines and subdisciplines. Such tactical stability and consensus can be enormously useful in the elimination of unnecessary labor. As Latour claims, the modern project added valued dimensions of scope to various kinds of knowledge claims, just as paradigms can generate important new kinds of knowledge within the frames of intelligibility they establish. Some questions don’t need to be repeatedly asked by every newcomer to an overlapping field of inquiry, even though every adaptation of normalized practices will inevitably be resituated and altered as it travels to new contexts. Paradigms can then be conceived as shortcuts that eliminate unnecessary expenditures of labor and creative inventions for making new kinds of discoveries, and at best they can serve some faculty and some students as an important kind of use-value to prevent needless exploitation and humiliation while promoting well-being, joy, and understanding. But this can happen only in specific circumstances, and for that we will have to more closely examine the huge discourse of shifting paradigms that has tended to cannibalize discussions of disciplinary change.

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3. PARADIGMS PERFORMED AND THE KUHNIFICATION OF THE HUMANITIES Paradigm was a perfectly good word, until I messed it up. thomas kuhn, The Road since Structure I argue that paradigms should be seen, not as the ideal form of scientific inquiry, but rather an arrested social movement in which the natural spread of knowledge is captured by a community that gains relative advantage by forcing other communities to rely on its expertise to get what they want. steve fuller, Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times

Everyone is sick of paradigm shifts. Even a local columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Reg Henry, recently took to satirizing the lingo. He got his friend to search for the term paradigm shift on Nexis, and the results were scary: “798 citations . . . during the previous year; 423 citations in the previous six months; 212 citations in the previous 90 days; 61 citations in the previous month; 11 the previous week; and one citation today. There were too many citations for the previous two and five years to register” (Henry c2). This may be just one sign of the incredible legacy left to us by Thomas Kuhn, who set in motion this whirlwind of rhetorical iterability that has spread far beyond the confines of higher education. Fortunately, for Henry’s sake, he ends optimistically: “Not to worry, concerned readers. With my earnest leadership, we can navigate through packs of shifting paradigms without losing a single one of you.” I wish I could be so optimistic to my readers, but I am an academic, and, as Henry puts it, “I came to realize that ‘paradigm’ was a word that was compulsory to use when writing academic papers if you wished to appear suitably intelligent.” It’s hard to just shrug off Henry’s anti-intellectual satire when, in fact, a more localized search of the word paradigm in the mla database over the last thirty-five years turned up a staggering use of the term in titles of published articles and books in the humanities—a field that Kuhn himself was unsure ever could be described as having very real paradigms. 1 Consequently, those of us working in higher education cannot easily ignore the sheer fact that over the past four decades disciplinary innovations have often been described as paradigm shifts. These analyses are often accompanied by great hope: hope that the new paradigm will remedy the ills of the old, liberate intellectual work from the constrictions of the 92

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discourse of an outworn paradigm, and instill new vigor and meaning into the field. But the hopes have often been short-lived, often dashed upon the continued realities of institutional powers and practices that seem unmoved. Steven North argues that we have simply witnessed the “Death of Paradigm Hope.” Most of these hopes come from liberal, progressive, or even radical academics. In English and the humanities this means that the new paradigms now liberate us from the old formalistic, New Critical, or current-traditional paradigms and move us toward sociohistorical, cultural, political models of teaching and research. And to the extent that altering the objects and methods of the discipline opens new terrain, such changes are not at all insignificant. But what doesn’t change is most often revealed in the perpetuation of exactly the same basic labor practices, or the shift in labor is that, for example, old New Critics don’t get hired and new New Historicists or postcolonialists do. But for those whose professional work cannot be so closely identified with acknowledged models and paradigms, their valuable contributions to the profession remain marginalized, underpaid, and thus often exploited. The reason is simple if we momentarily reduce the complex meaning of paradigms to a reductive sense that they are exemplary models for enacting disciplinary discourse. To this extent they are conservative in the sense of consolidating and preserving the new objects and methods as a normal practice, even as those practices produce new forms of knowledge, sometimes even anomalies that challenge the assumptions of the paradigm itself, leading to the creation of a new paradigm. Traditional disciplinary hierarchies sustained by the knowledge contract remain untouched in some fundamental ways by virtue of such paradigm shifts. The questions then become, How can we reassess the function of paradigms in the hope of resituating academic discourse within an array of alternative practices? What role should paradigms play in the contractual obligations of the new university? These questions raise important issues tied to the multiple roles of the university in contemporary global cultures, and this chapter will, therefore, take a closer look at the meanings, liabilities, and powers institutionalized through the discourse of paradigms. I want to begin this chapter with a view of how Kuhnian paradigms institutionalize the recurring catch-22 that characterizes the double nature of the modern knowledge contract: disciplines are supposed to produce “new” knowledge that at any moment threatens to create an anomaly that can destabilize the preceding archive of “old” or received forms of knowledge. The catch-22 is the need for jurisdiction, control, and objectification, 93

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while the results of paradigmatic research often yield new, unexpected, and, to some degree, uncontrollable results that threaten the boundaries that the paradigms seek to control. At the same time, many forms of nonparadigmatic knowledge and teaching also mix, blur, stretch, and cross those disciplinary boundaries. This catch-22 is the “essential tension” Kuhn labored with his whole life, although his views were not exactly neutral: in his assessment, characteristics of newness such as “flexibility and openendedness” had “been too exclusively emphasized as the characteristics requisite for basic research.” The overall intention of his theories was to proffer “something like ‘convergent thinking’ which is just as essential to scientific advance as is divergent” (Kuhn, Essential Tension 226). Paradigms became the term to name institutionalized forms of consensus or convergence so that practitioners could indeed agree upon the legitimacy of the new knowledge produced. These tensions take on special urgency in the twenty-first century, when pressures for flexible accumulation ramp up the anxieties of all kinds of workers. The “cultivation and exploitation of anxiety” (Weber 28) has always been a key feature of professional life. As Burton Bledstein explains, the emergence of the nineteenthcentury culture of professionalism provided the American middle class a legitimate space in which to work out their anxieties about social status: careers were not horizontal but vertical movements up the hierarchies of professionally determined competencies: “Perhaps no Calvinist system of thought ever made use of the insecurities of people more effectively than did the culture of professionalism” (102). Individual performances of historically antecedent paradigms thus became the dominant way for negotiating all kinds of career anxieties. With the twenty-first-century proliferation of different users of higher education, what happens, then, to such anxieties when the search for stabilities of paradigmatic “normal practices” necessarily occurs in our globalized Information Age, when change and postmodern difference become, ironically speaking, “normal” practice? The Kuhnification of the Humanities I want to situate this disciplinary catch-22 within what I call, following Steve Fuller, the “Kuhnification of the humanities.” 2 My basic premise is that Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 study, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, has indeed had an enormous impact not just on the scientific fields but also on the disciplines of the humanities. As Fuller explains, “Kuhn’s ‘acritical’ perspective has colonized the academy” (Thomas Kuhn xv). The “acritical” dimension of Kuhn’s work is that he does not seem to reflect on his own 94

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position within academic discourse as well as the social and political effect that his discourse might have, nor does he seem to acknowledge the fundamentally structuralist or formalist analysis implicit throughout even his most historical writings. Partly for these reasons I share Fuller’s recent contention that the influence of this book has been, on the whole, for the worse: “I must nevertheless conclude that the overall impact of his book has been to dull the critical sensibility of the academy” (Thomas Kuhn 7). Kuhn was one of the first historians of the sciences to recognize the tremendous importance of social and institutional factors in the establishment and perpetuation of disciplinary paradigms of normal science. The socially constructed nature of the community of practitioners sharing a paradigmatic normal practice seems to de facto vindicate a healthy kind of critical pluralism. Many contemporary academics have thus celebrated this dimension of Kuhn’s work insofar as it institutionalizes difference by justifying multiple paradigms and thus different kinds of academic discourses, even when they seem incommensurable with each other. A common pattern, for example, is G. Ritzer, who in 1980 wrote a book called Sociology: A Multiple Paradigm Science. In this study Ritzer provides rationales that justify both the diversity of paradigms and the scientific status of those multiple paradigms because of their institutional power to exercise jurisdiction over important bodies of knowledge. In the humanities the breakdown of the dominance of New Critical exemplars after the intrusion of so many “extrinsic” theories led many practitioners to Kuhn’s social epistemology: the variety of paradigms is exactly the vocabulary used, either implicitly or explicitly, in the various historical accounts of competing schools and methods characterizing the various subdisciplines of English studies (see chapters 6 and 7). In The Republic of Letters Grant Webster exemplifies this strategy by adapting Kuhn’s notion of paradigm shifts to narrate a history of contemporary criticism as a series of paradigms or charters, as he calls them, that more fully account for the pluralistic nature of the humanistic disciplines. Given the multiplicity of critical theories and authorities, Webster acknowledges that literary criticism demonstrates “the lack of clear, unambiguous, and generally accepted standards of truth,” but Kuhn’s series of community-based paradigm shifts provides for a replacement of the unifying positivist criteria with plural “historical criteria of influence and obsolescence” (49). For Webster, the goal is the creation of “a new science of criticism” that “would seek out the variety in criticism rather than suppress it in the interests of a single ‘truth’ ” (59). 95

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But Fuller offers a cautionary critique of this use of Kuhn in the disciplinizing of the humanities: As the story of the reception of Kuhn’s book is normally told, it liberated the academy from a “positivist” or “objectivist” conception of science that privileged the “hard” sciences at the expense of the other departments in the university. . . . All of these revelations induced a collective sigh of relief from practitioners of the humanities and the social sciences, who had a hard enough time making sense of each other, let alone agreeing on a common method. They quickly latched on to Kuhn’s ideas and declared that they too were respectable knowledge producers laboring under paradigms. . . . Thus, the characteristic methodologies for this post-Kuhnian enterprise have involved histories and ethnographies of the research environment and deconstructions of disciplinary discourses. (Thomas Kuhn 3) 3

Despite the apparently radical effects of Kuhn’s theory, Fuller argues that exactly the opposite is the case. In short, rather than a liberating document, Fuller’s recent work illustrates the essentially conservative function of Kuhn’s ideas. According to Fuller, Structure can be read as an exemplary document of the Cold War era. In that context, Kuhn appears as a “normal scientist” in the Cold War political paradigm conducted by James Bryant Conant (1893–1978), president of Harvard University (1933–53), director of the National Defense Research Committee during World War II[,] . . . and chairman of the anti-Communist Committee on the Present Danger in the 1950s—as well as the person who introduced Kuhn to this historical study of science, and through whom Kuhn acquired his first teaching post. (Thomas Kuhn 5)

What appears to be philosophically radical (the socially constructed, community-shared paradigm) turns out to be politically conservative, because paradigms serve as normalizing mechanisms that, once institutionalized, can exclude other forms of knowledge and discourse that do not adhere to the paradigm. Kuhn does not seem to reflect upon his position within the dominant sociohistorical discourse of the very period in which he was participating as an intellectual. And, as Cary Nelson and Dilip Gaonkar explain, the academy participated in what they call “the unwritten and unsigned pact post World War II disciplines made with state power. It was a McCarthy-era pact guaranteeing silence and irrelevance from the 96

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humanities and collaboration from the social sciences, a pact disguised by (and structured in terms of ) the proprieties of disciplinarity and its proper boundaries, limits, and conduct” (“Cultural Studies” 2). Kuhnian paradigms served as a remarkably resourceful discourse for justifying the “boundaries, limits, and conduct” of normalized disciplinary practices under this rescripted version of the knowledge contract. Such socially constructed boundaries could therefore justify, in Kuhn’s words, the fact that “scientific communities must first be recognized as having an independent existence” (Essential Tension 295), independent, it would ironically seem, from the society in which they were socially constructed. Significant change in a scientific community occurs, according to Kuhn’s theory, when anomalies or discrepancies arise that do not seem to be accountable from within the foundational terms of the operating paradigm, and these anomalous results precipitate a crisis or period of “extraordinary” science. Scientists themselves might experience this crisis period as one of relative uncertainty about the kinds of experiments to conduct, dissatisfaction with current theory, and disorder among the results obtained. The problem/solutions exemplified in a reigning paradigm no longer seem adequate to address the anomalies. All the evidence suggests that Kuhn himself registered his own discomfort with these periods of crisis. 4 Restoration to the order of a disciplined normal practice can only happen with the arrival of a “revolutionary” new paradigm. 5 The exemplary model of work provided by the individual or group of practitioners who successfully resolve the anomaly then serves as the basis for reestablishing a regulated course of problem-solving tasks implied but not yet explicitly worked out by the theory, law, or general rule guiding the new paradigm. The conservative tendency of this theory of paradigms should now be apparent. For one thing, paradigms serve to restore and maintain order through the institutionalized mechanisms of containment: paradigms provide handy kinds of disciplinary yardsticks insofar as individual performances can be judged in comparison with the standards of normalized, paradigmatic work that has already been accumulated within the field, even as sometimes unexpected and unsettling results emerge as discoveries of new knowledge. When combined with the more extensive range of professional powers, some disciplines can attain impressive jurisdictional controls over those individuals who affiliate with the given field. During periods of normal practice knowledge is cumulative, in contrast to what Kuhn saw as the often incommensurable breaks and disjunctures occurring between different paradigms. Many academics thus appreciate 97

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the principles of stability as the defining value of disciplinary work in its ability to produce and accumulate new kinds of knowledge, but to adopt Kuhn’s version of paradigms often leads to unjustified claims for disciplinary autonomy. More specifically, Kuhn’s theory of scientific change based on anomalies ends up being conservative rather than transformative, because the anomalies themselves are seen to arise internally among specific individual practitioners of the given “normal” science. 6 Just how these anomalies arise in the ongoing course of a normal practice has always been the most conceptually troubling element in Kuhn’s theory of paradigms. Fuller emphasizes the political consequences of this model; namely, the notion of internally consistent academic paradigms tends to isolate a normal practice from outsiders, which means from broader social, political, and cultural arenas: “Various competitors and contaminants of science—specifically religion, technology, and history— were successfully excluded from the scope of scientific inquiry” (Thomas Kuhn 34). Indeed, by modeling the disciplinary structure of the scientific fields the guild function of professional disciplines as they arose in the late nineteenth century was to perform just this kind of exclusion of academic work from business and political interests even as it negotiated just those interests in terms of the knowledge contract. Relatively speaking, such exclusion has been the institutional basis for the “academic freedom” legitimated by the formation of the aaup in 1915, and this doctrine of the incommensurability of knowledge and capital has served in important cases to protect academic workers from arbitrary economic or political forces. But since, as we have seen, the powers distributed by the knowledge contract constantly had to negotiate the different positions for concrete labor, the academic communities were never so isolated or so removed from the interests of business and capital, technology and politics, as Kuhn’s theory suggests. 7 Despite considerable historical evidence to the contrary (which I will elaborate on in the next section), Kuhn’s conception of “revolutionary” change contains disciplinary innovation within the community of experts working according to a self-regulating paradigm. For all practical purposes this theory therefore justifies the scientific production of knowledge in isolation from any significant public input, judgment, or assessment. It separates researchers from teachers and teachers from students, with only the former having the jurisdictional power of participating in the work of paradigmatic knowledge production. This served the cold war era well, when the direction of scientific work in both basic and applied research 98

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need not be questioned by outsiders: since it was self-regulating, it simply needed to be deeply funded to insure its continuity. Paradoxically, the “disinterested” nature of the production of knowledge now had a socially constructed theorem to contractually justify specific guilds of expertise upon which the public must rely. A disciplined academic community could now freely admit that they were working according to a normal paradigm rather than an objective reflection or representation of nature. This apparently liberating and “relativizing” turn of Kuhn’s ideas is what has made his theory attractive to humanists and social scientists. However, when educators in the humanities uncritically adopt Kuhn’s notion of paradigms as liberating possibilities for new kinds of learning, it is especially important to keep Fuller’s cautions in mind. Specifically, in a Kuhnian world, education becomes a process of acculturation in which dutiful students (and instructors and researchers) learn to imitate the practices authorized by the paradigm. Deeply critical, “extraneous,” imaginative, innovative, speculative, nondisciplinary, nonparadigmatic, nonmodern kinds of work and lore (see Harkin, “Postdisciplinary Politics”), to name a few, can for all practical purposes be suppressed by the Kuhnian theory of paradigms. Even as the demographics of secondary education have changed and differences of race, class, gender, age, and ethnicity have, in recent decades, increased in number in the academy, underlying Kuhnian models of what counts as normal practice can be experienced by many as painful exclusions of such potentially disruptive differences. Clyde Barrow offers a vivid articulation of the “endless regulations that constitute fair warning and rules of the academic game” when played according to paradigms that “discipline behavior before the fact and, hence, legitimate the punishment of those who violate the rules of the game. Team players [following the rules of the modern knowledge contract] are rewarded with an array of quite desirable material and social incentives. The occasional renegade is still punished in a symbolic public spectacle” (Barrow 254). The team, in this sense, can be an interdisciplinary project as well as a disciplinary one, since the processes of method and objectification can be modeled according to the exemplar, and the research discourse uses recognizable, even if variable (depending on the particular discipline), expository forms of refutational argumentation with little alteration from traditional disciplinary practices. 8 For the “team players” there’s a great deal of joy and satisfaction that many scientists (or literary critics) experience in their professional lives through their contribution to the ongoing work of a given normal prac99

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tice. We should not forget “quite how fascinating such work can prove in the execution” (Kuhn, Structure 24) or how satisfying one’s job security can be when one does not challenge or violate a normal practice. Indeed, the regulative nature of such practices enables the institutionalization of what Jeffrey Di Leo calls the “systems of affiliation” that “dominate our academic identity to the extent that we must define and redefine ourselves in orthodoxical terms or risk being labeled transgressive to disciplines of which we wish to be participatory members” (52). Paradigms provided justifications for the insulation of disciplinary communities from forms of public critique of such specializations. But “the intense specialization of postwar academia—linking the right to speak with a narrow credentialing process—is increasingly apparent as a highly politicized compact between knowledge and power. Moreover, it is a compact in which academics cede almost all public power to specialists and to the agencies that fund and promote them” (Nelson and Gaonkar, “Cultural Studies” 12). Kuhn simply does not engage issues of power and politics despite the effects of power and politics worked out through the transformations of the knowledge contract that enter his own analyses. This is lamentable because, in these times of vastly globalized political and economic forces over which isolated communities seem to have so little direct impact, jurisdictional controls over the boundaries of knowledge production seem to be splintering and untethering at light speed, so that, whether one celebrates or bemoans the condition, we indeed seem to have entered the land of paradigms lost. Repositioning Paradigms within the Politics of the Profession One apparent option would be to simply avoid speaking of paradigms. Unfortunately, the disciplinary problems are more intractable than any such rhetorical avoidance might suggest, and the term just will not go away because so many people continue to use it. But much more than a default rationale is involved in our continued reflection on paradigms. With some important revisions, this key word can usefully designate domains of university labor that yield relative consensus, scope, and stability (Latour) as well as inventive and unexpected new results that can have many social values but that do not depend, in any simple way, on the metaphysical certainties of universals and absolutes in the production of knowledge. 9 My efforts in what follows draw on the work of a few people like John Mowitt, Paul Hoyningen-Huene, and Alexander Bird who have begun to politicize Kuhn’s notion of paradigms so that the term itself can be more descriptively useful in comprehending current changes in the university. 100

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Although I wish I could be so persuasive as to make my sense of paradigm a working term for interested groups of university workers, the arguments that follow should be better seen as a meditation on the issues that can be galvanized around such a sometimes useful and often troublesomely common word. Paradigm might be considered on the order of another important but often confusing term such as culture, which is perhaps one of the most complex words in the English language (Williams, Keywords 76). One must inevitably specify which historically evolved meanings of such overused terms one chooses to borrow or modify for any given analysis, but the semantic clarifications themselves can illuminate important social processes. Although Kuhn admitted in 1990 that he seldom used the term paradigm “these days, having totally lost control of it” (Road 221), he never relented in his insistence on the value of reflection on the vocabularies of analysis: “Terms antecedently available, whether to an individual or a culture, are the base for the further extension of both vocabulary and knowledge” (Road 247). In his later work Kuhn shifted from paradigm to terms he borrowed from linguistics, “a lexicon and a lexical structure” (Road 242), but, as might be suspected, this more technical borrowing from another discipline never had anything like the influence of his various revisions of paradigms. In this spirit I offer the following reflections on Kuhn’s notion of paradigm less in the hope that this will standardize its meaning (a sheer impossibility) than that it will assist in my presentation of new ways of envisioning the role of whatever we call paradigms and disciplines in the professional life of our changing university cultures. While paradigms are more common and central to scientific uses, there is no inherent reason that paradigmatic research should be more highly valued than other kinds of university tasks that fall outside the purview of academic forms of disciplinarity. By better understanding the social construction of paradigms, their blurred boundaries, and their relation to other, nonmodern forms of work performed by various users of the university, we can potentially alter the dominance of this specialized kind of work, especially in the humanities. 10 Paradigms are like the “technical” schema that exert enormous pressure for both containment of knowledge and exploration of new territories, even though Kuhn conceived of them in more restrictive ways as exemplars for “pure” scientific research. But as Derrida explains, in the contemporary world “it is impossible to distinguish between these two aims” (“Principle of Reason” 12) of pure and applied research, basic and technical science. A politicized version of paradigms 101

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might help us to see how and why scientific research serves military, agricultural, pharmaceutical, or industrial aims. But we can also see how better to use disciplinary jurisdictions to resist such appropriations and how better to account for important uses of nondisciplinary labor. In order for this to happen at least two things must take place: a rehistoricizing of Kuhn’s story of the rise of paradigms as congruent not with the rise of modern science but with the rise of the modern university; and a repoliticizing of Kuhn’s confusing and often multiple meanings of the word “paradigms” as the core of disciplinarity. With respect to the first point, a detailed historical investigation of the sciences is, of course, beyond the scope of this study, so I can only provide a brief summary of the empirical evidence that leads us to question Kuhn’s account. Fuller himself provides significant evidence that Kuhn’s apparently “historical” account of the rise of modern science is, in many ways, ahistorical. For one thing, while Kuhn derived his notion of paradigms by studying scientific work from about 1620 to 1920, his articulation of the normal practitioners of a given paradigm seems to be more of an ex post facto justification than an historical actuality. That is, since scientific work prior to the late nineteenth century did not take place in universities, there was no normalizing community of academic workers, and scientific discoveries often happened in very differing social and political circumstances, with different motives and different resources. The very word “scientist” did not enter the vocabulary until the 1830s, when it was coined by William Whewell (1794–1866), master of Trinity College at Cambridge University (Fuller, Thomas Kuhn 34). In short, scientific advances often depended on more ad hoc, situational discoveries, and investigators in different countries often worked with different expectations and more widely varying sets of data than a paradigm would suggest. Such historical differences in the rise of science suggest an even greater acknowledgment of the porous sense of the community of knowledge workers even when individuals are said to share theoretical approaches. From an even more general perspective Sandra Harding has argued that it is historically incorrect to see such key scientific figures as Newton as the originators of some kind of new scientific method of experimentation, as if they had inaugurated a new paradigm. Following Edgar Zilsel’s work in the 1930s and 1940s in the sociology of science, we find that experimental inquiry is virtually impossible to sustain in slaveholding societies. Medieval feudal societies were not slaveholding, but the rigid stratification between landed aristocracy and peasants who worked the land “was strong enough 102

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to preclude the emergence of scientific experimentation” (Harding 218). Consequently, “Zilsel’s account allows us to see that it was a violation of the feudal division of labor that permitted experimental observation to emerge and to become a method of inquiry. The technique was not invented by Galileo, Bacon, Harvey, Kepler, and Newton; they only used and refined it. Science’s new ways of seeing the world developed from the perspective of the new kind of social labor of artisans and the inventors of modern technologies” (Harding 218). Epistemology was not separated into autonomous paradigms independent of the political struggles of the day: “Science’s new cognitive structures gained support because they were coherent with, one with, the struggle to overthrow the political and intellectual authoritarianism of feudalism” (Harding 221). 11 It was only much later, with the institutionalization of science coincident with the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century formation of the modern universities, that the more humanitarian, anti-authoritarian, political dimensions of inquiry were separated out from the “disinterested” knowledgeproducing capacity of the new disciplines when the “principle of reason” became the ideological justification for the knowledge contract. It is only then that we can get an internalist account of science based on paradigms that stake out autonomous domains of inquiry: “The process of institutionalizing science can usefully be seen as the creation of a new division of labor. The separation of science’s cognitive and political programs, and the restriction of scientists to the former, separate those who can legitimately create social/political values from those who can legitimately create facts” (Harding 223). Congruent with Latour’s analysis of the modern Constitution, the divorce of epistemology from labor, paradigms from politics, is an historical peculiarity of the rise of the modern academic disciplines gaining social justification from the early formations of the knowledge contract, not something that happened in Newton’s day. To suggest otherwise, as Kuhn sometimes does, is to cast back onto history a discursive formation that had not yet come into being. Although in the late nineteenth century disciplinary paradigms clearly became the dominant social formation in higher education in the United States, a revisionary history assists in unraveling the parameters of that dominance. We can situate the work involved in establishing and sustaining disciplinary paradigms even as such labor can now be seen as only one range of practices among the various tasks performed by faculty and students. The social and political consequences of either paradigmatic or nonparadigmatic work cannot be established in advance of the context of 103

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specific uses and material practices in the network of extended relations and institutional bureaucracies in which they are created and disseminated. When we consider the array of meanings for paradigm we find that Kuhn himself was responsible for some of this confusion. 12 As Kuhn admitted in his 1974 “Second Thoughts on Paradigms,” he “sometimes found it hard to believe” that part of the success of Structure was that “regretfully . . . it can be too nearly all things to all people” (Road 293). He began the process of revision in his 1969 “Postscript,” in which he introduced the notion of disciplinary matrix and exemplars that he further clarified in “Reflections on My Critics” (1969) and again in “Second Thoughts.” Each stage in these revisions appears to expand the notion of the disciplinary matrix, although, as I argue, these reformulations are more of a clarification than an expansion. The concept still needs to be considerably extended, thereby allowing the continuum of disciplinary practices to bleed out into a much larger area of professional work and in turn to the social and political realms. The important qualifications have to do with clarifying the institutional function of paradigms, but in Structure this communal meaning was often mixed with a more subjective, perceptual sense of the term. Thus, for example, at that time Kuhn sometimes speaks of paradigms as if they were perceptual models essential to a gestalt shift of vision or a change in worldview. As Grant Webster explains, “Kuhn sometimes even refers to such switches in perception in religious terms” (13), as a kind of conversion experience. After conducting his survey of numerous case studies in the history of science Kuhn could remark in awe at the range of different ways of seeing that “makes one suspect that something like a paradigm is prerequisite to perception itself. What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see. In the absence of such training there can only be, in William James’s phrase, ‘a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion’ ” (Road 113). This is really just a rephrasing, without the transcendental idealism, of the traditional Kantian problematic, whereby subjective experience necessarily mediates any perception of the objective world. 13 By adapting this perceptual meaning of paradigm, many critics have thus used the term liberally as a way to describe different genres and styles in academic, professional, and literary writing as paradigms of different ways of thinking or mediating subjective experience. Conversely, paradigms often show up as a kind of synonym for ideology when very general or abstract ideas can be said to 104

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either consciously or unconsciously structure perception, such as when one speaks of the paradigms of individualism, or empiricism, or rationality, or “liberal humanism.” 14 The problem is that, as Alexander Bird persuasively argues, Kuhn’s claims for radical perceptual breaks between paradigms are based on weak psychological evidence: “Kuhn wants changes in a paradigm to lead to systematic changes in perceptual experience,” but “it is not entirely clear in all such cases that there is a difference in perception as opposed to a difference in what is inferred or what is done” (121). In material terms practices and ideas can change without radical breaks in an individual’s perception of the world: one need not have the kind of deeply intuitive, almost arational “conversion” experience when one shifts paradigms. 15 Late in his life Kuhn himself recognized his errors in conflating a hypothetical “group mind” with that of the minds of individual practitioners: “The most egregious examples of this mistake in Structure is my repeated talk of gestalt switches as characteristic of the experience undergone by the group” (Road 242). Kuhn’s revised notion of paradigms moves away from this perceptual model toward the socialized sphere, whereby he places “models” as just one of the criteria besides symbolic generalizations, exemplars, and values for the socialized process of the disciplinary matrix that emerges as an institutional formation within the modern university. These institutional meanings are much more than a perceptual internalization of cognitive models, as if such models configured an entire “world.” 16 In “Second Thoughts” Kuhn’s useful qualifications of the notion of paradigms can be directly related to the distinctions between discipline and profession that I discussed in the previous chapter. In this essay Kuhn distinguished what he conceived of as a general from a more restricted meaning for paradigm. The first general set of meanings “is global, embracing all the shared commitments of a scientific group” (Kuhn, Road 294), and the word “all” in that formulation points to the broader range of disciplinary practices (the “matrix”) without which successful exemplary problem/solutions cannot be institutionalized. In short, paradigm in the broad sense names the core set of practices associated with what I called discipline in the previous chapter. But even when they are homologous with discipline, Kuhn rarely discusses the even broader range of professional practices necessary for the material purposes of supporting the discipline. “Global,” in Kuhn’s formulation, can be a bit misleading, since it does not refer to what we think of as global today but instead is an extended description of “all the shared commitments” of the scientists themselves. 105

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To situate scientists within a truly global economy, however, is to realize that their shared commitments exist hand in hand with many different commitments and many competing interests in the ever larger professional domain within which the disciplinary consensus seeks its jurisdictional controls. The second and more restricted set of related meanings “isolates a particularly important sort of commitment and is thus a subset of the first” (Kuhn, Road 294). Kuhn suggests that the first meaning, paradigm1, be replaced with the larger term disciplinary matrix. In Kuhn’s words it is “ ‘disciplinary,’ because it is common to the practitioners of a specified discipline; ‘matrix,’ because it consists of ordered elements which require individual specification” (Road 168). Again, Kuhn’s notion of the disciplinary matrix could become synonymous with my sense of discipline as outlined in chapter 2, but Kuhn limited the matrix to just four main features: symbolic generalizations, models, shared values, and exemplars. 17 Following the traditional division between epistemology and politics, Kuhn simply eliminates from discussion the extension of the disciplinary matrix out toward the broader professional domains situated in turn within the political and cultural institutions of the society. One can only conjecture that it is perhaps because of its implications for social extensiveness that Kuhn essentially dropped the notion of disciplinary matrix, which, as HoyningenHuene remarks, “he never uses in his work after 1969” (159). Kuhn would have us believe that the exemplars, or the “paradigmatic” “concrete problem solutions” represented, typically, by key figures in the field, correspond to the “second, and more fundamental, sense of ‘paradigm’ ” in Structure (Essential Tension 298). But as Hoyningen-Huene points out, Kuhn’s distinctions become unintelligible without further clarification. Kuhn proposed that the restricted sense of paradigm2 as exemplary problem/solutions was just one of three other subsets of an integrated whole called the disciplinary matrix, or paradigm1. But this seems both logically and historically impossible. Exemplars, typically the historical cases of successful work by key figures (the “Magisters” or “Master Critics” in James Sosnoski’s formulation), include symbolic generalizations, models, and values as part of the paradigm-founding performance. A good example of the formation of such a paradigm can be illuminated by the material consequences within the university that followed from the work of Foucault. That is, Foucault himself serves as the exemplary figure whose research yielded some startling new kinds of knowledge about the emergence of modernity; the panopticon serves as the model 106

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for disciplinarity; and the symbolic generalizations are the vocabulary of enunciation, individuation, surveillance, biopower, discursive formation, and so on. Foucauldian disciples can imitate the master in their critiques, and often such imitations can be tremendously heuristic, as when learning a new mode of understanding shaped by the Foucauldian paradigm. “Disciples, that is, the members of a discipline, must have a framework within which even their intellectual differences take on significance, and this is what a paradigm puts in place” (Mowitt, Text 26). But, ironically, it also means that Foucauldians can exercise their disciplinary critique by reproducing the disciplinary structure of paradigms, often merely for the most shallow of careerist moves.18 Only by examining the context of specific performances can one determine what the consequences of such imitations [107], (16) actually entail. For these reasons, then, it becomes unintelligible to think of the four characteristics as independent subsets of the disciplinary matrix. Kuhn’s revisions can more profitably be seen as specifications of the Lines: 226 to 231 structural nature of paradigms rather than as distinguishing between a ——— broad and narrow meaning of the term. 19 In these formulations paradigms 12.6pt PgVar (by which I will henceforth mean paradigms1, the disciplinary matrix) need ——— no longer be confused with ideologies, myths, or perceptual gestalts, beNormal Page cause these kinds of related phenomena do not share all of the four char* PgEnds: Eject acteristics of institutionalized paradigms. The specifications themselves also begin to suggest the way paradigms are situated within the even more extended matrix of professionally sanctioned economic and political con[107], (16) trols over the disciplinary domains. Kuhn rarely discusses these extended domains of dependence because of his “internalist” orientation, which insists on the autonomous character of the scientific community (the very feature which Fuller, Harding, and others have rightly criticized in Kuhn). Even though he never elaborated on these extensions he does acknowledge the presence of political powers, especially when he writes in the afterword to a collection of papers presented at a 1990 conference in his honor: “The pursuit of puzzle solving constantly involves practitioners with questions of politics and power, both within and between the puzzle-solving practices, as well as between them and the surrounding nonscientific culture. But in the evolution of human practices, such interests have governed from the start” (Kuhn, Road 252). 20 More than ever, this extended vision, and the political analysis of how such “interests have governed,” is crucial to understanding what is happening in the university, both now and throughout its history. 107

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The bigger picture is curtailed in Kuhn’s notion of the disciplinary matrix because his notion of boundaries established by the intersection of generalized symbolic rules, models, and exemplars depends only on an epistemological gaze that tends to exclude the political, the economic, and the contractual and thus the issue of work and labor. The disciplinary matrix is not a neutral category but a domain whose reproduction depends upon what Mowitt called “an abridged ‘social contract’ ” (Text 27). As he puts it, Kuhn’s analysis while forceful seems not to appreciate the complex structure of a disciplinary boundary. A further consequence of this is that he fails to see how the object, that is, the domain ostensibly referred to by axioms, models, and exemplars, is historical not just in the evolutionary sense, but in the political sense. In other words, he does not see that the politically ordered relation among subjects necessary to the disciplinary subjection of agency is what constitutes the existence of the object. (Mowitt, Text 37)

There is no reason why we cannot describe the political and social domains of the formation of paradigms in ways that Kuhn had sometimes acknowledged but typically bracketed off. For Mowitt this means linking the narrower, restricted sense of “disciplinary reason” characteristic of the matrix of paradigmatic research to the larger, Foucauldian sense of the “disciplinary society.” As I discussed in chapter 2, this can be done, although the “disciplinary” terms tend to get in the way of each other. Nevertheless, Mowitt proceeds to argue that Kuhn obscures “a decisive aspect of disciplinary reason, namely the point at which rules shade into norms and the entire institutional structure of knowledge connects with other social forms of disciplinary power. . . . [I]t will be necessary to extend Kuhn’s notion of discipline precisely at the point where it turns away from the domain of power” (Text 30). This is, indeed, the crucial modification in resituating paradigms within the professional, social, and political realms. By seeing paradigms as the core of modern disciplinary practices, which are in turn situated within larger professional domains sustained by the knowledge contract, we can include the interests of users outside of and in relation to specific paradigms by decentering their historically hierarchical role within the university. The key is that “interests which outdistance the network of academic disciplines need to be factored into a contestation of the academic institutions themselves” (Mowitt, Text 42). This “outdistancing” mirrors my own sense of the expanded professional domains of nonmodern labor, which have considerable social value for a broad range 108

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of users but remain implicitly devalued by most versions of the knowledge contract. It will require solidarity and collective action to alter the contractually legitimated value of these domains, and such political/epistemological actions will have to contest the historical centering of disciplinarity within the university. Mowitt has recently summarized his basic theoretical distinction: “There have long been two texts: one, an object; the other, a paradigm. They can be distinguished but not entirely separated” (“What Is” 1217). Texts as objects always have a “remaindered” real that resists the frameworks of the disciplines that constitute them as objects. Texts in this first sense function as what Mowitt calls “antidisciplinary” objects because they always exceed the disciplinary boundaries of the paradigms that constitute them for research purposes. The weak sense of textuality that has so often characterized the institutionalized forms of poststructuralism tends to bracket off any sense of the text as an “object” that always exceeds the web of textuality and interdisciplinarity by which we frame those objects. Mowitt’s analysis wisely demonstrates how such loss of understanding of the relation between objects and paradigms can perilously dismiss dimensions of the material world of objects, and such losses can have devastating consequences. However, Mowitt’s terminology remains primarily concerned with epistemology rather than labor, even though there are significant political consequences for different kinds of work given these formulations. The “anti” suggests a binary opposition to the paradigmatic forms of knowledge. But the political work doesn’t always work itself out in epistemological terms. That is, if we think of Latour’s sense of an array of nonmodern practices, we find some of them work in tension with or against disciplines, others just work outside or beside the domains of the paradigms, and there are no clear boundaries between object and frame, nature and society. Paradigms are simply not the only access to the real unless we return to the perceptual, gestaltlike, and Kantian model of paradigms that Kuhn ultimately rejected. While such nondisciplinary practices may contest the allocation of resources when funding pours only toward the disciplinary spectrum, such practices may not necessarily conflict with disciplinary knowledge itself. Thus, for example, various kinds of teaching lore whose wisdom depends on situationally addressing different student audiences do not necessarily work against the disciplinary territories themselves, even though such labor cannot easily be made paradigmatic in terms of rules and models and exemplars. The political contestation then takes place within the professional domain as alternative kinds of practices fight for legitimation and funding. 109

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Despite these qualifications, Mowitt is highly sensitive to the mere replacement of one form of disciplinarity with another, and his analysis is so astute that it is worth pursuing even as I work to modify some of his key formulations. “The crucial point is not to challenge disciplinary readings simply by replacing them. Antidisciplinary research requires that readings reach from within artifacts to the paradigms that govern their interpretation and beyond these paradigms to the structures of disciplinary power that support them” (Mowitt, Text 216). The jurisdictional governing of interpretation according to reigning paradigms leads to a political critique of the knowledge contract and the supporting social and political powers that extend well beyond the locales of the university itself. For these purposes Mowitt proposes an extension of the concept of textuality so that by completing the theorizing of the text as an antidisciplinary object we can more fully address the range of social, political, and cultural factors involved in the textual production, disciplinary or otherwise, of all forms of knowledge. This is an attractive, even if somewhat abstract, formulation for many practitioners of radical or progressive institutional critique, since its intention is to expand the textual weave without idealizing or eliminating the objects that get fabricated into the weave of social and cultural domains. A double bind occurs, however, when Mowitt relabels this expanded domain of work and labor as a kind of new paradigm, “if we embrace the textual paradigm and seek to finish it” (Text 217). But the notions of “finishing” and “paradigms” return us to the discourse of modernity and disciplinarity itself, and so it is a difficult rhetorical as well as institutional move to offer such a new paradigm as a transformation of disciplinary reason. That is, in his early formulations Mowitt sees paradigms as the key feature of disciplinary practices, so it seems to be a contradiction in terms to suggest an alternative, or complement, to disciplinary reason by embracing a new textual paradigm. Mowitt advocates “the antidisciplinary paradigm of textuality” (Text 219). My point would be that you can’t have an antidisciplinary paradigm because such a term is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms as well as practices. Even a textual paradigm will operate by assimilating moments of exemplars (Derrida? Foucault?) with specific models (the text as a weave of meanings?) and symbolic generalizations (difference, trace, supplement, archive, etc.). When these are combined practitioners can imitate these performances so as to create institutional stabilities around this paradigm. For Mowitt the “completed” textual paradigm would avoid any idealistic sense of getting to the “naked” real world outside of the text in some 110

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“paradigm-free” way. It would do so because the text as paradigm frames the “difference between interpreting the world and changing it” (“What Is” 1221). In short, the textual paradigm would mediate the difference between the world external to the text and the textual/institutional world without ever ignoring or avoiding that difference. I don’t doubt that this would be the advantage of sophisticated textual paradigms, and innovative new paradigms do constitute significant institutional changes. But such epistemological changes would not fundamentally alter the disciplinary role of paradigms in the disciplinary economy of value that organizes university labor. Political actions and social movements do not always work according to exemplary problem/solutions, models, symbolic generalizations, and scientific values. Yet the textual paradigm would necessarily require such organizations and evaluations of work that matched the exemplary models in disciplinary ways, and the modern knowledge contract could easily accommodate such practices. Textuality is indeed such an abstract configuration of an infinitely complex domain of possibilities, so to that extent alone an exemplary model such as Foucault can provide the basis for a new paradigm. No doubt this can be beneficial and transformative. But even so we have to imagine that there are innumerable ways to conceive of textuality, and any given paradigm will congeal around the selected exemplar. Again, depending upon uses, this congealing can be beneficial or highly restrictive of other, alternative paradigms as well as nonparadigmatic performances characteristic of various alternative discourses and social movements. I can well share Mowitt’s hope for more “radically democratic” curricula than the kind we currently have whereby the dominant “model of the disciplinary object . . . serves to coordinate the various components of the curriculum” (Text 219). But Kuhn’s whole point is that paradigms cannot be radically democratic because they have limited democratic uses within communities of normal practitioners, who must acquire familiarity with the discourse, literacy acts, and expertise of the professional disciplinary community—the function of the knowledge contract is to assure that the practitioners of a given paradigm determine who gets to work within the discipline. Knowledge of exemplars, models, and symbolic generalizations is required for full participation in the disciplinary community, even though the relations to outsiders need not be as rigid as Kuhn’s internalist account suggests. If they are paradigms, they are simply not likely to be radically democratic, even though radically democratic powers of legitimation can 111

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work through and around the place of such paradigms within the institution and the broader social life. This is a key point. Let me use a simple example. Many of us who work in the humanities are not the best sources to ask about the relative validity or usefulness of various narcotics. We need the disciplinarians here, but once we consult the experts who have through disciplinary specialization studied various narcotic effects, the social consequences and need for more research on these issues become a professional and public issue of considerable debate. For such debates to even be possible requires that the disciplinary networks be extended out into the professional and public arenas through acts of translation that are not always paradigmatic but flexible and porous in an array of different contexts with different media. Restricting such translations to, strictly speaking, a textual paradigm could constitute institutional exclusions, no matter how much we may say we want to include alternative kinds of valuable cultural work, or else the emphasis on a generalized notion of textuality will be much more inclusive than any notion of a Kuhnian paradigm can properly designate. If we return to Kuhn, we find that one of the four characteristics of the disciplinary matrix is shared values, a dimension that Mowitt does not discuss. This seemingly benign formulation, however, potentially opened more doors to the political than Kuhn himself foresaw. That’s because for Kuhn “shared values” almost always got narrowed to the traditional description of disciplinary values in the sciences: accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity, fruitfulness, and so on (Hoyningen-Huene 149). But there’s no reason why values should be so exclusively delimited to scientific ones: “Objectivity and partisanship are allies, not rivals” (Eagleton 136). We can, therefore, begin to extend Kuhn’s narrow sense of values to include Mowitt’s concern for the larger social values of justice and fairness and thus to power and inequity and in turn to the professional, institutional, and political arenas in which such powers and values are contested and contractually regulated. As the Foucauldian critique of the micropolitics of exclusion reveals, some important individuals, students, and workers are unjustly excluded or neutralized by the disciplinary processes of legitimation when “the orbit of a paradigm . . . closes back in around itself as soon as the credentials of its ‘initiates’ have been verified” (Mowitt, Text 220). Mowitt seeks, as do I, “to institutionalize a form of inclusivity that actually encourages curricula to undergo legitimation crises—and not simply at the local level of a particular institution, but at the level of the borders that distinguish the local from the 112

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global” (Text 220). If this were possible, then indeed we ought to be able to listen to “those whose voices have been drowned out by the very voice of advocacy” (Mowitt, Text 221). I share these goals as an important part of the reformation of the university by legitimatizing in evaluation practices some of the vital, nondisciplinary labor of our diverse professional lives. What kind of paradigm might support and legitimate this kind of work? My point is that it would not be a paradigm, or at least not only a paradigm. Rather, collective action on the part of faculty and students can begin to negotiate alternative legitimations for crucial kinds of nonparadigmatic, nondisciplinary labor that does not always utilize rules, models, or exemplars. “Paradigm-free” could not possibly be some unmediated realm of access to the real world or the ideal world, for that matter; nondisciplinary practices just mediate reality without utilizing the institutional assimilation of the four characteristics of paradigms. Disciplinary paradigms serve, albeit to varying degrees, to create stability that “closes back in around itself,” even as (or after) the somewhat unpredictable results of the research create new knowledge. But we have to be careful to recall that in many instances both dimensions of paradigms, creating new knowledge and closing back in (as in seeking agreement and consensus or in learning and utilizing an exemplary model or symbolic generalization such as “class struggle” or “textuality”), can be crucial social values, and that is indeed what Mowitt hopes for his notion of the textual paradigm. To that extent such a reflectively sophisticated new textual paradigm can well be crucial to the well-being of a broad range of individuals for whom such disciplinary knowledge is an invaluable resource. But, by itself, such new paradigms won’t transform sufficiently the domains of work in the changing university. To complicate the picture, as Latour points out, modern paradigms don’t just close in—they add scope in terms of models that can be shared and performed by others without having to repeat all the processes by which exemplary figures inaugurated the paradigm. And the sometimes startling and unpredictable knowledge that emerges as the result of paradigmatic performances can significantly alter our understanding of the world. As Terry Eagleton cautions us, “It is a mistake . . . to believe that norms are always restrictive. In fact it is a crass Romantic delusion” (15). To this extent we need not adopt Kuhn’s more conservative assessment of paradigms as always internalized around a kind of “static self-confirmation”—paradigms are much more porous to the professional and social forces in which they are embedded, as Mowitt would no doubt agree. 21 To transform those 113

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dimensions of university labor that repressively restrict some individuals and groups, we have to be able to distinguish domains of educational work that take place outside calls for new paradigms, textual or otherwise, so that we can better negotiate with various intellectual, social, and cultural interactions that don’t always operate according to principles legitimated by the disciplinary terms of the knowledge contract. But in order to do that we will need to articulate a performative dimension of paradigms themselves that is always operating to destabilize the disciplinary forms of closure. Paradigms Performed Thus far I have been describing paradigms as particular kinds of social formations and institutional practices. But practitioners must indeed perform the work legitimated by any given paradigm, and it is this performative dimension that most often unravels the idealized stability, closure, and consensus embodied by the paradigm. 22 As Louis Menand puts it, “Every paradigm contains the seed of its own undoing, the limit-case that, as it is approached, begins to unravel the whole construct” (“Historical Romance” 82). Such “limit-cases” are indeed new performances, and they often emerge unpredictably from any given normal practice. Interestingly, Kuhn himself laid the ground for such a performative analysis of paradigms, but his own formalist assumptions led him to ignore this dimension. That is, the notion of exemplars as concretely enacted forms of knowledge production clearly depends on powerful kinds of individual performances by those exemplary figures. Although there are, as we have seen, exemplars in other fields, such as sports heroes, artists, and writers, their performances do not have the special paradigmatic characteristics of synthesizing models, symbolic generalizations, and scientific values. Disciplinary exemplars function as kinds of “leading performers” linking the methods of interpretation as articulated in the symbolic generalizations to the objects as visualized in the models presented (the panopticon, the verbal icon, etc.). One could say that Kuhn provides a formal and institutional analysis of the exemplary performances of key scientists such as Bohr, Einstein, and Planck. Although the performances of such exemplary figures clearly have extraordinary social force, it may be more significant to consider the performances of faculty and students whose everyday work sustains various kinds of disciplinary “normal” practices. For this purpose I’m going to draw on performance studies and more particularly on some of the innovative work on the performative theory of gender construction by Judith But114

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ler and Eve Sedgwick. 23 The normalizing function of performing gender stereotypes (and racial stereotypes) parallels in significant ways the normalizing function of performing paradigms: compulsory heterosexuality names the reiteration of dominant social codes very much like compulsory disciplinarity names the reiteration of dominant academic codes. Disciplinarity has generally been coded male, and the nondisciplinary aspects of university labor have been exploited specifically to the extent that they can be “feminized” (Schell, Gypsy Academics; Enos). Just as there is no unmediated ontological ground for given gender identities, there is likewise no unmediated ontological ground for paradigms—at least not in the old positivist epistemological sense as a true and accurate representation of reality. It is important to recall that these formulations are not denials of [115], (24) an external reality that exceeds the socially constituted “gendered body,” it is just that there is no unmediated approach to the body or ontology. Butler’s notion of performance insists that the singularities of an individLines: 324 to 329 ual performance are always situated within and crossed by the social and ——— political codes available to the performer. In this way, performance theory 12.6pt PgVar links individual human agency with institutional structuring, fulfilling the ——— double role that Anthony Giddens describes: “Social structures are both Normal Page constituted by human agency, and yet, at the same time, are the medium of * PgEnds: Eject this constitution” (121). Sedgwick distinguishes between two different meanings of performative, “that of theater on the one hand, and of speech act theory and de[115], (24) construction on the other” (7). Although she follows Butler’s sense of the different emphases of these two discursive progenitors of the modern meaning of performative, I believe that both dimensions come into play in the institutional sense of academic performance under the constraints of various paradigms. In terms of speech act discourse, the traditional sense of science as the model for propositional forms of academic discourse is that it produces constative rather than performative utterances. But this distinction is shattered, as Derrida has argued, to the extent that the very division between constative and performative depends on an idealist metaphysics that obscures rather than eliminates the “conflicts of the faculties” that we encounter in higher education (“Mochlos”). For my purposes, the theatrical sense of performance extends the linguistic meaning, and the former works especially well in all those more staged, paradigmatic moments of publication and/or literal performance as a speaker at a conference or in a classroom. 24 115

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By reconceiving paradigms as originating in exemplary performances that become institutionalized through all those subsequent performances based on reiterations, repetitions, and imitations of the exemplars, models, and rules governing a given practice, we gain another access to the lost political dimension of these acts. That is, Kuhn’s internalist perspective opens to the larger social domains, because instead of a notion of some internal consistency or essence of the paradigm as an autonomous set of practices that works independent of outside influences, “that very interiority is an effect and function of a decidedly public and social discourse” (Butler, Gender Trouble 173). What this means is that no disciplinary performance by any individual (man or woman, Western or non-Western) can exactly imitate any previously exemplary performance, because the social differences in those acts cannot be eliminated from the temporal dimension of their performance. Because of the more easily objectified subject matter in the scientific fields, different performers can more closely imitate the work of predecessors, but differences always remain. The historical record of scientific performances illustrates that “there is not a single rule, however plausible, and however firmly grounded in epistemology, that is not violated at sometime or other” (Feyerabend 14). Just as gender differences are socially fabricated ways of organizing identity, paradigms are socially fabricated ways of organizing social life in specific kinds of institutions, and differences in the actors performing the imitations become more crucial than Kuhn might have wished. Paradigmatic performances speak deeply to practitioners’ sense of making and remaking their professional identities in ways quite analogous to the performance of gender identities. So the question of social justice reenters (it never left) the epistemological when we examine the performative dimension of disciplinary practices by specific actors. Let me make this performative dimension more concrete. It means that, for instance, demographic changes have more direct performative effect on paradigms than might otherwise have been imagined. When more women and minorities become actors within the profession, their disciplinary performances can alter, even if in small ways, the identities of the paradigms themselves. “Paradigm shifts” do not, then, happen merely because of internal anomalies encountered in normal practice; they also happen because of the exogenous elements that enter the professional life of those paradigms. Thus, particular disciplinary performances might engage forms of commitment, affiliation, and solidarity to multiple social movements such as feminism, identity politics, labor movements, antiwar movements, 116

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which can alter paradigmatic performances, especially in the humanities. Second, the context and subject position of any given intellectual performer varies hugely, from tenured professors, academostars, assistant professors, and teachers at nonprestigious universities and community colleges to part-time temporary faculty whose resources and potential range of performances is radically restricted in many cases. Paradigm formation by way of reiterations of individual performances always takes place through sets of asymmetrical power relations so that social and institutional conditions of domination and exploitation inevitably play out in individual performances. As I suggested in chapter 1, the most striking thing about paradigmatic performances is that their high cost in terms of resources can aid management plans to casualize large segments of the workforce whose nondisciplinary performances have already been devalued by the disciplinary economy of value in which they are staged. The debilitating sense that some feel when academic work seems to take place in a land of paradigms lost can thus mean for management a keen sense that disciplinarity has a smaller stage, which justifies the expansion of some forms of nondisciplinary work, but only as more cost-efficient, contingent, part-time hires. Mostly this means devaluing teaching as professional practice, but it means much more than pedagogy in the narrow sense. Innovations in terms of addressing different student needs, different cultural, gender, and racial differences in multicultural classrooms, and the complex tasks of reading and writing our cultures—many of these performances become either insignificant (and thus defunded) because they have not achieved full disciplinary status as paradigms, or, conversely, the utilitarian forms of the nondisciplinary proliferate, but only as cheaper forms of labor. The performative character of disciplinary labor reveals that epistemological stabilities are always only relative and sometimes illusory, since performative differences range from close imitations to more subversive alterations. The range of these performances suggests that disciplines are not divided in any binary set between Kuhn’s original notion of the split between “normal” and revolutionary practices. 25 Disciplinary practitioners perform work across a continuum and array, even when the disciplinary economy of value dictates preference for the normalized performances. Transgressions are constantly being enacted, more so in some low-paradigm fields such as English than in others, but prestige tends to gravitate toward those fields that can sustain more resolute forms of paradigms, mainly the sciences, 117

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just as these fields also tend to be the ones whose objectifications can serve more direct capital interests. Boundary-making performances become crucial mechanisms for distributing power within the institution, and boundaries are often made through acts of naming: naming fields (gender studies, English, biochemistry, composition studies, etc.) that can designate domains where related paradigms (or subspecialties) can be clustered and administered. The institutional obligation for naming one’s theory or method, for instance, thus becomes one kind of performance that designates one’s paradigmatic affiliation. To this extent a name, just like a paradigm, “is not fixed in time, but becomes fixed again and again through time, indeed, becomes fixed through its reiteration” (Butler, Bodies 212). It is precisely through this repetition that the name, or the paradigm, gives the illusion of being inherently and inextricably fixed to its referent, or exemplar. In actual performances the boundaries are never so precise and clearly drawn, and they are always contestable, dynamic, and in social and political tension with other kinds of performances. The hope for social change in a different future means allowing for discursive rearticulations that can alter the function of disciplinarity by creating professional spaces for the nonmodern performance of a wider range of educational practices on the part of different kinds of educators. These spaces, just like paradigms, need to be named so they can be negotiated into the contractual obligations that govern our professional lives. Even though some remarkable performances move far from the disciplinary end of the spectrum, they must be contextually supported with resources just like the disciplinary actors. The value, including the long-range economic value, of these alternative performances cannot always be articulated in disciplinary terms and requires the solidarity of collective action in defending and legitimating such labor. The naming function calls for some careful articulations and translations between and among different academic domains that often seem incommensurable. The performative dimension of paradigms helps, thereby, to rearticulate Kuhn’s key notion of incommensurability. As Kuhn maintained throughout his career, it was the problem of incommensurability that led him to the notion of paradigms in the first place. From a Kuhnian perspective, practitioners of different paradigms can’t easily talk to each other because of discursive incommensurabilities. Certainly, it can be very difficult to move in and out of different disciplinary vocabularies and practices, and it can be impossible to perform two paradigms simultaneously. 118

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But it is often possible to perform them sequentially or to change from one kind of performance to another and in many cases to blend them into work that emerges not in paradigmatic form but as another kind of discourse altogether. Critical pluralism depends on this possibility, as when one shifts from, say, a New Critical to a Marxist vocabulary, and such shifting of vocabularies often has a more political than epistemological motive. One can perform beside as well as along with the exemplars. “We also sometimes succeed in altering the way we think and feel without exchanging, or needing to exchange, whole conceptual frames or intellectual paradigms” (Gunn 142). From a performative perspective, therefore, the gaps and misunderstandings between paradigms appear less like epistemological breaks than performative incompatibilities. “Incommensurability . . . is merely an enabling (and sometimes disabling) illusion . . . because that which is out-of-the-question can always be made open-to-question—can be made problematic—statements are never incommensurable. That is, statements from any language, culture, or discipline can always be brought within the problematics of any other language, culture, or discipline” (Yarbrough 8). The work of translation between different languages, cultures, or disciplinary paradigms is rarely impossible even though it takes a great deal of time and therefore labor. Disciplinary pressures to emulate paradigms, however, rarely allow for such time: more commonly in the humanities, practitioners of different paradigms do not try to translate between discourses so much as attempt to refute each other by staying within the terms of their home paradigm. Publications result, careers are made, fame is achieved, but too often very little use-value emerges from these discussions. Individual performances can, therefore, be based on such unreasonable, selfish, careerist motives as to undermine the usefulness of those performances to anyone except the performers themselves. “The previous generation of scholars gave us not only new models for success but also a few new models for egregiously bad behavior, whereby self-absorption, hauteur, and primadonnadom were raised to the level of professional principle” (Bérubé, “Epilogue” 223). You can’t take the performance out of the paradigm, so that the question of justice is always embedded in the epistemological. The social consequences of disciplinary behavior register in the way any public performance has consequences: as fair, useful, and important to others or as shallow self-display preening “as if ” it were the height of professionalism simply because it invokes the exemplary figure of some Master Critic, displays the model of interpretation and the symbolic generalizations established by that exemplary figure. Too often, as we know, 119

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it’s the latter. 26 In those instances, such competitive individualism reflects the gendered character of disciplinary modes of behavior as performed within the differing stages of capitalism. 27 Since we can’t easily transcend these competitive forces that operate through the culture, we must negotiate them as they operate within the institutions we inhabit. The ethical dimensions play out in paradigmatic performances when individual practitioners must imitate exemplars or Magisters even when they are not given the resources to make such performances yield anything other than token status (Sosnoski, Token Professionals). Such “coercive mimeticism” (Chow viii) functions much like the injustice enacted through compulsory imitations of racial and gender stereotypes. For younger members of the profession, both students and faculty, this is understandable because, as Butler explains, under the pressures of disciplinary scrutiny one’s very identity depends upon repetition and emulation of exemplary models (or racial/sexual stereotypes) as a way of psychic investment in a community. And it works under the double constraints of the modern knowledge contract: one must imitate the exemplars even as one produces “new” forms of knowledge. Especially in the humanities, where paradigmatic forms of closure are difficult and sometimes even impossible to achieve, such psychic investments in paradigms have more often than not led to factionalisms, or fractions (Abbott, Chaos), in the form of warring camps that defeat and disrupt affiliation and identification with larger organizations and movements, including faculty and student unions as well as common causes shared by many educational workers in different fields and different institutions. Humanities workers must often emulate paradigms even when such performances may have little use-value for the majority of practitioners in the field and virtually no direct impact on anyone outside the discipline. Much of the character of disciplinary arguing in the humanities becomes a fruitless form of endless quarrelling when disciplinary closure is not possible to achieve (Sosnoski, Token Professionals, Modern Skeletons). Although different sets of beliefs and assumptions can be negotiated, to attempt to refute an opponent operating from a different paradigm can rarely if ever lead to a consensus at a higher level because it’s typically not just a question of knowledge but of social values that are competing. But the uses of paradigmatic research obviously entail more than envisioned in this sketch of its dark side. If we return to Fuller’s objections that paradigms prevent “the natural spread of knowledge,” we might modify this objection by first recognizing that knowledge doesn’t spread by 120

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“nature” but by socially constructed forms of communication and dissemination. In free, open, democratic societies (hard to find in the modern world of globalized biopower, even harder in the premodern) knowledge can spread rapidly; in repressive societies all the effort in the world to break down paradigms will not lead to a “natural spread” of the knowledge produced within those disciplinary domains. No doubt Fuller is correct to see the convergent dimension of paradigms as “arrested social movements,” since by definition this is the case any time forms of consensus, relative stability, and the scope of disciplinary claims congeal in given historical moments. But he tends to neglect the less predictable results that often emerge as new knowledge from the performance of paradigms. Even more, we can’t conclude in advance of the context of users that the arresting [121], (30) function is always and inherently bad: social movements can also be repressive, anti-intellectual, antieducational, as perhaps much of the well-funded right-wing political movement has been in the United States. In Eagleton’s Lines: 376 to 381 words, the knee-jerk kind of “postmodern prejudice against norms, unities ——— and consensuses is a politically catastrophic one. It is also remarkably 12.6pt PgVar dim-witted” (15–16). As I suggested in the previous section, paradigmatic ——— stability can often be resistant to, say, various media distortions of the truth Normal Page that need to be refuted, such as was commonly the case in the pc wars in * PgEnds: Eject the early 1990s. Likewise, the “flexible” movements of capitalism can be experienced by many as inflicting extremely unjust kinds of suffering. Arresting those powerful social movements in the performance of [121], (30) paradigmatic limitations can be an important form of resistance by which groups can use disciplinary empowerments to carve out spaces of work not exclusively evaluated by capital demands or racial and sexual stereotypes. Indeed, the political and social valence of disciplinary stability is not predetermined as politically conservative, even though, historically, institutions have become dominantly conservative. For these purposes we have to rethink the nature of conservativism as a potential ecology of conserving and stabilizing practices that in some cases certainly can have more radical social consequences by benefiting a wide range of users. Paradigms have no inherent virtues, so it’s always a question of who benefits from their uses. The dignity and civic responsibility appropriate to all educators require that we synthesize labor, epistemology, and social justice rather than trying to rely exclusively on disciplinary criteria and the discourse of “standardization” to adjudicate problems that are not in the nature of paradigms to resolve. 121

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If paradigms can designate one pole along a horizontal spectrum of potentially valuable forms of educational performances, it becomes possible to assess the importance of a wider range of both disciplinary and nondisciplinary practices. According to Yarbrough, we need to change the “pervasive beliefs that coherence and comprehensiveness are necessary to meaningfulness” when the closure and coherence achieved by paradigms represent only one range of possible kinds of institutional possibilities. “There are other ways, other motives and criteria, that might serve our interests better” (Yarbrough 11). To a considerable degree such forms of alternative modernities are already happening by necessity through the extension of complex networks and affiliations of contractual labor, new media technologies, and shifting global economic conditions. By theorizing these changes more carefully we can gain better control over the processes of change that affect the performance of our work as educators and learners. In practical terms this kind of reform would call for a transformation of evaluation criteria performed during hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions and in all the work of curricular revision through committees and bureaucracies of specific institutions. It would involve different kinds of educational work that emerges across an array, continuum, or spectrum ranging from settled paradigms to creative innovations that break the boundaries of any recognizable discipline, to valuable tasks that simply operate outside the boundaries of disciplines altogether—but without an automatic placement of disciplinarity in the dominant position. We simply can no longer afford to conceive of the humanities as having “not yet reached the developmental stage” associated “with acquisition of a paradigm” (Conant and Haugeland 9), as if we were just “soft” travelers on the increasingly “hard” road toward full disciplinary status marked by the acquisition of relatively stable paradigms. In the humanities we can only convert small domains of specialized research into fruitful paradigms, spaces where consensus emerges in the form of relatively stabilized but specialized vocabularies. Historically speaking, we have too often operated as if we could account for all the valuable forms of our work according to disciplinary paradigms. To alter the institutionalized rationales for the distribution of labor under the knowledge contract, we need not abandon that contractual set of relations only if we include other kinds of contracts for the nonmodern domains. Disciplinary work varies greatly between different fields, and, especially within the arts and humanities, there is a much more limited place for paradigmatic labor within these quarters of the educational landscape and a much broader 122

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range of professional labor accountable to users under nondisciplinary criteria of value. Studies of language, textuality, and culture characteristic of work in the humanities often produce human understanding and social justice through many nonmodern kinds of labor. The scope and significance of such rhetorical and hermeneutic acts cannot easily be measured according to exemplary performances of specialized paradigms. Even to suggest that new “integrative” paradigms can solve the problems of specialization is to be caught within the Kuhnification of the humanities whereby our psychic needs to perform disciplinary kinds of behavior will more often than not exacerbate the disabling rather than enabling function of paradigms. We had better aim our reforms at a deeper level of institutional reconfiguration, and for that it will be difficult without some form of collective bargaining that does not depend on exclusively disciplinary performances. Those performances will, however, have to be professional on all counts in the best sense of serving our public franchise with dignity and justice for the work we are paid to perform.

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4. RADICAL DIVERSITIES AND THE COSMOPOLITAN SELF The Disciplinary Intellectual Confronts the Multivalent University

multi-valence n. 1. the capacity of an element or part of a structure or system to combine with other elements or parts in more than one way. 2. the ability of social structures or organizations to allow for their members to combine in more than one group. James J. Sosnoski in James J. Sosnoski and David B. Downing, “A Multivalent Pedagogy for a Multicultural Time” Before we get there, the existing grounds of disciplinarity will have to be radically overhauled. Cary Nelson and Dilip Gaonkar, Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies

From Managed Diversity to Cultures of Diversities When Charles Eliot became president of the corporation of Harvard University in 1869, one of his first innovations was the introduction of the elective curriculum. No longer would an undergraduate spend four years moving through a prescribed curriculum of classical languages and mathematics. He (there weren’t any women at Harvard) could now enjoy a kind of intellectual “diversity,” even if no one would have called it that then. 1 Eliot had sought to distinguish the modern university from other kinds of professions such as the clergy, and he accomplished that feat by institutionalizing the knowledge contract in such a way that each emerging disciplinary field could be administered by discrete departments, and surrounding the undergraduate college were the specialized professional schools of divinity, law, and medicine. Following the lead of Cornell, Johns Hopkins, and Harvard, virtually every university in America followed this model, especially during the 1890s. 2 Individual choice with respect to electives and majors was modeled on the German university’s Lernfreiheit, freedom to learn, a staple of the disciplinary system that all American universities tried to imitate. The elective system thus signaled the institutionalization of a degree of intellectual diversity even as the cultural diversity of students was primarily limited to white, middle-class, Protestant males. One of the keys to sustaining such modest intellectual diversity within a homogeneous cultural lack of diversity hinged on the use of disciplinary 124

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standards, and, of course, the battle rages today in the form of affirmative action, “back to basics,” and No Child Left Behind (nclb) movements. Eliot had all along been a believer and innovator of standards. As a tutor at Harvard in 1854 he had introduced written exams and laboratory exercises (Bledstein 338); in 1892 he chaired the famous Committee of Ten, which recommended entrance examinations and college preparatory programs in secondary schools. Even as Eliot developed these modern disciplinary procedures, his notions of intellectual discipline never wavered from the earlier nineteenth-century meaning of discipline as a quality of one’s individual “character,” so in these terms it is understandable that during the 1890s he became increasingly concerned with a troubling kind of diversity that seemed to be unraveling the fabric or perhaps the character of American society: educated wasps were “diminishing in absolute numbers” (Bledstein 156), and the small percentage of those highly educated citizens was failing “ ‘to reproduce itself ’ ” (Eliot, quoted in Bledstein 156). After his retirement from Harvard in 1909 he understood that the knowledge contract with its disciplinary standards could not fully do battle without the aid of additional contractual legislation that could control racial diversity. For these purposes he became the first president of the American Social Hygiene Association (asha), whose primary purpose was to control prostitution, promiscuity, and venereal disease. The asha sought legislation to enact such controls. These scientific concerns for health were closely tied to racial attitudes because Eliot believed that “alcohol and venereal disease . . . were destroying ‘us.’ ‘By “us” I mean the white race, and particularly the American stock.’ ” Indeed, “Eliot’s ethnocentric fears of ‘race suicide’ were alarming” (Bledstein 156). My sketch of these disturbing links between educational discipline and cultural discipline is not intended as a slur on Eliot’s personal character, but this anecdote provides a material instance of much more widely shared practices either directly or indirectly linking (or severing) intellectual and cultural diversity. Eliot’s case represents a kind of exemplary implementation of the more general practices orchestrated by Foucault’s sense of biopower operating through the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, and discipline: “The educated class could compensate for its shrinking size only by asserting the discipline of its superior character over the ‘undesirable races’ in American society” (Bledstein 156–57, emphasis added). This chapter focuses on the institutionalized links between the diversity of epistemological practices and the diversity of cultural interactions. 3 As an institutional invention of the West, the exclusionary dimensions of dis125

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ciplinary practices in higher education have historically, at least, so often depleted rather than preserved the diversity of cultures and learning environments made possible in a wide array of different university settings. Since, as Bruno Latour argues, the task of modernity was the work of purification (to isolate, objectify, and describe Nature by scientifically purifying it from the idiosyncrasies of society, history, and politics), such standardized forms of purification can’t help but play out in practice as a kind of racial purification as well. The knowledge contract is, after all, a Western invention and thus too often intentionally ethnocentric, as we have seen in the case of Charles Eliot. Working exclusively under the modern versions of the knowledge contract, we find that “the core mission of the university remains insulated from the commitment to diversity” (Appadurai, “Diversity” 26). Diversity is, of course, now one of the words most bandied about in contemporary culture. On the one hand, it appears to be a user-friendly word for differences suitable for the neoliberal market economies. It serves as a sign that universities and corporations have distanced themselves from the obviously offensive forms of racism such as we find Eliot directly expressing, but it is even more removed from the blatant forms of racial violence, school segregation, and white supremacist rhetorics. To this extent, “cultural diversity” has become the buzzword of liberal educators concerned with the statistical and demographical accounting of racial, gender, and ethnic differences among student and faculty populations. Often associated with affirmative action, the institutional legitimation of cultural diversity follows from the unavoidable recognition of the multicultural differences that comprise the peoples of the United States, so much so that no one can ignore them. Indeed, university officials seek diversity as a part of marketing strategies designed to attract prospective students: the high-profile statistics about “diversity” in a given university population appear as part of the data used in the U.S. News and World Report rankings. 4 In short, every university has to have it, but the knowledge contract based on disciplinary standards cannot take too much, or the differences become greater than the academic disciplines can tolerate, because the latter depend upon the production of stability through legitimized forms of argumentation aimed at minimizing radical diversities. The same “essential tension” Kuhn theorized between the paradigmatically preserved and revolutionary new forms of knowledge gets recast from an epistemological to a cultural register. Indeed, cultural and disciplinary differences are deeply linked, but not through any easy equivalence, which 126

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is why quotas and statistical determinants of racial diversity can sometimes exacerbate the problem of imbalances they were intended to resolve. Race and gender are not neutral, numerical categories but complex performances that engage all kinds of other differences, including social class, geography, ethnicity, nationality, learning differences, and so on. The key problem now is that liberal versions of tolerance that claim to have disassociated themselves from the more direct, brutal forms of racist discourse as evidenced in Eliot’s rhetoric now harbor some of the more insidious forms of systemic racism. The discourse of managed diversity has, as Rey Chow, following Etienne Balibar, argues, created a situation in which racial or racialized discourse is not necessarily “opposed to emancipatory claims; on the contrary, it effectively appropriates them.” Perhaps it is only by clarifying this connection with biopower that we can begin to understand why the increase and acceleration of racial and ethnicist violence tend to happen in places where, paradoxically, there is the most talk about and awareness of racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity. (14)

As such, issues of racial diversity are directly tied to disciplinary discourse and thus to the legal and contractual terms legitimating higher education. 5 As increasingly different kinds of individuals perform academic work according to disciplinary paradigms, the paradigms get tested, altered, and stretched, as I argued in the last chapter. When the intellectual and institutional arresting brought about by these paradigms links itself to the arresting of cultural differences, as inevitably happens in our impure worlds, epistemological tensions quickly escalate into ethical tensions. Different cultures, different rhetorics, different home languages all create meanings and values that contest the disciplinary acts of social arrest, as they should. The answer to these ethical issues cannot be resolved by recourse to the contractual obligations of disciplinary knowledge alone— that’s the recurring message of this book. When the liberal discourse of diversity becomes hinged to quantifiable data for its defense, it can become little more than a mirror image of right-wing arguments advocating disciplinary standards, more testing for accountability, and less funding all around. For the accountability crowd diversity is a dirty word. It rings of quotas and political correctness as a justification for reverse-discriminatory hiring practices. The conservative anthropologist Peter Wood thus satirizes the efforts to institutionalize diversity: “Diversilogues trade in the ideology of diversity; diversidacts teach 127

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it; diversicrats regulate it. . . . Diversiphiles are a dominant voice in many precincts of American culture” (17). But Wood’s contempt is the opposite of Chow’s objections to the liberal rhetoric of diversity. Like many right-wing commentators, Wood advocates the abolishment of affirmative action in favor of the reaffirmation of academic standards. 6 He tries to distinguish between an older “natural” meaning for diversity and the newer, contrived, artificial meaning for diversity as meted out in quotas and affirmative action. But, of course, the whole point is that what he calls “natural” diversity is also socially mediated through the operation of biopower. The myth of neutrality and color blindness when institutionalized through reductive disciplinary standards is that it will eliminate race preferences of all kinds. But Glen C. Loury puts it well: “As anti-preference activists [like Wood] form institutions, amass funds, solicit plaintiffs, and rally troops to make America a ‘race free zone,’ they necessarily help to construct a racial—that is to say, ‘white’—interest” (xxvii). Nevertheless, Wood’s attack on diversity hits affirmative action squarely on dangerously reductive disciplinary grounds where it should not be standing. That is, “pinning down and labeling . . . are precisely what concocted cultural diversity requires” (Wood 38). But the root of the problem is that, if they really wanted to ameliorate racialized discourse and working conditions, advocates of affirmative action should not be trying to play numerical games on the most reductive kind of disciplinary grounds, which call for a single set of standards. The irony is that as Wood pokes fun at “pinning down and labeling,” that is exactly what his version of standards do: pin down and label candidates according to a unified, monovalent set of numerical standards. The standards comprise the material objectifications Wood claims are universal, but upon close inspection they turn out to be ideological untruths that create the appearance of neutrality while masking a more genuine objectivity of individual and cultural differences. Indeed, the right wing champions standards as if they were the objective results of disciplinary paradigms, but such misrepresentations of disciplinary research simply eliminate from consideration any notion of truly new, different, and unpredictable forms of knowledge that sometimes emerge from careful uses of paradigms. Standards are always social constructs that can create some useful but nevertheless contextually limited degree of stability, but they are rarely neutral measurements that “objectively” mete out rewards, because human beings cannot easily be reduced to such statistical charts. A genuine respect for objectivity recognizes that our common nature as human beings, our “species being,” as Marx called it, is to live in and through 128

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cultural differences. University officials have generally chosen to play the affirmative action game as if it could be enacted on a narrow, reductive, and misrepresented field of disciplinary grounds legitimated with legal terms set exclusively by the modern knowledge contract, even though the contract laws governing affirmative action permit, indeed enforce, alternatives. 7 This becomes more obvious when we glance briefly at the historical record. The primary contractual legitimation of a connection between epistemological and cultural diversity entered the courts in 1978, when Justice Lewis Powell of the United States Supreme Court issued his opinion in the 5–4 split decision in the famous case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. 8 “Before the Bakke decision, when people spoke of ‘diversity’ in education, they almost always meant the variety of colleges and universities in America” (Wood 108). Unlike the unanimous 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (of Topeka) that (legally, at least) ended school segregation, the Bakke decision was, as Wood explains, one of the murkiest decisions ever rendered by the Supreme Court. Powell’s opinion negotiated between the two factions of four justices, each faction arguing opposing views of the case. 9 It is not my intention to go into the details of that case, but “diversity, by the mere accident of Powell’s adopting it in the unusually divided circumstances that confronted the Court in that case, won its chance to become both a legal concept and a broader cultural ideal” (Wood 144). This is true, and the terms of its emergence have dictated the contractual range of possibilities for affirmative action ever since. Those terms deserve some close inspection regarding the role (or misuse) of the knowledge contract in its implementation, especially in light of the recent split decision in the Supreme Court’s 2003 ruling in the University of Michigan Law School case, Grutter v. Bollinger, which basically reaffirmed the general conditions of the Bakke decision: race could be used as a legitimate educational concern so long as it was not tied to quotas. 10 In contractual terms it becomes more important than ever that educators see these decisions as providing an opportunity to redefine diversity issues so that they can be identified not just according to reductive disciplinary criteria but across a wider spectrum of educational values and uses. From this perspective the constitutionally legitimated grounds for affirmative action not just are “murky,” as Wood puts it, but open more possibilities to create a culture of diversity than most universities themselves have been able to sustain. In other words, the Bakke decision actually opened the door for multivalent possibilities, but most universities’ persistent recourse to a reductive version of the terms set by the modern knowledge contract 129

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itself keeps rearticulating racial differences within narrowly disciplinary terms of statistics, quotas, and standardized testing. As David Hanauer has argued, standardized testing “becomes a tool of oppression through which vested interests are protected, racial inequality is propagated, non main stream knowledge is trivialized, and preferred social norms and values are propagated” (2). Hanauer cautions that, “since testing is one of the major ways powerful elites maintain their own power, it seems very unlikely that testing will be avoided or used in a socially responsible manner for the development of oppressed populations or knowledge types” (3). 11 Nevertheless, educators should recognize the juridical opening of the affirmative action rulings, and under these legal circumstances they may be better able to utilize the contractual liberties of multiple criteria as a way to legitimate alternative educational goals and methods, not single standards, thus promoting a genuine culture of diversity, not just a statistically managed diversity. The crucial point of the 1978 decision was that, although Allan Bakke won his case, two paragraphs in Powell’s decision did grant a vague right of the use of racial classifications as potentially useful and “constitutionally permissible” criteria for attaining “a diverse student body,” but only under “strict scrutiny” that they not be administered in terms of improper quotas or any form of blatant “reverse discrimination” that would violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s stipulation of equal protection under the law. In other words, racial diversity is a legitimate educational interest, but a quota system, such as that used by the University of California, was an inadmissible means to attain legitimate ends. Bakke’s case was based almost exclusively on numbers: his application for admission in both 1973 and 1974 was rated by the school on single numerical scales (a 500-point scale in 1973, a 600-point scale in 1974), and these computations were derived from other numerical scales determined by grade point average and various scores on the mcat. Bakke demonstrated that his scores were slightly above the average of those of the regular admittees and significantly above those averages of the special admittees. I list these numerical scales only to demonstrate how much the criteria for diversity were based on narrowly conceived disciplinary principles of objectivity materialized in a sociological discourse of statistical standards of assessment. Powell objected to the University of California reserving sixteen places out of one hundred positions for minority applicants whose “standards” of admission were other than the set of standards used for the “majority” applicants. The entire assumption is that social accountability can only be registered in color-blind, statistical terms 130

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appropriate for an accounting ledger, and these reductive numbers are then orchestrated for the purposes of powerful elites seeking to maintain their power. Even more, there is no admission whatsoever that nonmodern, nonnumerical, experiential education and learning criteria can play any part in these decisions regarding cultural diversity. The contractual basis of this argument often boils down to what “is often called the ‘racial proxy’ argument, i.e. racial diversity is a proxy for intellectual diversity” (Wood 119). A conservative like Wood has no truck with such arguments, and his objections have a substantive base when the proxy argument, reduced by university officials to falsely misrepresented “disciplinary” measurements, must rely on the use of skin color and statistical standards as the only criteria. The whole point, however, is that race, [131], (8) like other categories of difference, is not a stable entity or thing that can be easily identified: race cannot simply be reduced to skin color and numbers and thereby managed, even though both can be variably significant indices Lines: 134 to 140 related to more complex differences. But this all depends upon the specific ——— context in which they are deployed. Racial essentialism is not an answer 12.6pt PgVar to racism, but racial justice cannot be served by a mythical belief in race ——— neutrality. Ethnic absolutism in the form of a “black” race is, as Paul Gilroy Normal Page puts it so well, “antithetical to the rhizomorphic, fractal structure of the * PgEnds: Eject transcultural formation I call the black Atlantic” (4). Exactly the same can be said for admissions criteria: educational value cannot always be reduced to grade points and test scores alone, even though both can be variably [131], (8) significant indices related to more complex differences, depending upon context. Wood wants to play the admissions game by those numbers but won’t grant the same artificially constructed nature of those standards that he grants to the socially constructed statistical measurements for race based on skin color and linear genealogy. “Racism,” therefore, is a very real cultural phenomenon linked to and embedded with all the other kinds of gender, national, ethnic, and class differences, but the institutionalized versions of managed diversity reduce racial difference to stereotypes based on skin color. It is, therefore, much easier to detect and punish the negative instances of racial stereotyping, as when Brown’s daughter was forbidden to enroll in a white school in Topeka, Kansas, solely because of her skin color, than it is to name in any single, measurable way a positive version of diversity that avoids any form of stereotyping. The only answer is to not deploy any single standard as if it could be universally fair, but right-wing ideologues like Wood wish to conceal that difference. 131

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Even so, William Bowen and Derek Bok’s study of the benefits of diversity, The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions, plays according to disciplinary rules, and they manage in these terms to document some very real advantages to affirmative action. 12 The virtues of this study emerge from their sophisticated rather than reductive use of disciplinary models of numerical and statistical evaluation. They use empirical methods to quantify a whole range of educational conditions, from admissions processes, outcomes assessment, employment opportunities, socioeconomic status, student satisfaction ratings, career earnings, and so on. Their sophisticated use of logistic regression models and probability theory carries considerable disciplinary power, and the evidence is compelling that, even working within these statistical frames, racial justice has been better served by the affirmative action movement than could ever be possible with some idealized notion of “race neutrality.” But the tension in Bowen and Bok’s study is that their methodological commitments to “highly quantitative” (“Introduction” lviii) disciplinary procedures tend to work at odds with their own commitments to greater diversity, and these tensions point to the limits of the liberal case for managed diversity. Bowen and Bok try to confront this tension in their introduction to the second edition by explaining more fully that their own statistical reductions sometimes belie the actual practices whereby “academically selective schools have never equated merit simply with test scores and high school grades” (xxxii). Admissions procedures have, in practice, “always considered a host of other factors that they believe are helpful in assessing a student’s potential” so that “race is considered in conjunction with many other attributes listed above” (Bowen and Bok, “Introduction” xxxii, xxxv). But their study supplies no evidence for these claims, even in statistical terms, and the kinds of narrative knowledge and qualitative evaluations that might yield such evidence are not part of the scope of their project. Nevertheless, they “encourage promising efforts now under way to develop alternative selection criteria that will allow colleges and universities to identify those students of high potential who may be missed by excessive reliance on standardized tests and other quantifiable measures of academic achievement” (Bowen and Bok, “Introduction” xlv). This may be a wise afterthought, but, of course, the more than 450 pages that follow their introduction do not move in that direction at all, so there is no way to distinguish the gesture toward complexity from the familiar capitalist ploy of free market and flex labor “differences” in the name of complexity. As 132

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Gregory Meyerson says of Bok’s recent book, Universities in the Marketplace, “Bok’s high-minded defense of academic values against commercialization nevertheless rests on almost total acceptance of free market premises, political and philosophical premises which lead to the same sorts of antinomies . . . in the more go for it flex university” (87). Any genuine culture of diversity will have to define the mix of modern and nonmodern practices and the various kinds of educational paradigms, values, and purposes that shape the mission of any given institution and do so against the pressure of flex labor and casualization and the defunding of higher education. Genuine cultures of ethnic, racial, and gender diversity call for deeper interventions in the operations of biopower through, among other things, the implementation of multiple evaluation practices where differences can be better accommodated to the many different kinds of labor, learning, and research in higher education. There may indeed be a degree of social murkiness to the extent that no matter how precise different criteria are specified, they may never achieve the crystalline simplicity of numerical equivalents. We must confront, not efface, that kind of murkiness or excess, which always exceeds the processes of objectification and purification and will inevitably involve both modern and nonmodern practices, paradigms, and nonparadigmatic learning values. Just as the powerful right-wing movement for accountability in education tries to accomplish its goals through more testing but not more funding of educational needs, in the recent Grutter v. Bollinger case the University of Michigan’s vulnerability to legal action did not stem from what could have been a deeper and important search for a culture of diversity; rather, the university’s efforts to measure diversity on a fixed, numerical scale, which meant it could get “more” diversity as a marketable statistic, could occur only at the cost of allowing those who mask their self-interest beneath their public acclaims for defending “objective” admissions standards to take their case for unfair practices all the way to the Supreme Court. The problem is that “more may be better, but it is not good enough. It is not good enough for the university unless the commitment to diversity transforms the way in which knowledge is sought and transmitted” (Appadurai, “Diversity” 26). The question then becomes, How can we transform the role of disciplinary models for the production of knowledge so that the institution can better meet the social, cultural, and educational needs of both students and faculty who use higher education for diverse purposes? Needless to say, Michigan administrators had not considered the problem in these terms, 133

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but we have to use the opening in the recent Supreme Court’s decision as an opportunity to recast the question of diversity. When we shift the focus from cultural to epistemological diversity, we find that most scholarly educational and sociological attempts to study the diversity of the ways knowledge has been sought have been conducted through the study of interdisciplinarity, which often brackets off the whole question of cultural differences in knowledge and understanding. Even more, the scholarly literature on interdisciplinarity tends to reaffirm, rather than critique and alter, the centrality of disciplinarity in the modern university. In her 1990 survey of the growing field of interdisciplinary studies, Julie Klein suggests a key theme in much of this work: “Our vocabulary— indeed, our entire logic of classification—predisposes us to think in terms of disciplinarity” (Interdisciplinarity 77). 13 Such a “logic of classification” is the consequence of biopower. No doubt it can be helpful to describe the differential and dynamic forms of disciplinary powers, but it requires a considerable leap to begin imagining alternative ways of linking intellectual and cultural diversity that do not depend exclusively on disciplinary habits. 14 Since considerable intellectual work takes place outside and beside the modern knowledge contract, institutional critique of the place of disciplinarity in these times becomes, inevitably, “a dissent from both the internal organization and the cultural positioning of the contemporary university” (Nelson and Gaonkar, “Cultural Studies” 18). These are intimidating tasks when “cultural positioning” seems to be primarily under the sway of economic downsizing and administrative reengineering to meet cost-effective criteria. So it becomes all the more important to develop theoretical and practical approaches to the links between intellectual and cultural diversity that do not just resort to disciplinary criteria. In contrast to Wood’s hypocritical cries for “neutral” standards as an answer, Appadurai offers a much more sophisticated intervention in the discourse of diversity by distinguishing between what he calls “cultural diversity” and the “culture of diversity.” Whereas cultural diversity refers to the engineering of demographic differences through statistical means as a sign of liberal tolerance, as I suggested above, a culture of diversity suggests the institutional, ethical, and political opening not only to diverse interests and population groups but to different workers, different rhetorics, and different kinds of labor and education that create value across a wider spectrum of activities. Whereas cultural diversity signals what Chow calls the “official story of benevolent tolerance on the part of supposedly reformed 134

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white societies . . . whereby the privilege of whiteness . . . is simply reconstituted and reinvested in a different way” (13), the culture of diversity within the university does not yet exist. Imagining what such a future culture of diversity might be like is the critical utopian gesture we cannot afford to ignore or repress, although there are so many forces arrayed against it. Indeed, it must be fought for, negotiated, and contested within the conflict between the culture of diversity and the regimes of flexible accumulation and niche-marketing strategies that appear to champion diversity while masking traditional forms of hegemony and the dominance of biopower. These are the most important kinds of distinction of value we can make in gaining a degree of control over what counts for work in our professional lives. The reformation of the role of disciplinarity in the university requires, then, not just a bow to the statistical realities of cultural diversity by advocating new kinds of paradigm shifts, nor the implementation of rigid quotas, nor the reduction of criteria for the “best qualified” to a single scale of numerically measured attributes. The material creation of a true culture of diversity whereby concrete institutional practices would support multiple kinds of thinking, learning, knowledge, and acculturation can only take place across a much broader spectrum of nonmodern yet professional labor activities than the disciplinary forms of the knowledge contract would allow. One doesn’t, therefore, simply abandon standards but places them alongside other kinds of criteria, including experiential, non-Western, community-based skills and activities. It is our mission to take stock of those changes, using whatever powers are left to us so that economic and discriminatory factors alone do not determine all the changes taking place. In short, diversity of activities and values must be institutionalized not only by an expanding of the boundaries of disciplinarity but through an active creation of alternative spaces adjacent to and in tension with disciplinarity itself in the legitimating practices of higher education. Once we put educational practices and values in the context of nonmodern, hybrid, and multicultural interactions, collective bargaining can articulate all kinds of justifications for a culture of diversity.15 The university would then not just replicate the global economy but provide both resistance and direction for imagining new values and new practices and new subjectivities. Alternative forms of modernity can then serve an incredible diversity of peoples now subject to the unjust operations of biopower. Such alternations in the function of modern Western universities require the performance of a double task: negotiating modern contractual obligations so 135

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as to protect, legitimate, and fund an array of cultural resources, including many otherwise nonmodern activities and uses of labor. For this to happen we may have to sort through some of the “diverse” meanings of discipline itself that have aligned themselves etymologically and historically with the emergence of the disciplinary society. In the next section I explore this realignment by examining several attempts to revise the meaning of the term discipline by returning to some of its older meanings that have been lost from the research models of disciplinarity in the modern university. Despite their appeal, I argue that such recoveries of the past are not likely to provide the visions of a different future that we most need. However, working through some of those reflections points us toward new possibilities that situate modern disciplinary practices legitimated by the knowledge contract within a more truly cosmopolitan set of activities, including nonmodern forms of academic labor. The concluding section suggests the difference between Kerr’s multiversity, which acknowledges cultural diversity, and the multivalent practices of the mixed modern/nonmodern university, which accommodates genuine cultures of diversity. Recovery of the Semantic Archive: The Promises and Perils of Reviving the Lost Art of Discipline In Modernity at Large Appadurai analyzes the difficulties of communicating across vast cultural differences, especially regarding the global dissemination of such key words as freedom, democracy, culture, and, I would add, discipline: As a result of the differential diaspora of these keywords, the political narratives that govern communication between elites and followers in different parts of the world involve problems of both a semantic and pragmatic nature: semantic to the extent that words (and their lexical equivalents) require careful translation from context to context in their global movements, and pragmatic to the extent that the use of these words by political actors and their audiences may be subject to very different sets of contextual conventions that mediate their translation into public politics. (36)

Although Appadurai’s subject in this passage is the field of political rhetoric in the multinational economy, his articulation of the semantic and pragmatic problems in the deployment of terms speaks directly to the shifting meanings of “discipline” that have taken place, especially since the nineteenth-century rise of the modern disciplines of knowledge. As I 136

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suggested in the previous chapter, the labor-intensive but often nondisciplinary acts of translation between paradigms, discourses, and cultures rarely get justified under the terms of the modern knowledge contract, which prioritizes objectification over mediation. Yet there are significant semantic differences as the term discipline migrates within and between so many different “political narratives” that govern different kinds of populations. Mediation, translation, and the sorting out of these differences are necessary phases of the work we must engage in. Appadurai himself has offered such a “careful translation” of the semantic shift of the meaning of “discipline” in the nineteenth century by exhuming some of its original meanings prior to the rise of disciplinarity. The pragmatic effects of reviving the older semantic register, Appadurai argues, will be to re-create the virtues of a cosmopolitan liberal self and thus a revival of the liberal arts that instantiates his version of the culture of diversity. In what follows I trace out this argument, explore its limits, and argue that such a return is not likely to provide the kind of alterations that will successfully change the role of disciplinarity in higher education, although an understanding of cosmopolitanism may be crucial in expanding the domains of work suitable for a globalized academic world. In order to do that I further complicate the matter by discussing three different but closely related semantic clusters that adhere to the term discipline as it traversed European universities and North American colleges prior to about 1862, the date of the Morrill, or Land-Grant College, Act, which chartered the new state universities and inaugurated the rise of the modern university in America. In addition to Appadurai’s articulation of the nineteenth-century meanings of discipline as “care, cultivation, and habit,” it is also helpful to place these meanings in the context of Laurence Veysey’s description of the closely related connotations of internalized mental discipline, piety, and moral worthiness of character and James Slevin’s etymology of the term as registering its original emphasis on teaching, acculturation, and pedagogy rather than the research model based on the German universities (“Disciplining Students”). Like Appadurai, Slevin also argues for a recuperation of the older meanings as a viable way to revive a greater range of diversity in the humanities disciplines. All three of these perspectives draw on different but complementary valences, and the recuperation of that semantic archive may serve heuristic purposes of understanding the past uses of discipline in contrast to the present sense of academic discipline. But once the transition to the modern disciplinary ecosystem legitimating the knowledge contract 137

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has happened, the recovery of past meanings may not so easily reshape the terms of disciplinarity. For that purpose, we have to examine a bit more fully the contexts of former uses of discipline. Disciplinarity and diversity are at odds in the traditional division between research and teaching if only because we so obviously encounter diverse population groups in our classes. For this reason, Slevin’s goal is to alter the dominance of disciplinarity as an exclusive focus on research protocols by exhuming some of the historically antecedent meanings of discipline that have much more to do with education, learning, and teaching. He hopes that such etymological resuscitation will alleviate the research/teaching hierarchy that follows from the “hegemonic” concept of disciplinarity current since the late nineteenth century. He begins with definitions of the contemporary understanding of the term discipline; these are uncontroversial because they are fully in accord with most accepted uses of the term today as related to biopower. That is, disciplines designate objects of study, fields of knowledge, methods of evaluation that create specialized communities of researchers—very much like the notion of Kuhn’s “disciplinary matrix” or paradigms. Within this discourse of disciplinarity “teaching is configured as outside the definition of the discipline, though related to it” (Slevin, “Disciplining Students” 156). 16 Slevin’s project is to redefine the nature of an academic discipline by restoring a notion of “discipline as a system of instruction . . . as the act of inviting and enabling others to join that conversation—then we upend this normal, common(sense) way of talking about it and undermine the categories currently deployed to privilege and despise” (“Disciplining Students” 156). These are, no doubt, attractive goals, although I doubt they will happen by trying to redefine discipline in this way, partly because there is no sense of return to a lost past that will serve the best interest of the many users of the university today by, for example, moving teaching centers to the center of disciplinary practices. Teaching often involves nonmodern forms of intercultural interaction that cannot be fully legitimated under modern, disciplinary terms, and trying to reverse the historical process of disciplinarity will prove impractical. The material practices of disciplinarity and biopower won’t respond to a changed idea without altering labor, evaluation practices, and faculty solidarity by displacing the centrality of disciplinarity in our contractual obligations even while recognizing the best of its modernist virtues. Those virtues include the fact that disciplinary paradigms provide significant pedagogical as well as research resources: exemplary figures, models, and 138

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symbolic generalizations are inevitable phases of entering and participating in the discipline for students as well as faculty. But teaching is not just a “discipline.” Nevertheless, Slevin turns to the roots of the term itself, and it is worth an extended quote to illuminate this etymology: In its original form, “discipline” derives from the Latin word discipulus, “learner,” which itself derived from discere, “to learn.” The first and primary meaning of discipline involved “instruction imparted to disciples or scholars; teaching; learning; education, schooling,” a meaning the Oxford English Dictionary now declares “obsolete.” In contrast to the knowledge imparted (called “doctrine,” which comes from docere, which also gives us, among other words, “doctor”), discipline entailed the activities of imparting and learning. In English, the word “disciple” came to mean primarily (almost exclusively) a follower of Jesus, and so one schooled in but also subordinated to doctrine. It implied a kind of unquestioning subservience. Discipleship retains that force today. But in Latin, discipulus meant simply a pupil or student or learner. And a discipline involved learning, studying, and the process and structure of imparting knowledge; it included centrally the work of teachers and students together. The body of knowledge that was passed on, and debates about that body of knowledge, fell under the category of doctrine. At the heart of the real work in a discipline was not the scholar (or doctor, concerned with doctrine) but the learner and the teacher who helped that learning. (“Disciplining Students” 156–57)

Slevin recognizes that despite the appealing features of these antecedent meanings of discipline it is also the case that “forms of military discipline and ecclesiastical discipline (stressing order, obedience, unquestioning acceptance) came to have dominance” (“Disciplining Students” 157) in the premodern period. These elements of obedience, orthodoxy, and acceptance of authority were exactly the set of meanings that aided and abetted the successful conversion of the term during the nineteenth century into the research models characteristic of what Keith Hoskin calls the “ecosystem” of disciplinarity. Calling it an ecosystem suggests that “discipline” became institutionalized through a complex, systematic set of practices and beliefs that seek, like an ecosystem, a kind of equilibrium or balance, even if in practice that “equilibrium” was always asymmetrical with respect to class, race, and gender. That is, the biopower of modern academic disciplines 139

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is based on paradigms that create new, sometimes unpredictable forms of knowledge even as they seek stability, jurisdiction, and control through various anonymous surveillance mechanisms such as peer-reviewed publication venues. In this modern system it would no longer be possible to make clear distinctions between doctrine and discipline in quite the way Slevin points out medieval ecclesiastics could. But a careful historicizing of the etymology of the term discipline may reveal more significant overlaps, despite the obvious cultural differences, between the older meaning of discipulus evolving through medieval societies and the pious discipline of religious orthodoxy in nineteenth-century American colleges. Discipline and doctrine have already collapsed in this latter formulation. But, more important, in both these predecessors the structures of power and authority in which discipline as a form of learning and studying operated actually reveal more congruity with modern disciplinary orthodoxies than might at first appear to be the case. Another way of putting this is to suggest that learning and teaching did not mean then what we often mean by them now as problem-posing models of interaction, dialogue, distributed learning, and inquiry but rather recitation models of learning as memorization and adherence to orthodoxy: it was rarely a case of intense questioning of the doctrines of the church elders because these were a given. Slevin certainly does not want to reinscribe those models. In short, it would be ahistorical to claim that the older meaning of discipline as teaching was grounded in conversational models of exchange, despite the etymological history that indeed ties it to “learning” and “teaching.” When Slevin speaks of the “older, learner-centered notion of the work of a discipline” (“Disciplining Students” 163), this seems ahistorical to the extent that the older sense of discipline was much more tied to doctrine and authority than anything like what progressive educators would today call “learner-centered.” As David Shumway and Craig Dionne explain, “The ‘disciplines’ of seven liberal arts gave way in the late middle ages to ‘disciplines’ dominated by dialectic and philosophy. In both conceptions, knowledge was embodied in lists of books. There was little if any sense that a discipline was an enterprise designed to produce or discover knowledge” (2). As I suggested in chapter 1, this is a crucial point, because it means that the older humanist view of “knowledge” was archival, the preservation of a tradition of classics, not a production of new knowledge. These meanings of “discipline” before the late nineteenth century had little to do with conversational exchange and much to do with the preservation of an already existing and supposedly stable body of existing texts and doctrines. 140

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Slevin acknowledges these problems: “I suppose it may be futile to insist upon a meaning of the term that has passed away and that has been encumbered by associations with authoritarianism and physical and psychological abuse” (“Disciplining Students” 158). I agree, although what has “passed away” is not quite so agreeable as Slevin suggests. I think it will be futile, even though I share the goals of trying to reinvigorate teaching, learning, and diversity of work and labor practices. But it’s futile not only because the terms of disciplinarity are so prevalent and pervasive even today but also because such conceptual return to an older meaning would be costly in the sense of losing some of the valuable powers of the modern disciplines when disciplinary rhetoric does indeed serve important and creative uses even within the humanities. That is, in the important efforts to “reconceptualize ‘disciplinarity’ ” (Slevin, “Disciplining Students” 159) those of us in the humanities will not come off well if we continue to try to justify all our labor as part of the project of disciplinarity, no matter how flexible and adaptive to new material that project may be: it will continually be difficult to fend off charges from the “hard” sciences that the humanities remain just the “soft” disciplines. In fact, within some more narrowly defined limits, some forms of humanistic argumentation can be as “hard,” empirical, refutational, and falsifiable as the natural sciences—biopower can be productive, as Foucault insisted, as well as destructive. We shouldn’t just give up identifying that dimension of what we do but rather displace it from its exclusive position as the central arbiter of academic value. It will be better to alter the role that disciplinarity has in defining value to teaching, service, and all kinds of alternative work practices that are of great value to the users of the university and the public who benefits from those uses. 17 I agree with Slevin that we need “to accommodate the wide range of work in literacy,” community service, postdisciplinary projects, learning environments, multimedia innovations, and so on. Some of this work just will not be disciplinary labor, even though some of it might, in fact, be more important for many users than the more narrowly defined disciplinary forms of work. Of course, Slevin is right to acknowledge that he does “not need to catalog the powerful institutions that discourage such developments,” and such repressive forces in the disciplinary society will no doubt discourage nondisciplinary work as much as enlarging the academic forms of discipline (see chapter 2). So I agree that “these policies and practices inimical to a renewed conception of the work of an academic discipline are entrenched, and they need to be removed” (Slevin, “Disciplining Students” 160). I am not sure that they can be removed, but more probably they can 141

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be displaced, loosened, and supplemented by more inclusive versions of alternative modernities. 18 As I have argued throughout, it will be more rhetorically effective to acknowledge an array and continuum of work that includes disciplinary practices as well as other, equally valuable kinds of work. It is not a question of abandoning disciplinarity; “rather, the loosening of disciplinary structures has to be made the opportunity for the installation of disciplinarity as a permanent question” (Readings 177). In these terms paradigms need not be rigid, outmoded disciplinary practices but fluid, adaptable, and powerful kinds of rhetorical and institutional resources for some kinds of knowledge. As I argued in the preceding chapter, the performance of paradigms is itself not as fixed as Kuhn sometimes described it, but we have to theorize as well the alternatives to paradigmatic forms of knowledge that take place beside rather than just in terms of the relatively narrow parameters of the current knowledge contract. In short, Slevin’s appeal to changing the material “mechanisms of evaluation” that simply do not “see” “decentered classrooms, workshop and peer-group activities, open-ended discussions, continuing exchanges among students in their talk and writing, and lots of individual conferences” (“Disciplining Students” 161) is exactly what needs to take place. But to insist that all these practices, many of which are so clearly nondisciplinary, be categorized under a revised notion of the “disciplinary” would likely only obscure the biopolitical operations of disciplinarity, especially when trying to press these notions upon the researchers, teachers, and students who perform most of their work in recognizable disciplinary paradigms. Better to accede those paradigms their force and then decenter their work as the exclusive kind available to the users of the university. No doubt the “entrenched apparatus” of disciplinarity is “dependent on categories of analysis and procedures of measurement and reward that seem almost natural, and so invisible” (Slevin, “Disciplining Students” 161). Exactly, and this is a good statement of the limits of the domination of the disciplinary yardsticks for evaluation of the labor we actually perform as both teachers and students. But we also need to be careful not to throw out the valuable work of disciplinary “categories of analysis and procedures of measurement,” which are extraordinarily powerful sorting mechanisms when used with necessary restraint and acknowledgement of their own limitations. So when Slevin tries to imagine an opened discipline, I would suggest we use the broader term profession as a real and contractually expanded but “loose” (Abbott, System) category for including more diverse forms of 142

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activities than any premodern sense of discipline can designate. We would then stand a better chance of creating a more equitable and more sustainable but not idealized or imaginary category for “including, necessarily and fully, every learner.” The inclusive imaginary is undoubtedly attractive, but it is an idealization quite removed from the differential, asymmetrical relations of power that operate through institutions and bureaucracies of all kinds. Slevin advocates that we “understand academic disciplines in a more Erasmian way” (“Disciplining Students” 162). This sounds attractive, since Erasmus was a skeptic and reformer who opposed corruption and dogmatism, although his Handbook of a Christian Soldier (1503) advocated a piety, morality, and dedication to the truth that would seem quite a limited orthodoxy when transplanted to our contemporary society. For Slevin, the Erasmus model suggests that “the moment a student walks into our classroom, the first day of class, that student would be seen, and see himself or herself, as a full participant in the work of the discipline—just for showing up. The student would not have to negotiate entry, would not have to earn the right to speak and participate” (“Disciplining Students” 162). But even for Erasmus one’s participation had to depend on one’s piety and morality. This was a powerful form of literacy that one had to negotiate, since it was not always self-evident what such communal forms of piety and morality should or did take. Contractual obligations will always involve negotiations that we cannot just idealize away. In the contemporary university the ethical status of rights, dignity, and participation in a classroom can be conceived in terms of contractual forms of labor performed by the student as well as by the teacher. Needless to say, as various kinds of symbolic and material cultural capital get negotiated, not all of those activities are disciplinary in nature, so it is important to negotiate terms for these rights that operate beside and in tension with the dominant knowledge contract. Given an array of institutional bureaucratic work spaces, students indeed have a right to participate by showing up in some very important areas of our professionalized interaction, but it is too far from any material reality to suggest that they can participate equally in any of the various kinds of labor that take place in a university. These practices have to be legitimated through contractual obligations negotiated with as much care as that given to the disciplinary forms of the knowledge contract. The Erasmian notions of piety and morality were very alive in the meaning of discipline in American colleges before the Civil War and the rise of 143

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the modern university because, as Veysey explains, college curricula were determined not by modern parameters of disciplinarity but by moral and ethical criteria. Prior to the academic transformation of knowledge in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, academic discipline referred to moral rules of piety and conduct, as in the “mental discipline” necessary to build character: “Under the banner of ‘mental discipline,’ a phrase which referred to the sharpening of young men’s faculties through enforced contact with Greek and Latin grammar and mathematics, the old-time college sought to provide a four-year regime conducive to piety and strength of character” (Veysey 9). Belief in such “mental discipline was part of an interlocking set of psychological, theological, and moral convictions” (Veysey 22). This notion of a moral “regime” based on disciplined piety and character developed according to various religious affiliations and orthodoxies, so that, again, even if the term discipline then meant teaching and learning, it was a kind of recitation of orthodoxy and submission to the humanist tradition that was hardly a matter of a “learner-centered” curriculum or classroom. And it certainly wasn’t the case then, nor during the Reformation, Renaissance, and medieval periods, that the focus was on student participation and engagement. Since in 1870 only about 2 percent of the population in America attended college (Lucas 204), the consequences of such mental discipline served as one possible means to accrue and secure the social status of the pmc for those who could afford a luxury such as higher education. 19 In practical terms, then, the pious versions of discipline demonstrated very little cultural or intellectual diversity. But Appadurai exhumes a related cluster of meanings associated with the premodern meaning of discipline: “There is an aporia—or break—in thinking about disciplinarity in its two main senses: (a) care, cultivation, habit and (b) field, method, subject matter” (“Diversity” 30). Just as Slevin was concerned about the division between teaching and research inaugurated with the rise of disciplinarity during the nineteenth century, Appadurai sees the break in the two meanings of discipline as sustaining the gaps between broadly liberal conceptions of undergraduate education and the more specialized, discipline-specific training practiced in graduate school: The general contradiction in this sphere can be put something like this: much thinking about undergraduate curricula in the American academy presumes that care and cultivation—as expressed in habits of clear thinking, writing, and argumentation—must be divorced from the limitations of any single subject or field. This is

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what is liberal about the liberal arts. But graduate training (which is often and rightly described as training) presumes just the opposite, namely that discipline in the primary sense (care, cultivation, rigor, order) can be formed in the context of special subjects, fields, and disciplinary departments. (“Diversity” 30)

The earlier sense of “care and cultivation” corresponds to the versions of “mental piety” described by Veysey, but Appadurai extends this more restricted theological sense to a broader, romantic sense of the cultivation of the individual self, which got recast in the notion of Bildung that entered the German university through Humboldt’s reforms, as I suggested in chapter 1. Although there are many attractive features to this notion of discipline as cultivation and care, there are two main historical problems with this view. The first is that the traditional core curriculum of the old liberal arts college was so prescriptive that it could hardly attend to issues of individual and cultural diversity even as it sought to “cultivate” its students. The second is that, despite the persistence of the generalist ideology, the material practices of most liberal arts colleges even today tend to sustain disciplinary organizational practices—students experience majors, isolated disciplinary fields, disciplinary standards of evaluation and grading, objectifications, and banking of material. 20 Most faculty, even at undergraduate institutions, are evaluated according to disciplinary criteria in which field-specific objects and methods define courses and curricula just as they sustain research in scholarly publication. As Shumway explains, the rise of the modern disciplines went hand in hand with the transformation of the liberal arts curriculum. From the old college core curriculum of standardized classical languages and rhetoric, the elective curriculum was organized around the disciplines: “The departmental organization of the university follows from both of these changes, as does, paradoxically, the influential notion of liberal arts education, which was invented in reaction to the perceived narrowness of a course of study restricted to a single discipline. Thus, the liberal arts curriculum should be seen neither as a direct descendent of the nineteenth-century college—much less of Renaissance humanism—nor as antidisciplinary. The liberal arts are precisely a collection of disciplines” (Shumway, “Disciplinarity” 4–5), as embodied in Charles Eliot’s version of the elective curriculum. Thus, even relatively progressive liberal arts colleges are often deeply divided by disciplinary frameworks. 21 To this extent modern disciplinarity has directly shaped both undergraduate and graduate education. Appadurai’s distinction between the “two 145

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kinds of disciplines” mirrors Slevin’s division between the teaching and research meanings of the term, but just as older models of teaching were not quite so dialogical as we might imagine, neither was the bourgeois liberal self quite so cosmopolitan as we might like. Indeed, Appadurai directly confronts the ideological issues even if, as I believe, they are too entrenched to be easily revived as an alteration to disciplinarity: “To be sure, this sort of cosmopolitan ideal is also tied up with a particular bourgeois liberal conception of the self, with elite European conceptions of self and other, and with the many European imperialisms of the last four hundred years, as a key component of the civilizing of European elites. Yet, it also contains the kernels of the idea that the key for self-formation is a disciplined encounter with the other.” Appadurai sees the advantages of the former idea of discipline as a “return to the idea of the liberal arts as quintessentially cosmopolitan: they were intended, that is, to widen the horizons, broaden the mental experiences, expand the imagination, and stretch the moral worlds of those exposed to them” (“Diversity” 32–33). Nevertheless, we need to disentangle some of the more restrictive notions of discipline from the more progressive forms of the cosmopolitan self to reach the goals Appadurai articulates for a culture of diversity. The older notion of discipline is less “quintessentially” entangled with the positive renderings of cosmopolitan than he suggests. When we combine Appadurai’s exhuming of the vital concerns for care and cultivation with Veysey’s notion of piety and orthodoxy, these semantic roots become more discernible. In short, the older meaning of discipline as care of self was in practice tied to religious orthodoxy and obedience to tradition, as Veysey explains, so that the actual material manifestations of character exemplified in the bourgeois liberal self were a good deal less liberal and less cosmopolitan than the rhetoric might lead us to believe. As in Slevin’s resuscitation of the older meanings of discipline as pedagogy, it would seem to be a risky form of ahistorical grafting to revive a meaning for discipline without consciousness of the limitations of the material practices associated with the older meanings. When we focus on the notion of cosmopolitan we get a different etymology, particularly if we do not just return to its Enlightenment and romantic but to its earlier Greek roots. Appadurai points us in this direction when he suggests that we turn to Hans Georg Gadamer and recall the latter’s notion of the “encounter with the other” and in particular with “the study of the classics of Greece and Rome because of their strangeness and their role in the dialectic of self-formation” (“Diversity” 33). This turns out to 146

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be a fruitful direction, although Appadurai never exactly spells out these connections in any detail. Martha Nussbaum does, and her analysis of the Greek roots of cosmopolitan is useful in this context. Nussbaum links education to citizenship by returning to the source of those relations in the ancient Greek philosophical tradition, beginning with Socrates, but she turns less to Plato and Aristotle than to Diogenes the Cynic. As an iconoclast who influenced the third century b.c. group known as the Stoics, Diogenes took Socrates’ dictum to live the “examined life” further by suggesting that education meant becoming a “citizen of the world” (Nussbaum 8). The point of the liberal tradition of education as founded by the Stoics was that all educated citizens, not just an elite band of them, should be able to turn a skeptical eye on the received traditions and conventions. From within any given community what might be seen as natural and normal can then be seen as habitual and local, and cross-cultural encounters with the Other open us to such insights. Asked where he came from the ancient Greek Cynic philosopher Diogenes replied, “I am a citizen of the world.” He meant by this that he refused to be defined simply by his local origins and group memberships, associations central to the self-image of a conventional Greek male; he insisted on defining himself in terms of more universal aspirations and concerns. The Stoics who followed his lead developed his image of the kosmopolites, or world citizen, more fully arguing that each of us dwells, in effect, in two communities— the local community of our birth, and the community of human argument and aspiration that “is truly great and truly common.” It is the latter community that is, most fundamentally, the source of our moral and social obligations. With respect to fundamental moral values such as justice, “we should regard all human beings as our fellow citizens and local residents.” (Nussbaum 52) 22

The Stoic idea of the world citizen, or “kosmou polites” (Nussbaum 58), provides exactly the kind of etymological root that Appadurai seeks to develop in his notion of the cosmopolitan liberal self. In the philosophical tradition, then, this version of the cosmopolitan originates with the Stoics and emerges in the modern world more in the secular views of skeptics like David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Thomas Paine than in the theological and academic tradition of discipline with its ties to orthodoxy and moral piety. This version of the care and cultivation of cosmopolitanism can indeed become, under some circumstances, an ethical attitude toward 147

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both undergraduate and graduate education. It can be an instance of the kind of universalism that, as Derrida suggests, does not destroy the idioms but, rather, respects those cultural differences. Those circumstances will depend upon the contractual specification and legitimation of a spectrum, continuum, and array of practices beyond just the disciplinary ones. Appadurai’s formulation leaves him in the binary position of seeing only “two kinds of discipline,” the undergraduate “liberal arts” version and the graduate research version, with a kind of aporia, or radical break, between them, so that he is forced to ask, “Can liberal arts education and research co-exist to each other’s benefit?” (“Diversity” 31). That question has already been answered to the extent that the liberal arts version has been dominated by the disciplinary terms of the modern knowledge contract, which extends through both undergraduate liberal arts as well as the research models: Humboldt’s double function of the modern university was both its preservation of the past and the creation of the new. Disciplinarity became the means for negotiating this “essential tension” throughout higher education, not just in the graduate schools. Of course, as John McGowan pointed out, the generalist ideology of the liberal arts rationales for citizenship and critical thinking has persisted, but only within, often as a gloss or mystification of, the material dominance of the disciplinary structures of academic organization and behavior. Appadurai’s notion of an historical return to an antecedent meaning works better with respect to cosmopolitanism than it does with respect to discipline. Followed out along this thread, it then becomes more possible to achieve his aims of embracing a version of what Bruce Robbins calls in the contemporary scene a kind of “discrepant cosmopolitanism.” In this version cosmopolitanism becomes “an impulse to knowledge that is shared with others, a striving to transcend partiality that is itself partial, but no more so than the similar cognitive strivings of many diverse peoples. The world’s particulars can now be recoded, in part at least, as the world’s ‘discrepant cosmopolitanisms’ ” (Robbins 194). In this version of “mobile, reciprocal interconnectedness” (Robbins 197) diverse kinds of working domains intersect and interact, ranging from stable disciplinary paradigms to mobile kinds of community lore and learning outside and beside those paradigms. Instead of a binary conception of two kinds of discipline, we can collectively argue for a more genuinely cosmopolitan sense of diversity that engages disciplined research as one of many kinds of academic practices along a continuum, array, and spectrum of valuable work, alternative 148

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knowledges, and multiple subjectivities performed in both undergraduate and graduate education. We do not gain much advantage by trying to return to older meanings of discipline, as both Appadurai and Slevin suggest, but to construct new versions of work and labor within the university that include disciplinarity as well as the broad range of other kinds of practices needed to be truly cosmopolitan in a global economy. 23 We simply need to be very careful of any kind of return to ideals that never materialized other than in the ethnocentric versions that actually occurred in specific historical contexts. Appadurai never specifically addresses issues of work and labor, but he does analyze ideas about discipline. However, it’s the legitimation of work that matters most in these times, and we can no longer forget that dimension in our analysis of disciplinarity. Even as we struggle to understand just what they mean, professional and cosmopolitan values can work together with disciplinary values if they become contractually negotiated into the many levels of higher education, both graduate and undergraduate. Nevertheless, Appadurai’s question is central: “How should intellectual and cultural diversity be linked in the academy?” My suggestion is, be sure to link, first, the disciplinary economy of value to a labor economy of value so idealistic mystifications will not obscure the kinds of value placed on diverse kinds of work under the modern knowledge contract. In this sense, Appadurai’s key suggestion is well taken: “Let us insist on the mutual interlocution of historicity and authority in the organization of disciplines and recognize that one entailment of this mutual interlocution is to resist the hegemony of departmental disciplinarity (tied to the dominance of the ideal of ‘research’) over the more general disciplines of reading, writing, and argumentation” (“Diversity” 35). This sounds exactly right except for one key word: when Appadurai concludes by still invoking the “disciplines of reading, writing, and argumentation” (my emphasis) I think it’s a rhetorical mistake, since it is the very process of trying to turn them into disciplines that is at question. Reading and writing are such complex human activities that it becomes far too reductive to define them only as “disciplines” in any ordinary sense. And it is too self-defeating to think that we can revive an older, liberal meaning of discipline to counter the misuses of disciplinary power in the modern university. Appadurai’s hope, however, is the same as mine: “In this strategy, intellectual diversity could drive cultural diversity within the academy, and could provide a critical basis for its organization.” I hope this might come to pass, but the reference to “intellectual” diversity can itself still be tied 149

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too much to the epistemological economy of value and neglect the labor economy of value, which is much broader and includes different intellectual practices that create work across, beside, and within disciplinarity. If we can effectively avoid the old split between epistemology and labor, it may happen that “in this way, cultural diversity can create cultures of diversity not by fiat or by politics-as-usual but by a form of politics that is properly academic, that is, one that is disciplined without being merely disciplinary. This is a utopia whose thinking does not depend on the prior admission of its impossibility” (Appadurai, “Diversity” 36). The distinction Appadurai is trying to make here is the one I detailed in chapter 2 as the difference between the more general sense of Foucauldian discipline and the narrower forms of academic disciplinarity. But instead of the rather confusing elocution of “disciplined without being merely disciplinary,” which does sound a bit self-contradictory or impossible, we can specify the broader forms of rigorous and careful professional labor that clearly fit within the disciplined society as relatively distinct from the more specific forms of academic disciplinarity. Without making some such distinctions, Appadurai’s rhetoric of “proper” and “disciplined” will be too often turned back into the institutionalized practices of disciplinarity with their relatively stable paradigms, a familiar situation that still begs the question of just what “proper” and “disciplined” will look like in a transformed and reconfigured university. Altering Modernity: Multivalent Practices in the Multiversity Altering modernity to make this complex social formation more inclusive, more adaptable to other voices, other cultures is both an appealing belief and an historical fact to the extent that diverse manifestations of the modern have stretched to many places on the globe. There are significant consequences, as Dilip Gaonkar explains, to this globalization of modernity: “To think in terms of ‘alternative modernities’ is to admit that modernity is inescapable and to desist from speculations about the end of modernity” (“On Alternative Modernities” 1). My proposals for collective action call for alterations in the institutional dominance of academic disciplinarity. Such modifications enable the American university to become responsive to the changes in modernity Appadurai and others have documented in various studies of non-Western versions of societal modernity. 24 Indeed, it was Appadurai who coined the term alternative modernities in the 1980s to describe these culturally diverse adaptations of the modern. My focus on the North American university suggests that the process of altering 150

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the condition of modernity in this context will necessarily involve a kind of double negotiation whereby modern contract law can legitimate and protect nonmodern as well as modern forms of work. Again, although it is never as dualistic as my formulations suggest, nonmodern domains of labor already operate beside or within modern professional life, so it is a process of seeking better forms of contractual legitimation for such work. By clearly identifying the key virtues of the flexible forms of disciplinarity that have emerged as an important dimension of modernity, we then stand a better chance of more successfully altering its exclusive position of dominance within higher education and thus minimizing some of its more obvious vices and limitations when it gets reductively tied to the market economies. One of the most inescapable features linking capital with modernity is the juridical basis of social relations as enacted through contract laws and civil rights legislation. To this extent, modernity is a much more multidimensional cultural dominant than the specific forms it has taken within institutions of higher education, just as cosmopolitan forms of professionalism operate across a much larger domain of the modern than academic forms of disciplinarity. Professionalism is also another of the inevitable features of the modern world, and double negotiation becomes a process whereby the modern juridical powers wielded by professionals must be used to protect not just the modern domains of labor but also the valuable forms of nonmodern work that comprise much of what educators actually perform as practitioners in academic fields, departments, and interdisciplinary institutes. For such a transformation of the cultural diversity of the current university into a genuine culture of diversity the multiversity will have to become multivalent. The latter, rather ungainly term can register a degree of cognitive precision only through some careful definition of its meaning. It is easier to do this by first focusing on the pedagogical rather than the institutional levels of analysis and then generalizing from there. In several collaborative teaching experiments in the 1990s James Sosnoski and I realized that we needed some configuration or model for doing what we were doing in some of our teaching experiments that involved hybrid, online, and face-to-face interactions, as is the case in many classes today. Available terms such as dialogical, student-centered, emancipatory teaching just did not seem quite descriptive of what we (and many others) were trying to do. We experimented a bit until we found that we could adapt the term multivalent by modifying one of its key etymological strands that emerges from its uses in chemistry, where the root term valence is used to designate 151

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“the number of binding sites of a molecule, such as an antibody or antigen” (American Heritage Dictionary). Multivalent then means there are multiple sites for bonding, which when carried as an analogy to the classroom suggests more than just multiplicity or polyvalence, which is a given condition in any teaching situation. Rather, multivalent carries the further suggestion of multiple bondings, and this means that student differences have to be creatively negotiated such that cultural as well as learning differences can find appropriate and often different ways to bond to the classroom activities. No one mode, whether teacher or learner centered, will work by itself, because students bring different needs and different kinds of values to the learning environment. In the context of work, labor, and power it meant that we had to negotiate the use of grading by contract by specifying some domains of work that created spaces of relative autonomy for student belief. For instance, we granted credit according to an arbitrary criterion such as word count when we could not use our standard, holistic criteria of form, content, and originality to judge value in informal writing such as journal entries and response statements. From a philosophical perspective, we drew on the tradition of radical pragmatism, with its long tradition of pedagogical experimentation. In particular, we drew on the work of William James and John Dewey and, more recently, work by Donald Davidson, Giles Gunn, Steven Mailloux, Hephzibah Roskelly, Kate Ronald, and Stephen Yarbrough. One of the basic principles of this tradition is that diversity and “the recognition of difference” is “the motive for productive discourse” (Yarbrough 167) and that teaching and learning are always communication situations. This may sound commonplace, but most teaching situations do not follow out the consequences of this basic understanding. That is, the pragmatic tradition emphasizes the differences in the causes and conditions that affect our meanings and beliefs on the part of everyone involved, both students and teachers. As Yarbrough explains, “The aim of communication is to locate those causes, which in this case may lie simply in our differing experiences with the usage of words, in differing experiences in ranges of climate, in differing metabolisms, and so on. Communication—convergence upon the causes of one another’s beliefs—requires from us imaginative guessing and the testing of guesses, but it also requires a very specific attitude toward those with whom we discourse” (177). That attitude, which materializes in genuinely multivalent practices, requires careful attention to the words of others, what Davidson calls a kind of “charity” that “is forced upon us, whether we like it or not, if we are to understand others” (197). 152

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Pedagogically speaking, this means paying close attention to the different causes that shape different students’ abilities to bond to the discourses and practices that emerge in any classroom: “The more we learn from the other the more we can teach to the other” (Yarbrough 183). Student/learner differences cannot be seen as deviations from a standardized form of academic discourse or disciplinary expectations or liberatory agenda. Nor can teaching be seen as a method of helping students adapt their discourses to match that of other discourses, typically the teacher’s, if by “adapt” we mean simply accommodating their beliefs to match that of an authority figure. Rather, student differences are shaped by causes other than those that motivate our own habits, and we have to investigate those causes as much as they have to negotiate the causes and effects of our own beliefs. We have to be more careful than to just re-create our own desires in the emulations of our students by making them convert to our way of doing things. Of course, this does not mean abandoning our desires as educators but carefully negotiating them in classroom situations. As Thomas McLaughlin, Gerald Graff (Clueless in Academe), and others have argued, work within the academy means engaging the tensions between academic and everyday kinds of speech. Teaching and learning then become future oriented: meaning and belief are not things to be acquired or banked but to be constructed, invented, and created in the process of interactions both in and outside of the classroom. A multivalent classroom means that a key role played by the teacher is, more than an expert and archivist of knowledge, the creator of optional ways of addressing the material circumstances of the class because of the necessarily different set of causes that affect various students’ beliefs. The most common occurrence in the classroom is that a teacher confronts a diversity of sociocultural differences as well as a range of learning styles and cognitive abilities. The opposite of multivalence is, of course, the monological kinds of teaching that can be performed according to the traditional banking model of education, and the most extreme forms occur in those instances where teacher autonomy is depleted by being forced to teach a prescribed syllabus with required texts and standardized exams. But similar kinds of restrictions can also be performed through the monological scripting of an “emancipatory” or radical set of activities that the student must complete under the authority of the teacher. 25 Even liberal models of problem-posing, dialogical learning environments can be intimidating for, say, international students who arrive from very traditional, authoritative educational systems where passivity, not active intervention and partici153

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pation, is expected of students. 26 No single theory or pedagogical model can provide a final resolution to the contextual circumstances of different classes. A truly multivalent pedagogy means that teachers and students have to negotiate and create alternative possibilities for different kinds of interactions even within the space of one classroom. This takes time and therefore labor, and so any such innovations depend on the context, the institution, the curriculum, and the goals of the program. In a minimal way it calls for providing alternative kinds of assignments and choices among possible tasks to complete, and to this extent most teachers already engage a degree of multivalence in everyday practice. Some students both need and learn best under traditional, disciplinary, banking models even as they move to experiment with new ways of learning; some appreciate more the rigorous production of new forms of disciplinary knowledge; others learn much better in collaborative, interactive, small group work and dialogue; and there are, of course, any number of hybrid and nondisciplinary distributed learning possibilities between and beside the familiar pedagogical models. As Lev Vygotsky explained, students have different “zones of proximal development,” and a consideration of these differences, combined with social and cultural differences, calls for a reconfigured pedagogy, one that pays attention to those differences. With these conditions in mind, we proposed a redefinition of multivalent so that it could better serve as a working term in a pedagogical context to mean “the ability of social structures or organizations to allow for their members to combine in more than one group” (Sosnoski and Downing 3). The disciplinary classroom by itself cannot create such combinations, but a multivalent classroom can accommodate both disciplinary activities and alternative, nondisciplinary practices, depending on student and teacher needs. Of course, in practice this means special obligations for the teacher because not all classroom activities can be strictly planned in advance: a teacher has to learn to listen to the needs of the participants in any given class and respond accordingly, often in ad hoc ways, given different demographic factors in any classroom. 27 It also means that the invariable social and intellectual tensions brought into play because of the different causes affecting student beliefs have to be confronted rather than avoided, so it is not an idealistic model of uniformly satisfied participants.28 Indeed, since to varying degrees so many students have already bought into the free market and commodified forms of education such as job training, 154

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negotiation becomes a way of confronting or resisting the unquestioned reinscription of cultural dominance within the classroom. By understanding student work for the course as a kind of labor, any attempt on the part of a student to scam the system, trying to put the least amount of work into getting an A, registers, as it would in the workplace, as a form of corruption and an unfair labor practice. In my experience as well as that of many of my colleagues, most students open themselves to honest negotiations so long as their initial presumptions are not simply dismissed or denied outright hearings. That’s the nature of social life in the “contact zone,” as Mary Louise Pratt so influentially named the pedagogical situation, which is always one of inequality. In the inevitably asymmetrical relations of power encountered in the classroom, every decision to engage any kind of learning behavior or teaching practice invokes the question, What’s fair here for everyone involved? Students and teachers both need “to bring the relevant conditions that affect their lives to bear upon conversations about the discursive objects they share, or can come to share, with others” (Yarbrough 241). It is for exactly these practical reasons that Readings imagines teaching as thus becoming “answerable to the question of justice, rather than to the criteria of truth” (154).29 The question of justice draws us up against our limitations as well as our potential to open new possibilities. I have sketched the general pedagogical theory of the multivalent classroom not as a panacea for the future nor as a narrative of unequivocally successful teaching, especially since so many educators have provided so many narratives of successful, progressive classroom innovations. My particular concern with a multivalent pedagogy has been to suggest the relations between disciplinary and nondisciplinary kinds of learning activities and the spectrum in between and beside these more easily identifiable domains. Besides, although the successes continue to be quite real, equally real are the limitations and failures we experience. While we take responsibility for those mistakes, it is also the case that even as we enjoy the experimental freedoms made possible by our positions as tenured professors, the limitations of the disciplinary university tend to disrupt our experiments as much as our personal limitations. This is, needless to say, radically different for untenured, part-time, adjunct teachers who have little job security from the get-go. Any classroom finds its space circumscribed by curricular, disciplinary, and institutional domains as shaped by political realities and funding priorities contractually legitimated at both local and national levels. 30 Too often the press of disciplinarity means that we and our students 155

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are called to fulfill narrowly conceived disciplinary tasks such as prepare students for standardized tests (candidacy and comprehensive exams for graduate students, writing proficiency and gre exams for undergraduates) or meet field coverage principles in a traditional curriculum where the objects of knowledge and methods of interpretation do not always meet the multicultural makeup of our classes. No doubt some will object that multivalence seems to introduce elements of chaos and disorder when trying to negotiate such a range of differences. But in my experience the fear stems more from the disorder and chaos of the current curriculum operating under disciplinary structures that separate fields, departments, and specialties under the field coverage models of curricular design. The culture of diversity calls for ways to integrate and bring into relation the elements of that diversity in ways perhaps best exemplified by, for example, the learning communities advocated by Graff or the collaborative learning networks developed by Sosnoski, Patricia Harkin, and Ann Feldman. Differences need to be highlighted and negotiated, not hidden in separate and unrelated courses. Following Deborah Meier’s pioneering work in inner-city high schools, Graff suggests that schools need “to become a kind of intellectual ‘counterculture’ to counteract the anti-intellectualism of youth culture and the ‘mindless’ shopping mall school” (Clueless 265). Perhaps most important, were such a “counterculture” to become a reality in academic work life it would also have to counter the exclusive reign of the disciplinary economy of value in order to more fully integrate the nonmodern, vernacular, and “street smarts” that invariably intersect with our professional spheres of teaching and research. The pedagogical alterations thus call for curricular and disciplinary reforms, which in turn call for considerable labor, time, and energy on the part of teachers who must necessarily collaborate and seek domains of solidarity across their differences in order to institutionalize such reforms. The multiversity rarely rewards collaborative efforts that take additional work time, since such labor tends to be neither recognized nor funded under current disciplinary criteria for exclusively individual evaluation. A multivalent pedagogy calls for more and different kinds of peer and selfevaluation of classroom work, much of which then has to be specified under contractual terms of what kinds of effort, activities, and results yield what kinds of grades—these alternative practices also take time and resources. Large class sizes further deplete possibilities for interaction and dialogue. In short, we run straight into the familiar tale of economic downsizing and educational defunding. But that is the point. As David Noble suc156

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cinctly put it, “Quality education is labor-intensive; it depends upon a low teacher student ratio and significant interaction between the two parties— the one utterly unambiguous result of a century of education research” (46). The pedagogical domain links at all points to the curricular and to the contractually legitimated activities carried out by faculty and students across a broad range of institutional possibilities. The culture of diversity calls for pedagogical, curricular, and institutional domains responsive to radical differences, which means that advocates for such reform stand in direct conflict with the reduction of knowledge to information that can be cheaply and impersonally circulated as symbolic and real capital. In contrast, genuine forms of higher education cannot reduce knowledge to information and classrooms to training exercises. Most workers in higher education know this, which is why the basis of collective solidarity might be in the recognition of these shared problems. We might then better unite around the need to contractually protect the primary disciplinary and nondisciplinary educational activities that aim toward the development of the cosmopolitan self, where “the utter integration of knowledge and the self, in a word, self-knowledge” (Noble 46) and the examined life become fundamental to the education of socially engaged citizens concerned about their interdependence with others. “The knowledge of self attained in the process of self-examination becomes a lesson on how to be a self in a world populated by other selves” (Roskelly and Ronald 60).31 “Other selves” includes both local and global kinds of communal interdependencies. Economic reductiveness depletes the very real and diverse educational needs of the students and faculty who work in these institutional spaces. Unfortunately, Kerr’s version of the multiversity can well sustain the process of capital expediency when it exploits disciplinarity for reductive uses to serve only select groups of individuals. In this formulation the “multi” registers primarily as quantitative change (more users, different groups, all partaking of a wider range of activities), but the hierarchy of rewards is determined primarily by the disciplinary terms of the modern knowledge contract as it gets configured by economic determinants. Of course, this involves some degree of qualitative change, often for the worse when vocationalization overtakes other educational possibilities, but the basic features of the disciplinary university can adapt to these managerial changes as educators are forced to seek profits over learning. Multivalent, on the other hand, suggests the notion of cultures of diversity where the university must creatively adapt as much as the people entering its spaces, but not merely as an unreflective response to market 157

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changes. 32 Just as students come to class with all kinds of different ethnicities, races, genders, and social classes, these demographic differences also play out in learning differences: some need more structure, some need more dialogue; no one teaching “method” will answer to this culture of diversity. Educators must respond in multivalent ways, creating different kinds of learning environments responsive to different students, different social groups, different cultural contexts, different individual and collaborative curricular possibilities. The boundaries between teaching and research become more porous as teacher-researchers must be more responsive to the needs of readers in and out of the university. Multivalent cultures of diversity therefore negotiate complex social realities even as “complexity” by itself has become one of the bywords of neoliberal marketers. For this reason important distinctions must be made, just as in chapter 2 I followed Gee, Hull, and Lankshear’s distinctions between the local practices of progressive educators and the faux local discourse of late capitalism. In short, the knowledge contract must be negotiated within a broader sphere of ethical questions that pose in every instance the question of justice: what kinds of work get funded, what kinds of social needs are being met, what civic responsibility do students and faculty and administrators have for building a more equitable, less violent culture? A true culture of diversity in a multivalent institution means not just adapting disciplinarity to differences but creating work, labor, and contractual relations that can legitimate work outside and beside the disciplinary terms of the knowledge contract. Despite the enormous range of our individual differences as faculty and students, the attacks on genuinely liberal education should lead us all to recognize and create greater solidarity if only to respect and negotiate spaces for our differences. Gunn formulates the pragmatic question as a matter of determining “what difference difference makes in a world increasingly defined under the sign of the global” (195). The tradition of American pragmatist thought contributes, as Gunn argues, to our conception of the relations between self and other but also, as I argue in the next chapter, to the imagination and construction of new kinds of relations between labor and disciplinarity as they have structured higher education under the signs of modernity. No individual can do this work alone, and thus the need for collective bargaining to resist short-term profit in the interests of long-term civic values becomes more crucial than ever for negotiating our differences within our globally interdependent futures.

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5. PRAGMATIC INTERVENTIONS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

The Lure of Method and the Rise of Disciplinary Labor

Physics, like boilermaking, is at bottom unsupervisable. The genius of the university is to see this and to leave its artisans alone. It provides a structure which supports good working conditions and which recedes when the work begins. The work is directed solely and exclusively by the workers. Christopher Newfield, Ivy and Industry

Some Roots and Rhizomes of Radical Pragmatism When John Dewey moved to Chicago in the summer of 1894 the great Pullman strike was in full swing. Only three years earlier Charles Eliot had institutionalized the elective curriculum at Harvard, and universities across America were well on their way to consolidating the departmentally administered organization of the disciplines. 1 Dewey’s move to Chicago was therefore taking place within a dramatic moment in both university consolidation, disciplinary formation, and a crisis in capitalism. In early 1893 the economy went into a depression, and then into a panic. By 1894, more than 150 railroads had gone bankrupt; in four years, 800 banks failed. Unemployment rose to an estimated 20 percent. . . . Companies responded to the depression in one of their customary ways, by sharply cutting wages. In 1894 a wave of strikes followed, surpassing any previous one in American history, except perhaps that of 1877. In all, 750,000 workers struck that year, more than half in exceptionally bitter, violent, and protracted actions that nearly shut down the coal mines and the railroads, and left many workers dead, injured or imprisoned. (Ohmann, Politics of Letters 28)

This was, indeed, a critical moment in the early labor movement, because George Pullman had proclaimed that the model company town he had built in the 1880s represented a new kind of cooperation between management and workers. Yet in the spring of 1894 Pullman ordered a severe wage cut without any reduction in the cost of rent, services, or food in his model town. The local dispute escalated until it became a full-scale attempt by “powerful corporate managers to break the union and assert the superior power of capital” (Westbrook 86). Dewey was deeply interested in the progress of the strike, and his letters to his wife, Alice, who was then traveling in Europe with their children, 159

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reveal his sympathies for the workers, even though it was clear from the beginning that they would likely be defeated. Dewey’s response to the strike also struck a chord regarding his own status as an academic and professional. (He had accepted the position at the University of Chicago by convincing the university president, William Rainey Harper, that pedagogy should be a separate department. He was made head of the Department of Pedagogy as well as the Department of Philosophy.) For one thing, “Dewey was particularly troubled throughout the strike by the hostility to the strikers expressed by intellectuals and academics, including some of his new colleagues at the University of Chicago. ‘I think professional people are probably worse than the capitalists themselves,’ he said” (Westbrook 87). The Pullman strike was a radicalizing experience for Dewey not only for what it revealed about the class conflict between labor and management but also because he came to understand the close connection between capitalism and the newly emerging professional disciplines in the university system. As an advocate of free inquiry, creative democracy, and egalitarian social practices he had to confront the sobering reality that “ ‘Chicago Univ. is a capitalistic institution—that is, it too belongs to the higher classes’ ” (Westbrook 91). How could it be otherwise when it was Rockefeller’s profits from the ruthless monopoly of Standard Oil that had funded the University of Chicago? Dewey “told his wife he was quickly realizing ‘how “anarchistic” (to use the current term here) our ideas and especially feelings are’ ” (Westbrook 91). Dewey did not, of course, immediately quit his academic post to become a radical social anarchist, but he did privately express the view to his wife: “ ‘I felt as if I had better resign my job teaching and follow him [Eugene Debs, the leader of the railroad union] around till I got into life’ ” (Westbrook 87). Although he never abandoned his lifelong critique of the ties between capitalism and liberalism, he did learn that in his published “disciplinary” writings he had to act with some degree of prudence or he might be dismissed from the university, as were several of his colleagues for their political involvements. Perhaps it is no wonder, then, that those who have examined Dewey’s published work on ethics, pedagogy, and philosophy early (if not also later) in his career have detected little of the more radical of Dewey’s deepest political beliefs and institutional critiques. As Westbrook has now carefully demonstrated, Dewey “vented his radical spleen only in his private correspondence” (92), and a close examination of this correspondence reveals the extent to which Dewey came “to view the moral shortcomings of a paternalistic brand of ‘welfare capitalism’ which 160

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failed to cultivate workers’ capacity for autonomous participation in social life” (88). My point in offering this brief account of Dewey’s early engagement with radical political beliefs is not to offer one more argument for how and why we might best join forces with the contemporary revival of interest in pragmatism in general. Dewey understood that there is no “nature of pragmatism” as a disciplinary method, essence, movement, or school of thought that can then be determined to function in such a way as to further determine its possible or potential political consequences or institutional role as a “paradigm” of normative practices. It just won’t fit so easily within the disciplinary matrix, nor did Dewey want it to, because (as I elaborate in the final section of this chapter) as an attitude and belief about experience and inquiry, pragmatism named an orientation larger than any single method. For example, even in his chapter entitled “The Supremacy of Method” in The Quest for Certainty Dewey describes his understanding of scientific method as more of an attitude respectful of doubt, while for human action there is, ironically, no position from which method is so supreme as to eliminate the contingencies of experience in any absolute way: “The scientific attitude may almost be defined as that which is capable of enjoying the doubtful” (228). Philosophical and scientific inquiry began more with this attitude of care for the unsettled nature of experience than for the settled confines of a disciplinary paradigm, especially when and if the latter closed too quickly around objectifications that served the interests of those in power rather than broader public concerns about reducing uncertainties for those most vulnerable to the contingencies of life. As he put it, too often narrowly conceived “technical results” obtained by a reductive version of scientific method “are utilized by those in positions of privileged advantage to serve their own private or class ends” (Dewey, Quest 252). But even beyond these qualifications of Dewey’s position the very real differences between the various thinkers characterized as “pragmatist” defeat easy generalizations regarding the political consequences about what has come to be called “pragmatism” (see Gallagher xiv). I opened this chapter with this vignette because some of the issues that Dewey grappled with in 1894 may speak to our contemporary issues regarding the political consequences of various intellectual debates about the function of the disciplines in distributing and evaluating labor in the American academy. In this chapter I proceed by first reexamining two of Dewey’s projects in the 1890s and then conclude with a reexamination of the pragmatist views of the function of method. The two projects I have in mind are, first, 161

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Dewey’s efforts to launch a radical sociological newspaper, which was to have been called Thought News, and, second, his pedagogical experiments with the Laboratory School, or the Dewey School, as it came to be called. My general point is that these projects speak directly to current interest in the political critique of the disciplinary function of professional labor in the American academy as well as to the consequences of that critique in terms of broader social transformations and alternative modernities. In addition, these projects initiate a concern for the link between knowledge, pedagogy, and the powerful economic transformations affecting the contractual organization of labor under monopoly capitalism. Just as contemporary forms of disciplinarity operate under the globalized effects of the telecommunications revolution in late capitalism, Dewey was responding in the 1890s to the then newly emerging technologies of the telegraph and linotype presses that affected the communication and dissemination of disciplinary scholarship within industrial capitalism. Finally, Dewey’s views of disciplinary labor and professional work engage the rhetoric and politics of social change as fundamental to broad educational as well as more narrowly disciplinary forms of learning. The material practices developed in the Dewey School suggest fruitful realignments of disciplines and pedagogy, paradigms and professions, so that the contractual relations between teaching, scholarship, and service would have to be considerably renegotiated from the disciplinary models rising to prominence in the research universities. My claim will not be that Dewey provides simple answers to our problems, primarily because one of the limitations in much of Dewey’s subsequent theoretical work was that “he also paid comparatively little attention to the bureaucratic obduracy of large institutions” (Gunn 127). The attention we now pay to the historical causes of the disciplinary “obduracy” of higher education may better assist our collective efforts to alter that dominance. This is a crucial point, because so many recent descriptions of the multiversity have championed the forces of “disaggregation” (Leitch, Theory Matters), multiplicity, and boundary crossing (Klein, Crossing Boundaries) that it has become easy to lose sight of the persistence of disciplinarity despite these modifications. That persistence ensues from the deeply historical origins of the modern shaping of disciplinary labor according to contract laws that will not easily dissipate without careful attention to the institutionalized history of their formation. A focus on Dewey’s practical interventions within the institutions where he worked may, however, provide a kind of lore that chronicles some of the early work of modifying the dis162

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ciplinary organization of higher education at the very moments when they were being consolidated as contractual agreements, and hindsight always provides a theoretical advantage where we can pay better attention to the causes and consequences of those innovations. These case studies should foreclose premature evaluations of pragmatic action as merely acceding to the working conditions of late capitalism. 2 Indeed, the very failures of Dewey’s projects remind us of the difficulties we now face in making claims for the political consequences of our work within and without the domains legitimated by the various terms of the modern knowledge contract. Thought News and the Limits of Disciplinary Knowledge In 1990 Mark Poster argued that “each method of preserving and transmitting information profoundly intervenes in the network of relationships that constitute a society” (Mode 7). In 1891 John Dewey argued that “a tremendous movement is impending, when the intellectual forces which have been gathering since the Renascence [sic] and Reformation, shall demand complete free movement, and, by getting their physical leverage in the telegraph and printing press, shall, through free inquiry in a centralized way, demand authority of all other so-called authorities” (John Dewey to William James, 3 June 1891). 3 That Dewey might have viewed the “centralization” of telecommunications in an optimistically positive way as a sign that democratic participation in those technologies might be possible for all so long as they were centrally available might seem historically quaint in light of the vast surveillance mechanisms now available to those in “centralized” positions of power. But Dewey was keenly aware that the modes of disciplinary scholarship and public communication then available seemed so obviously to conspire against the kind of creative democracy he advocated. For our purposes the important link that Dewey was making here was between the transformation of communications technologies and the critique of disciplinary practices that “arrested” the flow of knowledge and information for the exclusive use of experts who worked hard to preserve their paradigms of normal practices from “contamination” by outside, social uses of that knowledge. Let’s begin with the disciplinary critique. Dewey saw plainly enough that the university of the 1890s gave rise to an elite intellectual aristocracy whose “scholastic” endeavors had little to do with broader social and political problems. Institutional isolation of discipline-based departments had severed the communication between scholars working in related areas in ways that clearly anticipate Graff ’s notion of the “patterned isolation” academics 163

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experience as a consequence of the “field-coverage principle” (Professing Literature 1–15), where paradigms then serve primarily as “arrested social movements” (Fuller, Thomas Kuhn). Further, once paradigmatic practices had been established under the general terms of the modern knowledge contract and specifically reinforced in faculty appointment contracts, the very practices and procedures of intellectual debate closed in around those normal practices so as to effectively sever academic work from the problems of everyday living and public concern. In Dewey’s words, the lecture hall had become “ ‘a monastic cell’ for the modern ‘Scholastic’ in which ‘he criticizes the criticisms with which some other Scholastic has criticized other criticisms, and the writings upon writings goes on till the substructure of reality is long obscured’ ” (Westbrook 51). The self-enclosed nature of paradigms that encouraged “writings upon writings” revealed how the new modes of disciplinary knowledge production could be as “old” in their attempts at exclusion as the “monastic cells” characteristic of the sectarian colleges. Prior to Dewey’s 1915 meeting at Johns Hopkins with Arthur O. Lovejoy to found the aaup and to script the new discourse of academic freedom, faculty contracts reinforced scholarly isolation. The power to grant and break faculty contracts resided exclusively in the hands of management, typically college and university presidents, who could fire any faculty pretty much at will if they became troublesome, which generally meant crossing from knowledge production to social and political activism. That is, for example, exactly what happened in the infamous case of the economist Edward Ross, who was fired in 1900 from his appointment at Stanford because Leland Stanford’s wife didn’t like Ross’s activist critique of immigrant labor and railroad monopolies. For most academics contractually caught in these circumstances paradigms were safer than politics. When reductively conceived as only a matter of paradigm shifts, academic change would amount to little more than, in Dewey’s terms, a shift of monastic cells. His social and political concerns for the consequences of academic work remain a central feature of all his writing. Cornel West articulates Dewey’s intellectual activism: “What was needed was not academic complacency but active engagement with the events and affairs of the world. In short, Dewey wanted a worldly philosophy and a more philosophical world” (American Evasion 82). But I believe that it is much more than a “philosophy” that Dewey is after here. That is, he is less concerned with simply installing a theory or philosophy that would work for every modern, “rational” subject; in short, he was not interested in establishing some kind 164

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of new “pragmatic” paradigm for knowledge. Rather, his concern was with the kinds of social interaction, communication, and collaboration that were sustained or defeated by the then-current institutional practices based on the disciplinary, departmental distribution of labor. For Dewey, the “central problem of our modern life [was] . . . precisely to do away with all the barriers that keep up” the “rigid separation between the things of matter and of mind—between the affairs of the world and of the spirit,” between theory and practice, and thus between the work of the university and the social-political life of the democracy. “To decline to recognize this intimate connection of professions in modern life with the discipline and culture” would doom higher education to “helpless failure unless it does more than accommodate itself; unless it becomes one of the chief agencies for . . . bringing about an effective interaction of all callings in society” (Dewey, Educational Situation 310). He clearly understood the power of new scientific paradigms to produce new knowledge, but he also saw how the disciplinary isolation of those paradigms could limit their effects to unnecessarily reductive forms of consolidation and conservativism that solidified elitism at the expense of plurality, diversity, and democracy. Those institutional practices depended on a fundamentally positivist view of knowledge and a speculative view of philosophy, which in turn depended on the hierarchical, class, gender, and race-based system of academic privilege and ivory tower isolation. The emerging university system was championing the establishment of the disciplinary matrix as a way to privilege the conditions of independent, autonomous kinds of knowledge, when, in terms of actual work and labor conditions, it was in fact replicating the very injustices built into the larger social system. In contrast, Dewey’s “vision rested on a belief that the key to social justice in America was a radical reorganization of the production and distribution of knowledge” (Westbrook 52). In short, he recognized that the modern terms of the knowledge contract had to be dramatically reconfigured. As such, “effective distribution of knowledge was thus essential to the development of the ‘social sensorium,’ and democracy rested as much if not more on the egalitarian distribution of knowledge as it did on the egalitarian distribution of wealth” (Westbrook 53). Disciplinary knowledge, however much it might shape itself into paradigmatic normal practices, was always situated and performed within the context of the distributed or contained uses of that knowledge. Although it is unlikely that he had even heard the word “pragmatism” and certainly not “multivalent,” Dewey’s behavior in this incident reflected the kind of belief in a cultural pragmatics that he 165

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would spend much of the coming decades in developing, promoting, and teaching. Cultural pragmatics could not be reduced to any single theory, since its basic understanding meant a contextual theorizing of the causes and conditions that affect the interactions of different discourses, and its basic condition was more an ethical attitude toward engagement with others than a cognitive belief about the nature of the world. Dewey’s basic goal was future oriented: to produce a more genuine culture of diversity in which university labor would have social consequences not just for the leaders of industry but for the public good of a democratic citizenry. Indeed, Dewey had identified a problem, and his hopes to work toward a resolution led to his eager and excited participation in the founding of Thought News. Dewey’s writing in the early 1890s had been in ethics and psychology, and his ethical reflections were beginning to lead him away from his leftist Hegelianism toward a concern for critical intervention and practical action in the social world of his day. 4 Franklin Ford, a rather eccentric former editor of a New York commercial newspaper, Bradstreet’s, presented Dewey with a plan to form a “national ‘sociological newspaper’ that would replace the scattered facts reported by ordinary newspapers with an analysis of the deeper social trends which would give these facts genuine meaning and significance” (Westbrook 52). The motives for such a publication arose in the context of the rise of new national magazines made possible by new printing and distribution technologies and the related fears and possibilities of an emerging mass culture. 5 Dewey could not help but be enthused by “the practical bearing Ford’s scheme gave to a central theme in his democratic theory. . . .’Consciousness is social in so far as any individual consciously directs his own activities in view of the social relations involved’ ” (Westbrook 53). Dewey argued that while “ ‘the dead weight of intrenched class interest’ had generated an alienating division of labor which inhibited the exercise of individual functions, so too had it inhibited the development of social consciousness by holding back the socialization of intelligence” (Westbrook 53). In 1891 he had presented his attack on the “scholasticism” of academic work in an essay entitled “The Scholastic and the Speculator” in the Michigan student magazine, the Inlander. Thought News then appeared to Dewey as precisely the kind of activist intellectual work that could break out of the ivory tower scholasticism and disciplinary isolationism, linking faculty to students and citizens in ways that the new disciplinary matrix prohibited. Thus, even though he did not use the term pragmatism at this stage of his career, we can see in this publication venture that his version of 166

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political rhetoric and pragmatic action called for tangible social as well as intellectual consequences in the public realm. Even more, the “public” so constituted would include not just the modern forms of knowledge production but also the alternative, local, contingent, vernacular, and what Bruno Latour would call the nonmodern forms of wisdom and experience accumulated both inside and outside higher education, all of which would be essential to civic life. Cosmopolitan forms of learning would then play out in local, town hall forms of democracy as well as in global social relations where a plurality of cultures is a fundamental sign of human interdependencies. The “news” had to be thoughtful and reflective of social issues even in the acts of reporting and analyzing events, thus the title Thought News. Such an aim would directly confront the predictable, formulaic, unreflective kinds of mass market magazines that were then selling like hotcakes. The tensions between and among the various kinds of knowledges from mass culture to academic enclaves had to be contractually negotiated, not severed through disciplinary purification and objectification as the only legitimate kind of knowledge. On the surface, the whole experiment seemed doomed to the failure it actually encountered. For one thing, Dewey depended in this project on his collaboration with the eccentric socialist Ford. The details of the advance news of this project and his sense of betrayal by Ford, who published another news bulletin that led to Dewey’s being lampooned in the Detroit newspaper, have been well told elsewhere. 6 My point in outlining this event is to point to Dewey’s early understanding of the connections between the available technologies of communication, the repressive, nondemocratic class divisions in American culture, and the power structure of the university at the very moments when the disciplinary matrix was taking its modern form. Again, even before Dewey had become a “pragmatist,” the problems he was addressing in the Thought News project suggest exactly the kind of direction he would take in developing a pragmatic understanding of the relations between political power and intellectual work. The question of the project’s ultimate failure in getting off the ground, however, may have less to do with gossip, betrayal, and political lampooning than with a lack of the kind of social, political, and technological conditions necessary to realize the potential of the Thought News project. “It was an idea ahead of its time and ‘too advanced for the maturity of those who had the idea in mind’ ” (Westbrook 57). As we now work toward the collective imagining of various kinds of alternative modernities, it becomes clear in retrospect that Dewey’s work 167

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on Thought News could find no form of professional recognition within the modern terms of the knowledge contract. Academics were not expected to reach out beyond the ivory tower in these nonmodern ways that disturbed the newly emerging disciplinary boundaries for demarcating “disinterested” forms of knowledge. Dewey had the audacity to imagine new kinds of interactive social and political contexts for the distribution and production of knowledge that involved more expansive cultures of diversity than traditional notions of individual scholarship, authorship, and hierarchical publication practices in strictly scholarly journals could sustain under the forces of industrial capitalism. Dewey’s vision would have had to be multivalent even as the modern knowledge contract stipulated a narrowing of epistemology toward the monovalent production of positivist knowledge within clearly demarcated disciplinary territories. Dewey imagined the placing of modernist forms of relative purification available in scientific experimentation for the production of new knowledge within the social arena of a broader spectrum of diverse rhetorics and multiple kinds of working conditions. Such an imagined university might well have provided “a structure which supports good working conditions and which recedes when the work begins” (Newfield, Ivy and Industry 125), but university management has most often chosen other directions for organizing academic work. As Dewey remarked in the 1890s, there was then a “tremendous movement . . . impending” where labor power, technology, and education might open new possibilities for democratic social life, but only under certain conditions. Dewey linked the shift in the modes of production of knowledge to changes in the electrical-telegraphic print environment, but that environment still fostered individualism and hierarchy rather than cooperation and collaboration. There was, of course, no way for Dewey in 1894 to predict the globalized powers of late capitalism, with its post-Fordist regimes of flexible accumulation that have so deeply commodified all forms of education, but his own social and political beliefs in solidarity and participation point toward the necessity for collective bargaining and unionization in ways that no one in higher education could have imagined possible then. Nevertheless, Dewey did more keenly realize than any other philosopher that any dramatic shift in technology and the mode of capitalist production would have its inevitable effects in the worlds of politics, disciplines, and pedagogy. And it was for this reason that Dewey turned, upon his move to Chicago in 1894, to his experiments in pedagogy. 168

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Pedagogy and Politics beside the Knowledge Contract Early in his career Dewey understood the significance of what today we might call the process of acculturation. The earlier ethnocentric version of the term referred to the ways that “primitive” cultures were transformed and modified by “civilized” cultures, just as the bourgeois self was transformed by the process of Bildung, or the development of character through one’s immersion in the traditions of classic Western culture. But a more contemporary, less colonizing meaning of the word suggests a sense that all individuals are influenced, modified, changed, given shape by the myriad social transactions that comprise any given culture. Culture, in this sense, is not something over and against nature, or reality, or anything else that we have to enter but just a name for the way things are in any particular social context. In contrast, enculturation suggests that we have to enter culture by learning its codes, as if it were something that mediated the world or reality, so that we have to accommodate ourselves to those codes. But culture is not a mediation between an individual and the social realm: it is, in this sense, a generic name for the necessary and particular ways that groups of people have associated through various conventions, traditions, and beliefs about the world. 7 In this sense, culture is in and part of the world, a “particular way of life” (Williams, Keywords 81), in the same way that language is in and part of the objects in the world, not a mediation between consciousness and reality. No one can live without being in culture, just as no one can live as a human without being in and of language. 8 So it is a question of how different cultures socialize individuals. Any idea or behavior, no matter how radical or activist in origin and intention, will likely have little effect unless it changes the processes of “acculturation” by which individuals change into their adult forms of socialization, which are themselves always in process of changing, growing, or dying. Dewey understood learning in this sense as not only a process of acquiring codes, systems, structures, and paradigms standing over and against individuals who had to enter these codes and systems but as a much more holistic adaptation of organisms to environments in which learning was a crucial matter of survival. Learning as experience and communication required an understanding of the causes of those systems as much as a familiarity with the codes themselves, which were not just structures but relations involving affect, emotion, and affiliation. Linguistic codes and speech acts signal one’s participation in the acculturation of specific community life: “Speech has both the instrumental use of re-assurance and the consummatory good of enhanced sense of membership in a congenial 169

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whole. Thus communication is not only a means to common ends but is the sense of community, communion actualized” (Dewey, Experience and Nature 206). In short, philosophical as well as political ideas must engage the educational process by which children as well as adults are “acculturated” as citizens within given societies. Dewey knew this very well, and he also knew that the main problem he confronted was a power struggle whereby the current educational system based on German models of the disciplinary matrix institutionalized within the research university mainly served to reproduce the many social injustices that were so obvious to him in the emerging urban industrial center of Chicago. Dewey understood that “the struggle over knowledge and over the means of its disposal was a struggle about power, about the conditions under which cultural capital (skills, knowledge, values) was produced, distributed, and consumed” (West, American Evasion 83). Dewey’s interest was in transforming rather than reproducing society. As he put it much later in The Quest for Certainty (1929), the “issue involves nothing less than the problem of the directed reconstruction of economic, political and religious institutions” (259). And he knew that there would be no way to do that without changing the entire educational system, with its hierarchical valence of disciplinary forms of labor. It’s no wonder, then, that in 1894 he wrote to his wife, Alice, “ ‘I sometimes think I will drop teaching philosophy directly, and teach it via pedagogy’ ” (Westbrook 95). The discipline and department often constrained more than enabled the kind of education he sought to imagine and construct. As head of the Department of Pedagogy, Dewey devoted himself to his lifelong commitment to the transformation of pedagogical practices as a necessary phase of the transformation of the newly emerging disciplinary culture of professional educators. My point in reexamining his educational experiments here will not be to correct misconceptions of earlier studies. In fact, excellent accounts of his work with the Dewey School are available, and Westbrook’s narrative of this period of Dewey’s life should correct any sense that Dewey advocated either an “aimless” progressivism or a narrow didacticism. 9 My purpose will be to connect the issues he was engaged with in the 1890s with similar concerns evidenced in the rising significance as well as limitations of disciplinary forms of labor and learning as important cultural and political transformations in higher education during the twenty-first century (see Downing, Harkin, and Sosnoski). And it’s true that these connections tend to be either lost or glossed. To begin with, Dewey’s reorganization of the school not only shifted classroom activities away from what today we call the “banking method” of 170

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authoritarian education to a “problem-posing,” experiential learning, but it equally altered the hierarchical administrative and political dimensions of the school itself toward what I described in the previous chapter as a multivalent institution. This was directly a labor issue subject to the contractual laws governing various educational institutions. Dewey was highly critical of the failure of schools to allow teachers to participate in the decisions affecting the conduct of public education. . . . [He advocated instead] “the adoption of intellectual initiative, discussion, and decision throughout the entire school corps.” . . . The work of teachers, he noted, was organized much like that of the children: “cooperative social organization applied to the teaching body of the school as well as to the pupils. . . . Association and exchange among teachers was our substitute for what is called supervision, critic teaching, and technical training.” (Westbrook 107)

Unlike in today’s public schools and universities, teachers in the Dewey School were responsible for designing, discussing, revising, and implementing curricular and classroom initiatives. 10 As in a truly multivalent institution, no one theory, no one mode of knowledge production would then hierarchically establish epistemological parameters in advance of the context in which the knowledge was being used and created. In light of the “cultural wars” and “canon debates” of recent years, the kind of practical effectivity and power granted to teachers in the Dewey School would seem to be an enviable environment compared to the standardized curricula, testing practices, and surveillance by rigorous grading exemplified in virtually all of our nation’s public schools and in most universities and colleges that have successfully institutionalized disciplinary departments. Although academic forms of collective bargaining had not even been imagined then, collaboration and solidarity among teachers was fundamental to creating a domain of autonomy in which their diverse forms of labor could be enacted without fear of disciplinary reprisal. Indeed, innovation and creativity thrive when “the work is directed solely and exclusively by the workers” (Newfield, Ivy and Industry 125). Bakhtinian critics would no doubt feel at home in the dialogical character of the daily transactions in the Dewey School. Recent work in collaborative learning and composing owe much to Dewey’s groundbreaking work in Chicago. But the work and labor of the teachers was directly related to the academic culture they were responsible for creating, and such responsibilities should remind us 171

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today that collective bargaining must negotiate such domains of work and labor more equitably than is currently the case, especially when the ties between epistemological and cultural diversity have been so magnified in a globalized economy. A close look at the actual practices of the school reveals that Dewey hardly had in mind a completely open-ended, “aimless” attuning of school projects to student interests alone. “Dewey’s is not a hedonistic nor an egoistic perspective. Because the individual is deeply rooted in and dependent upon the community of which he or she is a functioning member, one has a fundamental stake in the welfare of those with whom one associates” (Johnstone 191). Indeed, it was not simply a “student-centered” classroom, as most versions of progressive education have usually been described, and, even more, the reductive distinctions usually made between traditional and progressive forms of education don’t fit well with the actual practices of the experimental school. 11 Dewey’s work in the school and his writing about the school have much to say relevant to the contemporary debates that often degenerate into dualistic oppositions between a curriculum- or canon-centered discipline and a student-centered program. Dewey understood that a “student” was always socialized and acculturated such that individual “interests” were not merely idiosyncratic differences but reflective of the diversity of social and cultural backgrounds of the participants themselves. 12 At the heart of the Dewey School was a set of activities that Dewey called the “occupation,” and we should not overlook the significance of this word with its links to labor power and contractual forms of work. He meant this in a most literal sense: many of the collaborative activities the students engaged in ran parallel to “some of the work carried on in social life” (Dewey, School and Society 92). As such, the conditions of actual labor and work involved in all phases of the educational as well as social arenas play a considerable role in the labor theory of value. Thus, many of the problem-posing activities were planned around projects such as building a model farm, cooking, planning a weekly or monthly schedule, and so on. The problems the students encountered were actually much like the problems they would later encounter in, say, the physical and mental labor involved in building a farm. But the firsthand experience meant that the problematic situations they encountered were often of their own devising, and the mistakes they made were an important part of the learning process rather than “errors” to be falsified and eliminated by assigning low grades to such work according to ruling paradigms of disciplinary forms of knowledge. In short, the focus on occupations was the opposite of a reduction of 172

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education to mechanical job skills and banking of information: “Dewey’s vision had nothing to do with vocationalism” (Graff, Clueless 265). If Dewey’s ideas for elementary education were carried further into higher education, students and teachers would be involved in the problemposing education that Paulo Freire and others have advocated. For such changes to materialize they would have to involve not just classroom innovations but also a more careful attention to the problems of inequitable labor conditions in the current market economies that become further exacerbated by the disciplinary isolations of competing but often compartmentalized courses, curricula, and fields of investigation. Again, a close look at the records of the Dewey School are revealing: “Occupations in the Dewey School were free of the capitalistic division of labor not only along class lines but also, for the most part, along gender lines. Some of the most striking photographs of the school are those picturing little boys cooking and spinning and little girls at work as carpenters” (Westbrook 111).13 Since the feminist movement was only in its earliest stages, it is understandable that such social practices did not find as receptive a public audience as one would hope would be possible now. But it is also clear that much of the work performed by both teachers and students would have to be considered nondisciplinary, nonmodern, and multivalent to the extent that it was inclusive of diverse forms of learning adaptable to the circumstances of the users, both students and faculty, who were situationally engaged in working out problems in their present circumstances but always with an active imagination for what they might anticipate in their future work lives. The social and political consequences of adopting his disciplinary and pedagogical reforms were always foremost in Dewey’s mind. Dewey himself hoped, perhaps too optimistically, that adopting his educational reforms would “ ‘not involve a superficial adaptation of the existing system but a radical change in foundation and aim: a revolution’ ” (Westbrook 173). The aim of the school was not only to serve as a model of how meaningful and enriching education could take place, but also to make a practical intervention into the national debate on education. This practical intervention was, for Dewey, a form of political activism in that the struggle over knowledge and over the means of its disposal was a struggle about power, about the conditions under which cultural capital (skills, knowledge, values) was produced, distributed, and consumed. In sharp contrast to curriculum-centered conservatives and child-centered romantics, Dewey advocated an interactive

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model of functionalistic education that combined autonomy with intelligent and flexible guidance, relevance with rigor and wonder. (West, American Evasion 84)

Dewey’s notion of “flexible guidance” was crucial but dramatically at odds with what we have been calling “flexible accumulation.” Such guidance emerged from the historical circumstances that arose when some individuals had a funded experience in coping with the kinds of problems that less experienced individuals needed to be able to share and participate in as a resource. And it was not always the teacher who had such funded experience: in some situations students’ experience was itself the resource. In short, the traditional divisions between teachers and students was far less authoritarian at the same time that it did not abandon any resource that either teacher or student might bring to the problem. “There are a multitude of ways of reacting to surrounding conditions, and without some guidance from experience these reactions are almost sure to be casual, sporadic, and ultimately fatiguing, accompanied by nervous strain” (Dewey, Experience and Education 9). One’s performance in any given situation might indeed draw upon disciplinary resources, but the labor theory of value ensured that many nondisciplinary forms of labor and learning would be just as accountable and valuable as the paradigmatic forms of knowing. Such guidance, in other words, was helpful for individuals confronted with difficult and sometimes unfamiliar materials and problems. Dewey realized that such guidance was necessary in personal, social, and political processes of acculturation, not just in the narrow confines of the school and classroom. As Faith Gabelnick and her colleagues have explained with respect to the influence of Dewey on their construction of learning communities, “the type of education Dewey promoted required a close relation between students and teachers, and a different authority relationship based upon an attitude of ‘shared inquiry.’ Seeing education as shared inquiry redefines the teacher’s role. Instead of being primarily a transmitter of knowledge in traditional disciplinary models of reproduction, the teacher is now a partner in a collaborative relationship. Education is seen as a more open-ended inquiry process rather than a teacher-dominated process of ‘handing down’ knowledge as a finished project” (16). No vision of education could be further from Dewey’s than the contemporary reduction of knowledge to information and training in the “knowledge factory” (Aronowitz, Knowledge Factory). West, however, finds that “Dewey’s project is problematic not because he yearns for a bygone cultural golden age but rather because his emphasis 174

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on culture leads him to promote principally pedagogical and dialogical means of social change” (American Evasion 106). This may well be true, but it tends to hold only if we have a narrow sense of pedagogy and acculturation, one that separates it from the broader reaches of the social and political arena and from the newly formed principles of disciplinarity that had already come to structure the bureaucracies of higher education. Dewey did not wish to so separate learning, pedagogy, and inquiry, and his view here reflects quite well the position articulated by Donald Morton and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh: “We understand pedagogy not commonsensically, as classroom practices or instructional methods as such, but as the act of producing and disseminating knowledges in culture, a process of which classroom practices are only one instance. From this position, all discursive practices are pedagogical” (vii). Since all pedagogical practices are deeply rhetorical, the social and “political effectivity of trope and argument” (Mailloux, Rhetorical Power xii) largely determines the qualities and experiences possible in our differing and often conflicting processes of acculturation in and out of the classroom. 14 Listen to Dewey make virtually the same point, albeit in a less poststructuralist idiom and tone: “The democratic voice had to reach ‘all the agencies and influences that shape disposition,’ for ‘every place in which men [sic] habitually meet—shop, club, factory, saloon, church, political caucus—is perforce a school house, even though not so labelled’ ” (Westbrook 192). The central social and political problem under these conditions, then, is that the exploitive and oppressive circumstances of wage labor, poverty, racism, and sexism defeat the conditions for a rewarding cultural pedagogy that institutionally situates itself within an academic professionalism that has not been narrowed to an exclusive focus on disciplinary yardsticks. Exchange, collaboration, and collective solidarity are replaced with alienation and powerlessness, and the educational system based on the modern knowledge contract that valorizes individual achievement often reinforces these social inequities. In one sense, it is fair to say that the pragmatists were all seeking to create a method that would prevent such alienated forms of learning and knowledge and thus to create more fruitful paradigms and disciplines than what they witnessed in the emerging modern universities. Of course, they didn’t have the Kuhnian discourse of paradigms at hand, and the pragmatist arguments for new methods are more complicated because of the different spin they put on the word itself. On the one hand, the pragmatists were trying to avoid the rationalist and metaphysical “methods” of analysis characteristic of most Continental philosophies; on the other hand, they 175

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deeply admired the possibilities of the new forms of experimental method characteristic of the sciences, especially chemistry, even as they fought against the narrow versions of positivism. This kind of “essential tension” meant that in their various and often differing accounts of pragmatism they often substituted for method more general terms such as orientation, attitude, maxims, and principles. Since none of the pragmatists would separate the true from the good, no epistemological method of inquiry could ever be divorced from the ethical consequences of that activity. Even more than they might have anticipated, this concern for ethics and community leads directly to multivalent kinds of processes that tap resources of both modern methods and nonmodern experiences. Their very use of the term method seems to be caught between an older, nonmodern, and less specialized sense of method as an orientation toward a journey and the more modern sense of method as a stabilizing set of procedures that can be replicated by others as if it were independent of the particular users themselves. The moral of their method leads directly toward the concern for equitable labor and thus to collective bargaining and the solidarity of union faculty resisting exploitation of educational workers. But to understand these connections between the limits of methods and paradigms and the reach of pragmatist orientations toward inquiry, we need to briefly reexamine some of the uses of the term itself if only to try to avoid unnecessary confusion. The Evasion of Disciplines? or, Why You Can’t Make a Paradigm out of Pragmatism Pragmatism’s late-twentieth-century revival was championed by many noteworthy cultural figures across a variety of disciplines. 15 While the differences between various contemporary pragmatists or neopragmatists may be as notable as their shared commitments, one common practice among all these writers is their effort to resuscitate pragmatism through more detailed, accurate, and sophisticated analyses of their writings.16 These are, of course, very important practices, trying to “get it right” before criticizing and modifying various formulations, and I have obviously drawn on and elaborated this practice in everything I have said thus far regarding Dewey’s version of radical pragmatism. But the hope in most of these writings is that if we revive the original ideas and modify them to contemporary situations, such adaptations of pragmatism will then have a greater impact within higher education than they have. That is, virtually all of these writers see the many virtues in the tradition of American pragmatism as a particular method that most of us in education have somehow missed, 176

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and if we would adopt these views, then we would get things right. That’s only partly the case; that is, what I have been emphasizing throughout is that the institutional uses of the knowledge contract as worked out in modern disciplinary terms have established parameters of work and labor that severely limit the possibilities to adopt the most progressive forms of the pragmatist tradition. In other words, the visions of most of the pragmatists are as ethical as they are epistemological, as nonmodern as they are modern, and as nondisciplinary as they are disciplinary. The more radical edge of pragmatist beliefs about the links between ethics, inquiry, and epistemology leads to more substantive changes in the institutional relations between disciplines and labor than many have fully recognized. In a modern, epistemological, disciplinary institution pragmatism simply will not work well, no matter how well we understand its basic principles. You can’t make a paradigm out of pragmatism. Before I turn to some of the contemporary pragmatists I am first going to approach pragmatism’s disciplinary problems through a brief reexamination of the beliefs about method proposed by two of its founding figures, William James and Charles Sanders Peirce. My basic contention is that so many recent writers in the pragmatist tradition have followed an unfortunately misleading (although not inaccurate) tendency evident in the writings of James and Peirce when they attempt to define the movement as if it could be described as a method. Recall that in the terms I am using in this book I have adopted the modern sense of method as a set of ordered procedures that always work in relation to the objects of a discipline, and paradigms serve as the particular ways practitioners have mediated the relations between objects and methods through models, symbolic generalizations, and exemplars. 17 As I see it, the many different kinds of writing that have emerged from the pragmatic tradition evoke so many different kinds of actions, consequences, and ways of knowing that pragmatism cannot properly be limited to methods, models, and disciplines alone. That doesn’t mean that many of the pragmatists were not deeply concerned with methodological issues such as the rigorous logic of hypothesizing and testing belief through experimentation whenever possible, the empirical problems of reliability and verifiability in the face of historical contingency, and the experiential focus on learning so that the consequences of inquiry always lead to action in the world. But at the same time virtually all the pragmatists resituated method within a broader range of human endeavors, and the tradition evidences as great a concern for ethics as for logic and epistemology. To this extent, pragmatism has significant consequences 177

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for the institutionalization of labor in higher education primarily because it includes nonmodern as well as modern kinds of work and because its very significant concern for introducing new methods never really reduced education to methodology. Rather, it situated paradigmatic forms of disciplinary methods within larger domains of work, practice, and knowledge. My concern is that recent attempts to redescribe pragmatism as a method play into the institutionalized forms of disciplinarity, as if it could become another paradigm, which means that it would be little more than another form of academic discipline. In short, the critique of institutions and in particular of disciplinarity as an academic form of knowledge production, which is called for in nearly every sentence of virtually every pragmatist’s writing, has never been carried out with much attention to the specifics of disciplinary history within higher education. We can only do that by reconnecting method to work and labor, not just to epistemology. Of course, it is understandable that many have spoken of pragmatism as if it could be exemplified by something called the “pragmatic method” partly because the pragmatists themselves so often used that phrase. For example, William James’s 1907 book, Pragmatism, includes an often-republished essay, “What Pragmatism Means,” in which he specifically aims to describe the “pragmatic method.” In contrast to the European philosophical tradition’s examination of being and dialectic, pragmatism offers a more “this-worldly” focus on concrete and contingent methods of inquiry that can be used to bring about ameliorative changes through a refocus on consequences and social action. But that is only part of the picture. A closer look at James’s essay reveals that even what he identifies as a method is more a set of attributes, principles, and tendencies than anything we might clearly identify as a method, and he uses each of those terms at various points in the essay itself. 18 Even as James wishes, on the one hand, to call pragmatism “a method only” because “it does not stand for any special results” (379) (such as the true representation of reality or a predetermined consequence), it is hardly a specific method in our modern sense of the term because its generality and lack of specific procedures function only as preliminary protocols rather than the methodical use of models and symbolic generalizations characteristic of, say, a Kuhnian paradigm. Since James goes on to describe the pragmatic method as “only an attitude of orientation” (380), he opens innumerable possibilities for material practices that might indeed include an array of nonmodern (and, in this sense, nonmethodical) as well as modern activities. To this extent, the pragmatic orientation would require multivalent institutional spaces. 19 178

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For this reason, James offers a configuration of pragmatism as “a corridor in a hotel”: pragmatism’s “innumerable chambers open” to an unlimited array of possibilities such as “in one [room] you may find a man writing an atheistic volume; in the next some one on his knees praying for faith and strength; in a third a chemist investigating a body’s properties. In a fourth a system of idealistic metaphysics is being excogitated; in a fifth the impossibility of metaphysics is being shown. But they all own the corridor” (380). The “corridor” is indeed more like a general disposition, protocol, or “orientation,” as James goes on to describe it, than a specific set of cognitive schema or linear procedures characteristic of the modern meaning of method. Etymologically considered, it appears that James is torn between the premodern roots of method as a general term for a path of inquiry and its modern meaning as a set of specific, ordered procedures that can be replicated by others. The Greek root of methodos is “a going after,” and, even more basically, met(a), or after, combines with hodos, a road or journey. In this sense, pragmatic method might be seen as a general orientation for a temporal journey calling for situational choices about which roads to take in the search after various kinds of knowledge and understanding. But this is a long way from anything we might call a disciplinary method suitable for modern academic and epistemological uses. When we turn to the case of Peirce, a different picture emerges. Book 5 of his Collected Papers is titled Pragmatism and Pragmaticism, and the essays collected in this volume are often seen as the founding texts of the movement. It is here that Peirce works to identify what he calls the “pragmatic method” as distinct from the dominant forms of idealistic and metaphysical philosophy. Peirce was undoubtedly the most methodical of the pragmatists, but in the context of his own life and education this is understandable. As the son of one of Harvard’s most eminent mathematicians and astronomers, Benjamin Peirce, Charles grew up just blocks from Harvard Yard. He attended various private schools and graduated in 1859 at the age of twenty from Harvard. Four years later he received a bachelor of science in chemistry from the Lawrence Scientific School, the premier scientific research institute of Harvard, and his career as a scientist began with this training. 20 His first full-time job was an appointment made in 1867 by his father, who served as superintendent of the federal Coast Survey, and Charles became an assistant in charge of gravimetric survey, a position he held for many years. In light of his remarkable achievements in philosophy, we often forget the extent of his contributions as a scientist. 21 As Cornelis de Waal explains, 179

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“Peirce’s pragmatism was conceived in the spirit of the laboratory” (26). He thought of himself primarily as a logician, and there is so much technical use of mathematics and symbolic logic deployed in so much of his writing that even his close friend William James complained in at least one instance that Peirce’s flashes of brilliance could be sandwiched between passages of impenetrable prose (see Cohen ix). Peirce’s huge volumes of Collected Papers register a much more systematic attempt to develop the general principles of pragmatic method, and he even invented the more ugly word “pragmaticism” to distinguish his brand from that of James, whom he deeply admired but differed with over what he felt were James’s less systematic, more individualistic versions of inquiry. Peirce also had a strikingly troubled relationship with higher education. Throughout his life he gave various lecture series “at Harvard and at the Lowell Institute in Boston, and in 1879 he accepted a part-time lectureship in logic at Johns Hopkins University” (de Waal 2). But a permanent position was not to be when scandal broke out in 1884 after the discovery that he had been having an affair with a much younger woman, Juliette Froissy, while he was separated but not yet divorced from his first wife. The founding president of Johns Hopkins University, Ernest Gilman, immediately fired him (here again we find no contractual protection from this action for Peirce), and “this episode became widely known among university administrators in the United States; along with the ecclesiastical fundaments of most universities in that period, it is probably the principal reason Peirce never acquired another permanent academic appointment” (Ketner and Putnam 5). Indeed, in the 1890s, when James tried to find a position for Peirce at Harvard, President Charles Eliot would have nothing to do with Peirce, partly because of Eliot’s dislike of Peirce’s father. No doubt, Peirce’s blunt and unaccommodating manner also made him ill suited for the social demands of academic life, so it is little wonder that most of his references to education in his letters are primarily scoffings at the petty ways of institutional small-mindedness. The crucial point is that disciplinary criteria and their powers of exclusion were experienced by Peirce as little more than blunt forces of social control that had little to do, from his perspective, with epistemology or research methods. He never did develop anything we might call an institutional or disciplinary critique other than through his concern for the general maxims of his version of pragmatism. Nevertheless, partly because of these anti-institutional biases Peirce never lost sight of the broader contexts of meaning making when describ180

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ing his method of inquiry. Often his sense of humor led him to make such unflappable remarks as “pragmatism and personality are more or less of the same kidney” and “in order to be deep it is requisite to be dull” (Peirce, Pragmatism 14). In actual practice he uses terms such as maxims, beliefs, habits, and principles, which really are more appropriate for his orientation, since those maxims don’t typically register as anything so specific as a procedure or method in the modern, disciplinary sense of that term. When he does turn to specific patterns or methods of pragmatic inquiry, he does so with an interest in sharpening the vital empiricist dimensions of the experimental method so that it might indeed become part of a reinvigorated form of philosophy. But this dimension of his project, which indeed lends itself to sharpening the potential disciplinary paradigms of certain kinds of philosophical inquiry, never worked to deplete the value of those alternative but related dimensions of experience such as love, chance, and intuition that operate outside as well as inside and beside the domains of the modern disciplines. For example, in 1923 Morris R. Cohen edited a collection of Peirce’s papers called Chance, Love, and Logic. Only the last of those three terms is properly the subject of method, and the concluding essay in the volume is called “Evolutionary Love,” in which Peirce expands on his notion of agape, or love. Even though he uses his logician’s jargon of “agapasticism” and “synechism,” his focus is on the relation of deep feelings, motives, and purposes that always surround the methodical procedures of method. Perhaps even more significantly, “the Agapish of Peirce . . . was something that was irreducible to market culture, even as the pragmatism has elective affinities to the market culture” (West, Prophetic Thought 53). Peirce’s suspicion of the closure that any too-easy slide into method implies was always active: “One may very properly entertain a suspicion of any method which so resolves the most difficult questions into easy problems” (Pragmatism 21). Even in the effort to try “to make sure of our ground, and obtain some secure method” that might characterize pragmatic inquiry, Peirce’s sense of method was that a neutral set of procedures could never eliminate the assumptions, beliefs, and habits that any practitioner brings to the inquiry—it was an orientation to negotiate those preliminary desires and beliefs. Such an orientation evoked a sense of the ground that was materialist rather than idealist, but the real was also closely tied to a very broad view of community. That is, Peirce’s social realism resonates with the notion of a cosmopolitan or global sense of a more infinite, human community 181

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rather than a local group: “The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase of knowledge” (Pragmatism 186–87). In these formulations we can see similarities to Derrida’s notion of universalism that does not destroy the idioms or Marx’s sense of “species being” reflecting our shared material realities. Despite these commonalities, no methodological prudence should deplete or mystify the enormous range of social, cultural, and natural differences. Whatever order could be brought to bear on any inquiry, Peirce always recognized that “nature is not regular. No disorder would be less orderly than the existing arrangement. . . . [N]obody thinks of the irregularities, which are infinitely more frequent” (Pragmatism 213). Finally, even the principles of logic were primarily social, not abstractly epistemological or methodical by themselves: “The social principle is rooted intrinsically in logic” (Peirce, Pragmatism 221). Peirce came to understand that he seemed to have lost control of his own basic maxims regarding pragmatism because “it gets abused in the merciless way that words have to expect when they fall into” other hands. That was why he introduced the new term pragmaticism, which “is ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers” (Peirce, Pragmatism 277). He goes on to admit that the problem with pragmatism is that “no formal list” of the maxims of the movement had ever been made, and in his efforts to do so he states the most general “under the vague maxim, ‘Dismiss makebelieves’ ” (Peirce, Pragmatism 278). Of course, what he means in serious terms is a dismissal of any a priori, metaphysical, or idealistic propositions that have not been subjected to experiential inquiry: one must consider the effects and consequences for action of holding any belief. It is often in opposition to the metaphysical uses of philosophy that he most often uses the designation of method as a way to speak of the humbler task of pragmaticism, which then serves as a method for producing clear thoughts that might have ameliorative effects upon the social world. For example, in one effort at methodical definition Peirce argues that “pragmatism is, in itself, no doctrine of metaphysics, no attempt to determine any truth of things. It is merely a method of ascertaining the meanings of hard words and of abstract consequences” (Pragmatism 317). The “merely” in that last sentence is the sign of his trying to humble the role of pragmatic orientation toward belief and consequences when there can 182

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be no appeal to some antecedent “truth” that grounds all assertions. In this sense he is indeed trying to tie linguistic assertions to the experimental method, and to that extent he may well be sharpening the borders of various disciplines according to their specific methods and paradigms: “I know very well that science is not the whole of life, but I believe in the division of labor among intellectual agencies” (Peirce, Pragmatism 375). Peirce never carried out the consequences of that belief in the division of labor within the practical domains of higher education or within the actual formation of disciplinarity within the modern universities. But he was always aware that learning involved more of the “whole of life” than just the disciplinary methods. In short, his vision of intellectual activism is always larger than his concern for methodology. That vision was always social, collective, and communal, even if it was not, strictly speaking, institutional. Thus, when Peirce contrasts his “Rules of Philosophy” with those of the metaphysical, Cartesian variety, he devotes his second principle to explaining that “we individually cannot reasonably hope to attain the ultimate philosophy which we pursue; we can only seek it, therefore, for the community of philosophers” (Chance 3). The “community of philosophers” might well include new pragmatic paradigms, but Peirce would have rejected at every count any presumption that the results of those paradigms would exclusively affect only the participants in the interpretive community. There could be no internalist account of pragmatic inquiry whereby a local community of investigators might justifiably avoid confrontation and critique from outside perspectives. Nor would he have reduced all of education to just those methodical procedures alone, and that was a key premise of the pragmatist legacy carried forward more expressly in the educational experiments and pedagogical philosophy of John Dewey. But the many strands of the pragmatist legacy have too often been tipped toward the concern for method and pedagogy in ways that tend to sidestep the problems of labor within higher education. To successfully draw on this body of work as a guide to reducing exploitive practices means that we need to more fully link the problems of learning, inquiry, and method with the institutional tensions between disciplines and labor. Perhaps then we have a better chance of fulfilling the promise of an educated citizenry that is “about the perpetuation and extension of affordable, accessible, quality education for everyone who wants it” (Noble xii). When we turn to some of the contemporary pragmatists, the quite admirable effort to articulate certain shared characteristics of the intellectual 183

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tradition upon which they draw unfortunately sometimes gets reduced to principles of method alone. Each of these writers struggles with the tension in that reduction. Understandably so, perhaps because, as Edward Said articulated this essential intellectual tension, “the hardest aspect of being an intellectual is to represent what you profess through your work and interventions, without hardening into an institution or a kind of automaton acting at the behest of a system or method” (121). In what follows I want to look briefly at a few efforts to rearticulate pragmatic principles only to demonstrate that they call for more substantive kinds of institutional reform in order to even begin to make such principles part of the material practices of a broader range of educators. Cornel West is a good place to start because he has been such a visible advocate of what he calls “prophetic pragmatism.” In The American Evasion of Philosophy his main thesis was that the roots of the pragmatist movement evaded the philosophical foundationalism of the European tradition of philosophy. But the evasion of philosophy also meant a confrontation with the institutionalization of academic disciplines under the modern knowledge contract. These latter concerns play out much more as labor issues concerned with equitable working conditions for an array of tasks that are not all epistemologically defined or discursively tied to debates about philosophical beliefs alone. To this extent the consequence of the pragmatist movement was not an evasion of disciplinarity but a confrontation with such emerging versions of societal modernity. In this respect it is more accurate to see pragmatists working toward alternative forms of modernity such as I suggested in chapters 2 and 4. The brief anecdotes of Dewey’s work on Thought News and progressive education thus represent historically specific confrontations with the limits of the newly arising forms of disciplinarity. We can in those instances witness Dewey trying, not always successfully, to open new possibilities for significant alteration of the relations between disciplines, labor, education, and modernity. To this extent it is much more than an evasion of philosophical idealism; it is a praxis of thought/doing that alters social institutions to meet the needs of diverse groups and individuals in more ethically justifiable ways. West has advocated just such an ethical version of pragmatism. In Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times he articulates the four main elements he associates with “prophetic thought,” the tragic-prophetic version of pragmatism he prefers. Just as in the case of one of his heroes, William James, each of these principles is more an ethical orientation than anything we might call a method or that might be adaptable to the models, symbolic 184

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generalizations, and exemplars characteristic of disciplinary paradigms. The first element, “a broad and deep analytical grasp of the present in light of the past,” may be closest to the general principles of a hermeneutic interpretive model. Key terms like multiculturalism and Eurocentrism are for West “not analytical categories,” but from a more nuanced historical perspective they provide ways of naming social problems that call for “powerful descriptions and persuasive explanations of wealth and status and prestige” so that we can better “keep track at any social moment of who is bearing most of the social cost” (West, Prophetic Thought 4). West’s pragmatist invocation of “the condition of truth is to allow the suffering to speak” (West, Prophetic Thought 4), but the ethical principle is hardly anything so procedural as a method for allowing those voices to emerge. The following three elements are even more obviously ethical principles. The second tenet, “Connection,” refers to the “value of empathy,” which means “never losing sight of the humanity of others” (West, Prophetic Thought 5), a principle that should not be lost in the education of the cosmopolitan self. The third principle, “Tracking Hypocrisy,” is a “self-critical” attitude, not “a self-righteous mode” for “accenting boldly, and defiantly, the gap between principles and practice” (West, Prophetic Thought 5). Fourth, West recalls the affirmative character of the pragmatist movement as a necessary form of hope, a way to “keep alive the notion . . . that the future is open-ended and that what we think and what we do can make a difference” (Prophetic Thought 6), so that we do not just retreat to a world-weary cynicism. The point is that these four ethical principles always exceed the range of modern practices characteristic of strictly disciplinary work; to this extent, it is far less necessary that everyone call themselves “prophetic pragmatists” than that we locate domains of collective solidarity to work toward the construction of an alternative modernity that might allow nonmodern and other voices to speak within and beside the disciplinary domains. The consequences of such worthy ethical principles is that they can get you in trouble, as they did West himself in the fall of 2001 when he was called out by, among others, Harvard’s new president, Lawrence H. Summers, for the kinds of social activism he was engaging in that did not measure up, in Harvard’s eyes, to his responsibilities as a scholar.22 Despite his remarkable scholarly productivity, West has always been committed to those who did not enjoy the education and privilege he has enjoyed, and he often, therefore, speaks at churches, organizations, and political meetings that extend far beyond the university. In a sense West is a model of how intellectual work can and should affect broader public spheres, and Sum185

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mers’s contentions on behalf of traditional disciplinary scholarship hinges on his assertion that “what’s most important in the university is the pure pursuit of the truth” (Wilson and Smallwood a9). As West has long argued, nothing could be further from pragmatism than this separation of the true from the good. This model for hierarchically valuing the “purification” of exclusively disciplinary forms of knowledge represents the very domination of the modern knowledge contract that this book contests. West has always realized that even as he sought in The American Evasion of Pragmatism to articulate a clear vision of what he means by “prophetic pragmatism,” he was also aware that “there is—and should be—no such thing as a prophetic pragmatist movement” (232). I take this to mean he recognizes that pragmatism should not be reduced to a school of thought, a method, or a paradigm, even though such schools, methods, and paradigms play a part in various kinds of pragmatic inquiry. Not all contemporary pragmatists have been as wary of the limitations of method as West. Giles Gunn, for instance, introduces pragmatism in Beyond Solidarity as “a method of inquiry” (xxi), but this may be a misnomer, since it is certainly not the case that there is only one method associated with pragmatism. Even within the terms of Gunn’s own project, to place pragmatism within the sweeping concerns for “difference in a globalized world,” the practical consequences of his sophisticated rhetorical analysis can hardly be enhanced by thinking of the movement as a method. Focusing more specifically on the romantic/pragmatic possibilities for the teaching of writing, Hephzibah Roskelly and Kate Ronald acknowledge Peirce’s and James’s preoccupation with method and go on to articulate the pragmatist equation of experience and method, but I believe that it is reductive to shrink the reaches and riches of experience to method, even though that tendency can be gleaned from some of the original pragmatists. Roskelly and Ronald provide an insightfully compact list of the “tenets” of the pragmatic method, but I believe that tenets, beliefs, attitudes, and values are better terms to characterize the seven general characteristics the authors list than to hold them out as a unified method. 23 No teacher of either quantitative or qualitative methodology today would see these as other than orientations or protocols preceding the specific paths of research methods. Roskelly and Ronald quote from John Dewey’s Experience and Nature to support their articulations of the attributes of the pragmatic method, but Dewey never uses the word “method” in the passage they cite; instead, he speaks of experience and “ ‘the varied constituents of the wide universe, the unfavor186

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able, the precarious, uncertain, irrational, hateful’ ” (88). These domains of experience can hardly characterize the procedures of any method. Roskelly and Ronald recognize this unsettling dimension of pragmatist thinking by acknowledging their “ ‘unsettled’ attitude toward categories, systems, and history” that “can, indeed, ‘unstiffen’ received theory, especially about knowledge and ethics” (85). But in order to fully recognize the significance of the relations of method, labor, and discipline, they need to carry that unsettling attitude toward method as well. Thus, when they devote their entire seventh chapter to “Changing the Course of the Stream: Romantic/Pragmatic Perspectives on Systems” (Roskelly and Ronald 123– 38), I agree with virtually everything they say, except the analysis implies more than it accomplishes. Because they see pragmatism as a case of “a method” leading “toward the end of promoting in organic and real ways a rationale for belief, in the individual and in the community” (Roskelly and Ronald 137), their analysis calls for but simply does not address the contractually negotiated relations between method, labor, and disciplinarity within those communities except in such a general sense that it hardly leads to very dramatic disciplinary changes. Consequently, the moral virtues of the movement tend to seem more romantic than material. In practical terms, Roskelly and Ronald’s fine analysis of the pragmatic method never touches upon the painful disciplinary separation of writing, reading, literature, and creative writing that perhaps most call out for revision in the contemporary university if we are to address unfair labor practices (see chapter 7). Pragmatists offer many agendas, moral visions, and critiques of traditional epistemologies that include a careful attention to method and thus to what we might well now call paradigms as part of the process of inquiry. Roskelly and Ronald cite Peirce, whose belief in a radical empirical method goes without saying, but in the quote Peirce speaks of it not as a method but as “ ‘a given line of conduct’ ” where one must be always “ ‘alert for indications that the moment has come to change your tactics’ ” (86–87). Pragmatists have a long tradition of speaking in such seemingly benign terms as “conduct” and “habits,” but the consequences of examining conduct and habits potentially leads to a more radical critique of orthodoxy than simply accepting the “habitas” (Bourdieu) of academic life (see also Bourdieu and Passeron; Giroux). The attention to conduct suggests the ethical dimension whereby one is prepared to alter one’s conduct if the evidence does not warrant belief in the ideas emerging from the practice. To this extent, changing educational practices within the modern, disciplinary university would inevitably mean altering work at a fundamental level with 187

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respect to the way labor is organized into specific sets of hierarchically arranged institutional domains. When we turn to one of the most influential pragmatists in the field of literary and rhetorical studies, Steven Mailloux, we find that he has developed a highly sophisticated assimilation of rhetoric, pragmatism, and hermeneutics, which he calls “rhetorical hermeneutics.” 24 He offers both compelling theoretical accounts of what he would acknowledge as an emerging paradigm and practical examples of the consequences of how this model of reception history plays out in practice through the reading of specific texts, ranging from literary cases such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Little Women, and The Pilgrim’s Progress to public political rhetoric such as witnessed in the nineteenth-century concern for the tropes of “reading as eating” or in the 1980s rhetoric of the Reagan administration’s rationales for deploying the Strategic Defense Initiative, which seemed to be a direct contradiction of the 1958 Space Act requiring that all “ ‘activities in space should be devoted to peaceful purposes’ ” (Mailloux, Rhetorical Power 170). But, putting aside for the moment the huge question of the adequacy of the method itself, my concern is that by presenting it as a method, Mailloux advises us to gain power by adopting it as our own. 25 My reservation with this procedure is that he has tended to foreclose the relationship between discipline and labor within the institutions in which he (and we) work. That is, the rhetorical force of his own arguments is that we should adopt his version of rhetoric as the foundation for our discipline, in a sense prescribing that we should all become practitioners of the new, improved paradigm. If we would perform through imitation the exemplary kinds of interpretations he provides us models for, we would improve the way we do business in the academy. However provisional those foundational terms would be, as any pragmatist must acknowledge, the work of those who adhere to alternative methods or whose labor concerns nonmodern domains not so dependent on any one paradigm would not likely have a job for long in this university. Of course, that’s what happens when old paradigms are replaced by new paradigms: we get a rerun of the same institutional structures, which is exactly the way the modern knowledge contract determines the domains of legitimate labor within the university. Mailloux has strong commitments to social justice in all his writing, as befits most of the pragmatists, but, writing in the modern disciplinary university, the moral commitments tend to pale in his discourse through his focus on rhetorical hermeneutics as a new method. The reasons for that paling, I submit, emerge from the powers of the modern knowledge contract 188

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to legitimize disciplinary knowledge over ethical action. As Patricia Bizzell configures this institutional logic, Mailloux “attempts to hold a fig leaf of method before the nakedness of his moral commitments, presumably because he has been trained, as we academics all have, to view the open professing of moral commitments with embarrassment” (286). We have been so well trained as disciplinarians for whom method is a requirement in the modern university that nonmodern forms of mediation and labor too easily, and unjustly, disappear from the provinces of our vitas. It would not be a transformation but a consolidation of the modern university were we all to have to start thinking of ourselves as rhetorical hermeneuticians in order to get hired and promoted. Despite my edgy sarcasm I actually have deep admiration for the genuine accomplishments of Mailloux’s method, but I want to be very careful to see such labor as one possibility among a much broader array of valuable working projects suitable for humanities educators. If we recall again the experiments in publication and education that John Dewey carried out in the 1890s, we would have to acknowledge that, as one of Mailloux’s champions of pragmatism, Dewey’s aim was not to install a new paradigm in the university. When worked out under the conditions of the modern knowledge contract, Mailloux’s efforts to create a new pragmatic paradigm urge us all to adopt the method of “rhetorical hermeneutics,” yet the material consequences of such efforts tend to reduce a broader social movement, which would include the academic labor movement, to the creation of a new paradigm. However useful that paradigm might be as an alternative to some of the traditional interpretive paradigms that try to evade history in the name of aesthetic formalism, we should be very wary of limiting our concerns to the labor of imitating that kind of practice alone. Mailloux follows Richard Rorty’s influential conversational model of intellectual exchange whereby the solutions to intractable problems can be therapeutically redressed by simply switching vocabularies. But, as I have argued elsewhere (“Deconstruction’s Scruples”), this liberal and ironic version of academic exchange tends to conceptually flatten disciplinary hierarchies and social differences as if the Burkean parlor upon which the conversational model often gets configured really were open equally to anyone who showed up at the door. The dominance of the knowledge contract exerts considerable force through the contractual legitimation of disciplinary vocabularies. We must be much more wary of the social consequences of those vocabularies because they are struggles for meaning and value deeply tied to or at odds with what it means to be a citizen in the contemporary world. 189

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6. THE ‘‘MOP-UP’’ WORK OF THEORY ANTHOLOGIES Theorizing the Discipline and the Disciplining of Theory

Few people who are not actually practitioners of a mature science [or English department?] realize how much mop-up work of this sort a paradigm leaves to be done or quite how fascinating such work can prove in the execution. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Living in childhood without a sense of home, I found a place of sanctuary in theorizing, in making sense out of what was happening, a place where I could imagine possible futures, a place where life could be lived differently. . . . Fundamentally, I learned from this experience that theory could be a healing place. bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress

Theory Trouble All the trouble began with theory. At least that’s how some folks devoted to the traditional study of literature for and by itself often paint the picture of the fall of English. Just when English departments had nearly gained respectability as a New Critical discipline, some rough beasts started slouching toward Baltimore and New Haven. They upset things, turned over some pieties, crossed some borders, and generally roughed things up in academic quarters at a time when the U.S. debacle in Vietnam was roughing things up in another part of the rapidly globalizing world of the late 1960s. Even three decades later, when younger theorists came of age, some of them had to admit that, as Michael Bérubé cast his newly minted affiliation with theorists, “it’s a beastly rough crowd I run with” (Public Access 43). The theory craze arrived from the outside (outside the discipline, outside the United States), and all the labor of New Critics like René Wellek and Austin Warren who had so carefully tried to separate the chaff of the extrinsic from the seed of the intrinsic text itself seemed painfully to have come to naught. Disaggregation would have its field day in the wake of this upheaval, which, as we know, was as much a consequence of demographic changes, economic restructuring, and geopolitical unrest. In this sense theory was more a symptom than a cause: “ ‘Theory’ could be workably defined as a kind of discourse that is generated when basic assumptions cease to be taken for granted and become open to debate” (Graff and Warner 12). Now, however, there are signs that we have tamed the theory beast or at least canonized its main features in some impressive new anthologies. We have 190

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also forged some more comfortable rapprochements with the invention of new courses, new area studies, new texts, and a startlingly few new hires. Theory has been successfully domesticated when it comes packaged in a sixty-dollar Norton hardback. But when one of the six editors of the 2,600-page Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism is also the author of an influential essay called “The Posttheory Generation,” the entrepreneurs at Norton should be worried. How could the imprimatur of a Norton anthology that represents the pinnacle of field legitimation, the ultimate canonization of the theory movement of the past quarter century, be occurring during the very generation of young scholars that represents itself as coming “post,” or after, theory? Even more, the general editor of the volume is the very critic who appropriated the term disaggregation to describe the contemporary university as “disorganized in the extreme” at the same time that he staunchly admits that the new anthology “establishes a theory canon, and that it, indeed, aims to do so” (Leitch, Theory Matters viii, 15). Of course, it wouldn’t be the first time that a new field comes of age just as its disciplinary status begins to wane, but the theory question takes on significant importance because theory is not something we can live without in the way, say, that a close reading of flower imagery in The Faerie Queene can fade away without injuring too many people. Norton tries to make the “definitive” collection of theory after “Big T” Theory loses its cash value. 1 Nevertheless, Leitch is exactly right in his assessment of the strategic (as well as cash) value of such an effort: “For me this canonizing project represents . . . a defensive move to conserve the vital recent gains, to ensure the ongoing dissemination of theory, and to encourage the resultant transformation of literature programs and departments” (Theory Matters 15). And it is on exactly these double grounds that the Norton anthology deserves to be evaluated. The “defensive move” of conservation leads to the progressive move of transformation: while the canonizing gesture reinforces the terms of the traditional knowledge contract, the explicit hope is that such a move will have the contradictory effect of altering those very contractual terms. The problem, as I see it, is that even on these defensive grounds the Norton anthology may be, for many at least, practically unusable in these times, and that is one of the serious messages that this chapter addresses in confronting the disciplinary status of what counts for theory. If theory is generally the writing of a foundation, no matter how provisional, the frames of intelligibility by which any anthology represents the domain of theory is the crucial gesture. Indeed, the frames count for more 191

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than we might like, and the general editor of the Norton anthology, Vincent Leitch, has very shrewdly outlined some of the framing possibilities for any anthology in his chapter “Framing Theory” in Theory Matters. I am going to elaborate on the theoretical problems of framing later, but first I want to note in Leitch’s representation of his own aims in the Norton anthology the repetition of the most commonly naturalized frame (so “natural” that it doesn’t even count among the five structuring frames that Leitch names): that of “literature programs” or “literary criticism.” This is a reiteration that tends to perpetuate the institutional blindness to perhaps the most striking material problem affecting the actual labor of teachers and students in English departments: the split between literature and composition (which I elaborate on in the next chapter) sustained by unequal kinds of contractual arrangements. Even more, the category of the “literary” is exactly that which has most come undone under the refracting lenses of many different theories. And even more important from a labor perspective, when so many workers in English departments have been devalued by that very frame, how could it not be that composition, literacy, and rhetoric practitioners would not be offended when so few composition theorists appear in this magisterial anthology, when the various alternative, topical tables of contents have no reference to composition? The one subhead for “Rhetoric” omits many of the key figures in the history of rhetoric, especially those pertinent to rhetorical theory, and not one of the thirteen names in this category could be called a compositionist. The answer cannot just be so simple as that there are no significant thinkers now or in the historical hit parade of influential theorists to gain rights of inclusion. Of course, the frame is not so rigid that the anthology does not include authors and texts outside the field of English and literature, although most of those texts all bear upon the category of reading the literary. That is to say, even in those “outside” cases, such as the selection from Pierre Bourdieu, the chapter culled from his massive book Distinction attends to the “judgment of Taste” as a way of linking this work more directly to the critique of belles lettres category of literature and its links to social status. In short, what gets left out are Bourdieu’s more institutional critiques of orthodoxy, the habitas, and his more recent critical work on globalization, even though the latter is where Leitch finds Bourdieu’s most valuable contribution. 2 I want to be very clear that in making this charge I realize that the real problem is not peculiar to the Norton anthology but is “paradigmatic” of nearly every theory anthology that has thus far been produced. Even when so many of the theories within the covers of the anthologies enact 192

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“crossovers,” “hybrids,” and “pastiches” (Leitch, Theory Matters 74) in the process of opening “unstable and proliferating cross-disciplinary sites” (Leitch, Theory Matters 38), most theory anthologies have either glossed over or ignored the most significant division within English departments represented by the too often separate trajectories of literary theory and rhetorical theory, poetics and rhetoric, reading and writing. The theories sweep with abandon through philosophy, literature, history, anthropology, psychology, economics, sociology but commonly sweep under the framing rug the most tangible division within the English department. It may be just my idiosyncratic tastes registering when I find in most anthologies of theory no signs of Thomas Kuhn, Paulo Freire, literacy studies, composition theory, ecocriticism, or the academic labor movement, but I believe these figures and areas represent significant problems that call for considerable theoretical investigation for anyone working in English departments. Nevertheless, in the disciplinary frames developed by the most magisterial of theory anthologies as well as by virtually every other theory anthology, it is as if the labor problem plaguing the discipline and the university, for that matter, were not worthy of the theory canon. But I am getting ahead of myself. A key issue for every anthology is its belatedness, its appearance on the scene when the performance has shifted to another stage. This is one of the effects registered by Jeffrey Williams’s invocation of the “post,” and he colors his term posttheory with irony, since his professional identity is clearly as a theorist rather than, say, a modernist. What he implies, however, is that we have all lost the hope that some theory (Stanley Fish calls it “Theory Hope”) might get it right and thus form the basis for a new paradigm, a new disciplinary formation, that we might all then cohabit more peacefully. To the extent that some people had such hopes for a grand theory that might someday produce the ultimately unified modern university, few do today, and that is exactly the sense of “post” that Williams refers to in his generational title. But if so, what are we to do or say about a project like the Norton anthology that so clearly sets out to map the territory and establish its boundaries despite all the editorial qualifications? That is, this enormous text tries to be comprehensive, tries to theorize a foundation for theory and thus the canon of those who should be included. But the problem is that any such foundation becomes inadequate to its own task, and the canon is outdated hardly before the book leaves the shrink-wrap. Theory anthologies try to account for the historical rise and significance of theory within the humanities, while at the same time, as Kuhn puts 193

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it with respect to the “hard” fields, textbooks tend to efface the previous history by describing science in terms exclusively of the latest paradigm, not its historical evolution. In this sense, paradigms serve to decontextualize knowledge to the extent that such forms of knowing can be disseminated without respect to their contextual origins. That so few of the leading theory anthologies, including the Norton, even include a piece by Kuhn, whose work remains one of the most influential and widely disseminated theoretical studies since the mid-twentieth century, is another sign of the ties that bind theory to the disaggregating frames of the literary. This may all seem “natural” enough when the category of the literary has served as such a prominent territory marker for work within English departments, but the trouble begins when the category itself becomes even more contestable and unable to patrol its own borders. Kuhn himself was one of the first to fully understand the huge significance of textbooks, and anthologies, as part of the material practice of the reproduction of paradigms, conventions, and disciplinary orthodoxies. It is in this broader context that I wish to situate this investigation of theory anthologies, in short, the production of textbooks for course use and the kinds of labor involved in all dimensions of this complex social practice as legitimated by the general terms of the modern knowledge contract. According to Kuhn, textbooks in the sciences represent “normal practice”: they “mop up” the predictable results of paradigmatic problem solving once a new paradigm has been established and exemplified. Theory anthologists no doubt experience some of this satisfaction. Their “mop-up” work consists of selecting representative essays that have been written by a wide range of writers in different social, historical, and intellectual contexts for different audiences and for different purposes and somehow re-present them as exemplary models of relatively stable schools and methods that can now be studied independently of the contexts in which they were composed (see Kuhn, Structure 137). This is not an easy task, since many of the theorists resist the paradigmatic school serving to contain them. I want to be clear that I don’t believe the answer is simply to abandon the often valuable work that anthologizers perform by making such resources available, just as the entire argument of this book is not a simple abandonment of disciplinarity, even if it were possible, which it is not. Rather, one of the primary goals of my investigation is to recognize and overcome as many of the forms of “anthology disdain” that Williams describes (see his “Anthology Disdain”). Such institutionalized disdain is an inevitable byproduct of the function of disciplinarity operating according to the terms of 194

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the modern knowledge contract: although anthologies represent an objectified version of a disciplinary terrain mapped out by the received products of research, these texts themselves do not constitute disciplinary research but circulate within the subdisciplinary arena of teaching. A key phase, therefore, of transforming academic labor injustices must address the quality and value of professional work pertaining to anthologies, and theoretical reflection on the limits of the disciplinary function of anthologies should lead us to amend certain characteristics of their production and significantly modify their use in the classroom. But, perhaps more important, it suggests the kinds of changes in work, labor, and contractual language necessary to produce new kinds of resources for a different kind of university. In short, anthologizing is an enabling as well as a constraining activity, which is the basic virtue and vice of disciplinary work in general. Without a clear sense of how to negotiate both dimensions of this double bind, we are much more likely, even if inadvertently or unconsciously, to enact the constraining limits and thus to intensify the socially deleterious effects of the most “innovative” theoretical models. Theorizing resists at every turn the containers in which we package Theory (see Williams, “Packaging Theory”). My argument is that the theorists who compose anthologies have tended to fall back on a more limited, Kuhnified version of paradigms to justify their inevitably decontextualized collection of Theories. A revised theory of the place of disciplinary paradigms within the range of professional tasks evident in a broader spectrum of university labor (such as I proposed in chapter 3) would help to mediate these problems by resituating the work of theorizing within the rhetorical and political contexts of their uses and adaptations. But without such revisions the “Kuhnified,” constraining limitations of most anthologies register in the difficulty they have in actually engaging nonmodern, deeply contextualized forms of theorizing that are crucial to much of the work we do in the humanities. In an age of disaggregation the aggregating function of anthologies must be more effectively attuned to the play between modern and nonmodern domains of work within the rapidly transforming conditions of the modern university in which some domains of important professional work cannot be contractually specified when reduced to the academic disciplinary economy of value. As a labor problem, theorizing and justifying our work as part of the social contract for higher education becomes even more crucial to the role that the humanities play in this globalized age of empire. When theory anthologies circulate among that complex network of social relations that 195

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extend through and beyond the porous walls of the modern university, we must be particularly attentive to the kinds of work such texts both enable and constrain. The Double Bind of Theory Anthologies All contemporary theory anthologies confront Kuhn’s “essential tension” as an institutional double bind: they must inevitably do two things at once, both of which are mutually contradictory. On the one hand, many of the theoretical essays included in these anthologies tend to challenge, cross, or disrupt disciplinary borders; on the other, anthologizing itself cannot avoid its essentially disciplinary function. Much of what counts for theoretical discourse implicitly, if not explicitly, offers a critique of traditional academic disciplines and advocates implicitly, if not explicitly, a rescripting of the knowledge contract. Selecting, reproducing, and contextualizing a set of theoretical essays in an anthology serves to “discipline” those same theories under the legitimating powers of the traditional knowledge contract. The “theory canon” supposedly represents a set of paradigmatic essays exemplifying specific schools and methods of theory or exemplary figures—“Magisters” (Sosnoski, Token Professionals) or “sublime masters” (Bové)—that rise above the fray. The essays themselves often resist the constraining dimensions of the methodological parameters that supposedly warrant their inclusion as representative instances of the “schools” of thought under which rubric they have been anthologized in the first place. The editors of a theory anthology are inevitably “obeying a double bind: always historicize, but always ask compared to what” (Johnson 175). In short, many theories critique the normal practices of modern disciplines, while the anthologies themselves serve the modern function of trying to normalize the theories. Modern disciplinary containers fight with the nonmodern cultures of diversity waiting to break out at every seam. This disciplinary double bind is the characteristic condition of the production and dissemination of anthologies of theory. As we move from the sciences to the humanities the efforts to anthologize literary and cultural theory operate as a special instance of textbook production. When combined with textbooks in primary, secondary, and higher education, anthologies provide the institutional resources to regulate disciplinary practices by representing the objects and methods of specific subdisciplines within the field of English studies. Thus, a writing handbook, or an introduction to literature textbook, or an American literature anthology, or a theory anthology often defines by default, if not 196

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by explicit articulation, the subject matter for specific specialties. When commercial rather than academic presses write contracts for textbooks that determine field parameters, we can begin to understand the links between capital, labor, and disciplinary parameters. Indeed, a number of recent critical studies have come to recognize the significance of textbook production as one of the principal means for creating and sustaining distinct academic disciplines. 3 As W. Ross Winterowd contends, “It is simply and undeniably the case that textbooks for English classes are massively influential, establishing the canon or reinforcing canonical traditions, instilling attitudes toward literature and language, and determining how both literature and composition will be taught” (34). The determining effect of a textbook proceeds from its positive presentation of the status and procedures of a given normal practice. David Bleich explains that “most textbooks— physical science, social science, humanities, and writing—retain one feature in common: the presentation takes place in the discourse of direct instruction. A textbook is assumed to tell students what is the case, what they should do when they have to write essays or other kinds of papers. . . . The ‘voices’ of science and writing textbooks are declarative and directive. Knowledge as textbooks represent it is not contingent on the experiences of the readership” (16). Of course, anthologies of theory do not have the same wide circulation as do general textbooks for first- and second-year undergraduate students. But theory anthologies often serve as textbooks for upper-division undergraduate and graduate English courses in literary and cultural theory, just as literary anthologies serve as textbooks for survey courses. Therefore, they tend to partake of the “declarative and directive” explication of theoretical knowledge as an identifiable disciplinary terrain while simultaneously including essays that critique and resist the “declarative and directive” modes of proposition, explication, and knowledge. 4 Furthermore, some of the leading anthologies of theory explicitly present themselves as providing the resources necessary for teachers to change traditional normal practices in English studies, while at the same time the anthologies must necessarily function to consolidate and discipline innovative new directions in theoretical discourse in order to make them understandable to a wider audience of English teachers, scholars, and students. But there are special problems encountered by any field-specific attempt to anthologize theory as an emerging enterprise that so disrupts the borders of fields not just by intellectual eclecticism but by challenging the contractual obligations that maintain institutional boundaries. More than 197

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any other kind of anthology, theory anthologies challenge the disciplinary frames by which other textbook-size anthologies can delimit their subject matter. For example, consider the highly influential, two-volume Heath Anthology of American Literature. Even as it stretches the nature and boundaries of what it means to be “American” and what qualifies as “literature” and explicitly aims to expand the canon of multicultural American literatures, such a project can more justifiably use those categories as a disciplinary premise. Within those frames the Heath anthology consists of more than six thousand pages; its ostensible field parameters delimit the material included to literatures written in English within the continental United States over a roughly five hundred year period. 5 Even though what it includes is vastly smaller than what it excludes, the size of the volumes still allows for a significant degree of contextualization within the social and historical conditions in which those literatures emerged. Theory, on the other hand, has no such institutional status to begin with and thus faces very particular kinds of framing problems. A comprehensive anthology like the Norton tries to “cover” not five hundred years in one nation but two thousand five hundred years in many nations and several continents, and it includes writers identified with more than half a dozen academic fields, even though the focus is clearly on the Western tradition of theory and criticism. The task, then, of writing a foundational theory for the anthologizing of theory is a monumental task—the parameters are stretched way beyond those available to various anthologies of literature, since nationality and periodization provide relative frameworks that “theory” can never easily fall back on. Consequently, most theory anthologies try to manage this problem by still deploying recognizable disciplinary “paradigms,” typically, some version of either the historical chronology or the schools and methods frames that tend to be the unavoidable organizational possibilities for these projects. My position, however, is that if we more fully theorize how the common paradigms operate under the modern knowledge contract, we can perhaps better revise both the scholarly production and classroom uses of these beasts. Centripetal Paradigms and Centrifugal Theories When we turn to the production and consumption of theory anthologies, we can specify at least two overlapping levels at which paradigms can be seen to work as disciplinizing forces. First, at the level of the organization of the anthology itself, chronological, historical paradigms, on the one hand, or paradigms of specific schools of theory, on the other, often justify 198

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sectional headings and groupings. 6 Second, at the curricular level, theory anthologies provide the objects and the methods, the exemplars and the symbolic generalizations, and thus the disciplinary space required for the normal practice of teaching literary theory as a disciplinary specialty within English departments. In many instances anthologies also extend the range of possible practices by making new resources readily available. In this section I focus primarily on the first, organizational level, since the function of anthologies at the curricular level follows logically from the former. I later turn to the pedagogical and curricular dimension that more fully opens these works to their institutional uses with respect to the work of both students and teachers. Although the editors of the anthologies may never use the word “paradigm,” my contention is that the Kuhnification of the humanities operates implicitly in the paradigmatic presuppositions that justify the organizing principles for these books. That is, just as most English curricula retain the basic structuring principles of period and genre as a disciplinary normal practice, theory anthologies generally use one or both of these principles. The periodizing paradigm leads to the chronological arrangement of essays. 7 Williams colorfully named this kind of historical organizing principle the “hall of fame” model, which accurately captures the parallels between the sports world’s enshrinement of heroic figures and the glamorizing of “theory heroes” in the academic star system (“Packaging Theory”; Shumway, “Star System”). Most of the anthologies that provide an historical overview of criticism and theory, beginning, say, with Plato and Aristotle, use some version of chronological structuring, sometimes naming periods (classical, medieval, Renaissance, neoclassical, romantic, etc.) much as a literary anthology might do. These can be valuable resources, but, again, it all depends on how they are used within the classroom. As I have argued elsewhere, it can be a sterile and futile exercise to try in a single semester course to survey 2,500 years of critical theory by following the historical paradigm structuring the anthology (“Ancients and Moderns”). The construction of an historical sequence of highly selective or representative essays seems so “natural” that it can conceal the arbitrariness of the selection process itself. Decontextualized from their social and historical situations, brief excerpts from various philosophers and critics will often seem quaint, archaic, and irrelevant to many students. 8 We have to intervene by using alternative goals and practices in teaching to avoid this kind of disciplinary deadliness. I return to the question of how and whether to use these anthologies in the classroom in the final section of this chapter. 199

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When it comes to contemporary theory, the anthologists have, with some notable exceptions (e.g., The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism; Critical Theory since Plato), abandoned the chronological paradigm. Instead, the common practice is to divide the text into sections on the basis of paradigmatic schools and methods. In some anthologies sections are designated as themes and issues (e.g., “Politics, Ideology, Cultural History,” Lodge and Wood viii), although the contents of these sections typically include works by those theories that advocate the use of these categories as foundational terms (such as Marxism and New Historicism) rather than a cluster of essays that both advocate and contest those terms. Vincent Leitch calls this the “significant problems” frame, and he is certainly right that when reduced to a history of ideas approach it tends to decontextualize the problems from the social situations in which they emerge, “separating ideas from complex intertextual networks as well as from material contexts” (Theory Matters 37). To this extent I would suggest that the “significant problems” frame as a history of ideas model simply reiterates the deeper schools and methods paradigm because the structuring of significant ideas tends to organize itself according to the founding schools of thought: central “ideas” are circulated by the schools that produce them in the first place. In contrast to these rarefied histories of ideas, as I argue later, an expanded sense of a “problem-posing” frame would be a welcome addition to what we now have. But, given the typical schools and methods frame, there are sections on structuralism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, New Historicism, postcolonialism, gay and lesbian studies, and so on. Williams renames this the “food-group” or “namebrand” structuring principle, thus highlighting the marketing strategy (“Packaging Theory” 288) necessary for the quick take or rapid consumption of products. The “liberating” plurality of Kuhnian paradigms seems ideally suited to justify exactly this diversity of theoretical models divorced from any specific circumstances of their uses. Thus, an anthology may appear clearly organized by the sections divided into specific schools and methods, even though a given essay captured, say, under the “Reader Response” heading might equally seem to exemplify a feminist and/or New Historicist perspective. 9 Indeed, in their introductory and supporting frameworks the anthologizers themselves tend to perform, contrapuntally if not simultaneously, two seemingly contradictory tasks in order to negotiate the double bind of disciplinary containment, on the one hand, and cross-disciplinary dispersion, on the other. The editors must first perform the centripetal functions of inventing the definitional terms with sufficient scope to contain all the 200

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material in the volume. They must also perform the centrifugal, dispersive function by implementing some kind of conversational model of “putting in dialogue” the differences between the paradigms so as to emphasize exactly their plurality and diversity. 10 A brief example drawn from one of the most well informed theory anthologies, the fourth edition of Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies, edited by Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, should help us to see how these tensions are negotiated in practice. One of the many virtues of this book is its consistent emphasis that “the way we understand and interpret texts and even the assessing of our emotions in this process exist in bounded and defining contexts of culture, history, and social relations” (Davis and Schleifer, Contemporary Literary Criticism 1). This [201], (12) contextualizing gesture theoretically allows for social and historical differences even when the inclusion of any essay necessarily decontextualizes it from its original context. Davis and Schleifer aim for their anthology Lines: 141 to 147 to promulgate innovative new models of cultural studies, especially the ——— kind of “cultural critique” they describe and exemplify in their own writing 12.6pt PgVar (see their book Criticism and Culture). I share many of their stated aims and ——— intentions, so what follows is intended not as a refutation of their work Normal Page but as a call to further qualify their claims in order to enhance the material * PgEnds: Eject consequences of their anthology. Without such qualifications I believe it is far less likely that the volume actually achieves the critical goals they aim for among their intended audience of students and nontheorists. Some of these [201], (12) less desirable rhetorical effects arise because of the limitations that operate implicitly through the underlying disciplinary presumptions sustained by the Kuhnification of the humanities. For instance, even in their rhetorical efforts to contextualize theory in the above passage, the inclusion of the words “bounded and defining” registers the self-regulating and inclusive nature of Kuhn’s notion of paradigms. Paradigmatic theoretical models operate, then, to bind and define the possibilities for theory that can yield highly productive work when the theory fits the situation under investigation. But more often than not the paradigmatic binding happens by moving away from the lived experiences and actual theorizing activities of students and other nonspecialists where multiple and overlapping contexts often yield ideological contradictions more than bound and defined paradigms. But on the scale of theory anthologies Davis and Schleifer are among the most self-reflective, so it is necessary to take a closer look at some of the critical moves they make in framing the anthology. 201

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In their centripetal rhetoric of containment they begin their “General Introduction” to “The Nature of Literary Study” by explaining that “literary study . . . must be approached as a body of knowledge and as a discipline of inquiry, the ‘disciplinary’ practice of literary criticism” (Davis and Schleifer, Contemporary Literary Criticism 1). From the perspective of anyone studying the discipline of English studies this seems unobjectionable. After all, it follows logically from the general practice of disciplinary normalization: once it became a recognized department during the late nineteenth century, English studies has strained to define itself “in its own terms” as a distinctive kind of knowledge so that it could compete equally under the terms of the knowledge contract with the scientific paradigms for its rightful place in the university. But the theorists Davis and Schleifer include in the anthology refuse to do just that: they refuse, that is, to understand literary study on its own terms, and it is this tension between intrinsic definitions and extrinsic theories that their version of cultural critique seeks to negotiate. Indeed, many of the theorists in the volume are “extrinsic” to the field of English: Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Donna Haraway, James Clifford, and others. In contrast to this dispersive theoretical array the previous generation of New Critics like John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, René Wellek, and Austin Warren were adamant about their concern for intrinsic criteria. For instance, in their magisterial Theory of Literature (1947) Wellek and Warren contrast “The Extrinsic Approach to the Study of Literature” to “The Intrinsic Study of Literature,” thus privileging the latter over the former. As might be expected, more than half of the book is devoted to the concluding fourth section on intrinsic methods of analysis, which begins with the statement: “The natural and sensible starting point for work in literary scholarship is the interpretation and analysis of the works of literature themselves” (Wellek and Warren 127). In the third section they briefly review the apparent benefits of the extrinsic methods of relating literature to biography, psychology, society, ideas, and the other arts with the intent in each case of showing how such extrinsic methods are not as reliable as the “natural and sensible” focus on the intrinsic method of analysis. The disciplinary force of these arguments was considerable in establishing literature as an identifiable body of objects, and thus the New Critics enjoyed a period of relative stability, or normal practice, prior to the theory turbulence shipping out of France and Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. That’s when the trouble began or at least got worse on most disciplinary scales. No doubt in our post-Kuhnian age most English practitioners have abandoned the 202

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hope that there might be a single definition suitable for everyone in an English department. Nevertheless, Kuhn’s theory of paradigms has often served to rescue the otherwise improbable intellectual status and nebulous departmental justification for “English” as a field. To briefly review the basic Kuhnian sense of a paradigm, it signifies the disciplinary matrix whereby symbolic generalizations, models, exemplars, and shared community values mediate the relations between the disciplinary objects and the methods by which those objects are constituted. To this extent a Kuhnian paradigm can be described so as to emphasize either its object or its method, and by shifting the emphasis to methodology one can provide relative stability to an otherwise chaotic field by narrowing its practice to a set of recognizable theoretical schools, systems, or paradigms. 11 Even if a theory arrives from outside the field of English (as is usually the case), under the rubric of paradigms it becomes possible to conceive of a school or method as relatively autonomous, like a paradigm, independent of its social contexts of production and thus possible to study “in its own terms.” Of course, the latter, well-worn phrase is really a mystification to the extent that it obscures the material force of the socially constructed terms of the knowledge contract that sustains departmental organization and funding. By thus emphasizing method over object, various “interpretive communities” could be distinguished that applied their methods to a wide range of literary, cultural, and rhetorical objects. In short, the specificity of method made up for the lost specificity of the “aesthetic” object, and such alterations call for no substantial changes in the terms of the modern knowledge contract. The tolerant diversity of such subspecialties based on theoretical paradigms could be added on to the basic period and genre organization of English departments, and to this extent the Kuhnification of the humanities may have aided the departmental survival of English by containing theoretical innovation under the “field coverage” principle of disciplinary labor (Graff, Professing Literature). Davis and Schleifer avoid any attempt to define the entire field of English. The relations of writing, composition, and rhetoric in English studies fall away, as in most theory anthologies, as they focus on delimiting the broad subfield of literary studies and, within that, the even narrower arena of literary criticism. The loss of rhetorical theory is not just incidental, because rhetoric inevitably calls attention to the audience and context of actual language users, literary or otherwise. They thus begin their introduction to the section “What Is Literary Studies?” in the centripetal mode by drawing on the work of one of the great synthesizers of the field, Northrop Frye: 203

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“A necessary component of criticism as the study of literature and other forms of discourse and language involves giving attention to the methods of understanding. Literary criticism, as opposed to the more general and, as Northrop Frye says, the more ‘philosophical’ study of aesthetics, aims at developing, as we noted in the General Introduction to this book, definitions of ‘literature’ and methods of ‘reading’ ” (Davis and Schleifer, Contemporary Literary Criticism 21). This assertion is supposed to be so general as to “contain” virtually all viable forms of what can be called “literary criticism.” And since the openness of this claim doesn’t specify which definition of literature or which method of reading, it seems plural and tolerant. Within this general framework the anthologizers can thereby organize the volume according to numerous different schools, methods, and paradigms. Davis and Schleifer offer a model of performance theory similar to what I advocated in chapter 3 as a method for how students might encounter the dizzying array and centrifugal forces represented in the volume, but their acceptance of an unrevised, narrow version of Kuhnian paradigms tends to constrict student/apprentice performances. The task of students is to “try on” one theory or paradigm after another by seeing the theory they encounter in its performative dimension. Warning against the possibility of regarding the sometimes esoteric theories “as simply a body of knowledge to be learned, in which failure is always lurking,” Davis and Schliefer draw on Shoshana Felman’s “ ‘performative’ version of learning that encourages students to view a course in criticism as a tour on which they will explore a number of worlds from the ‘inside’ ” (Contemporary Literary Criticism xi). That there is an identifiable “inside” to these theoretical “worlds” suggests the kind of logic Kuhn uses to identify the internal consistency of socially constructed paradigms. Recall that, as I suggested in chapter 3, Judith Butler appeals to performance theory precisely because it allows us to see that the internal consistency is less self-contained than we might imagine because “that very interiority is an effect and function of a decidedly public and social discourse” (Gender Trouble 173). Such consistency becomes especially problematical when referring to schools of theory. Nevertheless, Davis and Schleifer suggest that “becoming a ‘member’ of the critical school we are studying constitutes a methodological wager that valuable insight can be gained from a sympathetic entry into a critical system, as opposed to an ‘objective’ scrutiny of a foreign object” (Contemporary Literary Criticism xi). While it certainly seems worthwhile to advocate a “sympathetic entry” into whatever one is studying, the problem is that these “schools” are less homogenized, less paradigmatically enclosed than the benign word “school” 204

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would indicate (see Sosnoski, “Theory Junkyard”). To suggest that there are “critical systems” even further stretches the degree of methodological consistency within a given “school.” Many schools are simply not systematic, especially if you examine in any detail the work of specific critics, because the specificity itself often reveals the mix of academic and vernacular, disciplinary and nondisciplinary, modern and nonmodern practices that slips out of the more abstract registers of theoretical generalizations. If this is the case, it explains why it is so hard to become a “member” of a critical school, even when we put membership in quotation marks. Taking a revised and more critical view of the Kuhnian perspective, to perform as if within the disciplinary paradigm of a theoretical “school” may be more a question of adopting the “arrested social movement” (Fuller, Thomas Kuhn 37) of the disciplined community of theorists occupying relatively privileged places in the academic hierarchy. In this light, “we must question, then, the normalizing impulses that govern our critical habits, especially when we remember their cruel effects” (Sosnoski and Wiederhold 82). That normalizing effects can be “cruel” might seem overstated to some, but, as I suggested in chapter 3, Kuhn’s use of the term community tends to gloss the elements of fear and anxiety that often operate to constrain even the best of scientific inquiry. As Steve Fuller describes the conservative pull of much paradigmatic work, “On closer inspection, a mafia mentality turns out to be at work, itself another by-product of the liberalization of science. Thus, in good Hobbesian fashion, the supposed ‘community’ of science refers to little more than the fact that everyone equally suffers under the same threat” (Governance 21). One may wish to discount these expressions as paranoid versions of the disciplined university, but it is difficult to discredit the fact that many persons do experience the exclusive nature of theoretical schools as if they were self-selective cults. The “cult effect” happens when the parameters of societal modernity registered in bureaucratic forms of normalization cut off the experiential terrain of the nonmodern. As bell hooks puts it, many experiences that fall outside the domains of the modern can be more of a sanctuary from oppression than a cult that enforces obeisance. While Davis and Schleifer counsel wisely that work in theory is often “an articulation of value, and a call to action,” that “criticism may become something that one tries out, tries on, lives in, and lives through,” and that “it is an experience that one actively engages in rather than a difficulty that one avoids or fends off ” (Contemporary Literary Criticism xii), it is also crucial to recognize that avoiding and fending off can often be vital acts of resistance 205

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and theorizing against the pressures of the disciplinary containments. To “live in” and to “live through” a paradigm can be literally impossible for most students whose backgrounds, education, life experiences, and access to material resources may be so different from the Master Critics they are asked to emulate that they can only perform a kind of subservient imitation in hopes that they might eventually be disciplined into the guild after a sufficient period of obedience to the paradigmatic models. The uses and abuses of anthologies directly become labor questions when we attend to their function in material university settings. Establishing disciplinary affiliation with those models is a more difficult process than merely joining a scholarly society or proclaiming a methodological allegiance, however necessary those professional steps may be. But as I elaborate in the next section, there are alternatives to the disciplined presentation of Master Critics exemplifying theoretical schools, and they call for both the modification of the uses of anthologies in the classroom and a problem-posing approach to producing them in the first place. Getting beyond the Magister in the Paradigm: Identifying Problem Clusters I want to return now to Vincent Leitch’s articulation of one of the five frames he suggests can be utilized in the construction of a theory anthology, what he calls the “significant problems” frame. As I suggested, Leitch accurately describes the limitations of this frame when it reduces its content to a thin “history of ideas” that would indeed decontextualize theory further from its material circumstances of production. But, in fact, there are few anthologies that actually use this model of significant problems as Leitch describes it except for some of the early anthologies from the 1960s and 1970s such as Charles Kaplan’s 1964 first edition of Criticism: Major Statements. As for contemporary anthologies, after, say, 1980 few of them take the old “history of ideas” model of organization as a frame, so it would be a misnomer to say that this model functions as a paradigm or normal practice for the construction of theory anthologies. But by calling it “significant problems” rather than “problem posing,” Leitch’s terminology may successfully name a weakly theorized frame deployed by only a few of the early theory anthologizers. The name itself tends to deplete the more radical, alternative potential of developing innovative anthologies that more fully address the situated, contextual nature of theorizing. 12 A problem-posing orientation simply abandons the unrealistic hope of trying to “cover” the vast and undemarcatable terrain of whatever it is we call 206

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Theory and instead seeks to contextualize theoretical issues by including a variety of texts that cluster around the problem being addressed within specific historical periods and situations. No current anthology deploys that frame, at least in the way I conceive of it. In order to illustrate what such a problem-posing frame might look like I briefly outline my general process of developing what I call “problem clusters” as a way of contextualizing key problems. As I suggested in the preface, I have organized each of the chapters in this book as a specific instance of problem clusters. In the context of theory anthologies the possibilities are endless here, so it is always important that any teacher, like any anthologizer, make explicit his or her “commitment or narrative investment” (Williams, “Packaging Theory” 291). Teachers and anthologizers both confront the need to commit their course engagements to significant historical problems that remain important in today’s professional life of English departments. In what follows I first sketch in the outlines of one of the problem clusters called “aesthetics and politics, 1770–1830” that I have developed in my own teaching of theory courses. My point is less a matter of modeling an “exemplary” theory scenario, since most theory instructors have developed their own clusters and modules that no doubt achieve many of the pedagogical goals represented by my own example. Rather, my purpose is to illustrate how the goals of a multivalent pedagogy inevitably involve a confrontation with the problem of contextualization characteristic of any anthology. After describing how I frame this cluster along three narrative lines, I then describe how I further contextualize the interpretive problems within my own multivalent teaching situation with its own particular graduate student population and institutional demands. I have designed the aesthetics and politics, 1770–1830 cluster to be adaptable to a three- to six-week segment of any number of courses but most often within the course I teach on the history and theory of criticism, where it usually serves as Cultural Turn II. (Cultural Turn I is set in ancient Greece, 425–350 b.c., and Cultural Turn III draws on one of the various contemporary problem clusters I have developed.) 13 The course itself is a first-year introductory course to literary and cultural theory for doctoral students, but it is easily adapted, as I sometimes have, to undergraduate and master’s-level courses. My commitment to this cluster stems from my assessment that what happened in that period in Europe with respect to the relations between aesthetics and politics deeply affected how English departments came to be and set most of the contractually negotiable terms that we continue to wrangle over in debates about the disciplinary status 207

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of our field. Of course, I am borrowing that commitment from Raymond Williams, who so potently showed us in Culture and Society that many of the new or redefined terms for the modern era emerged during this period: democracy, aesthetics, creativity, imagination, labor, class, and literature all took on new meanings and shaped social and political life in significant ways. Many of us in the field share an investment in this cluster simply because the particular period under scrutiny so deeply contributed to who we are as a discipline that we can get upended pretty easily unless we attend to the consequences of the discourse emerging from this moment in cultural history. Without some knowledge of this formative period it is difficult to understand many of the current debates: historical contexts bleed into each other in complex ways, which is exactly what most contemporary theories now teach us. Yet none of the theory anthologies we now have enables me to teach this cluster. One might object that my idiosyncratic tastes are the problem, so my argument hinges on the persuasiveness of my contention that the problem runs deeper than a matter of personal taste, or one could counter that I should not expect anthologies to be so contextually rich. But it is the latter claim that I most wish to refute: I believe that there is no practical reason that any number of theory anthologies might not adopt the basic principles of the problem-posing cluster design, even if they include contents (and problems) different from the specific ones I have chosen. 14 The general point of a problem cluster is to thicken the representation of a key problem that affects or affected the lives of specific persons or groups of people. My framing rationales also have to articulate how problems arising in historically antecedent situations actually reverberate with problems that we (my students and I) now have in coping with our changing profession. Interest in the past is not antiquarian but activist in the sense that it matters to us now as we act on and in the field from our various local positions. By necessity this orientation means drawing on texts from different genres (poetry, rhetoric, politics, memoirs, history, philosophy, journalism, etc.) authored during the period as part of the discursive community under study and texts from other periods that address or critique the given historical period. For strategic purposes I have structured three intersecting and overlapping narrative lines that run in and out of this cluster. (Since a syllabus comprises a sequence, it makes sense to play off this inevitable narrative feature rather than simply list a set of readings.) I call these three narrative lines the historical/French Revolution story, the rise of the imagination story, and the legal/authorial/institutional story. All three of these narrative lines can actually be engaged in a six-week sequence; 208

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otherwise, I offer the three narratives that I have “authored” as options for students to navigate, either individually or collectively. Since I am so clearly the “author” or at least the designer of each mininarrative, the students are reading not just the assigned texts but also my own narrative frame, which they are invited to read symptomatically, with resistance, as well as with some necessary empathy for the problems being addressed. The question of what caused me to so link these readings, which may or may not match what the students read off the sequence, becomes part of the dynamic of the classroom exchanges. That is to say, the narrative lines put students in the position of reading with or against the grain of my intentions and commitments as well as with the authors we read (which is the case anyway, even if we don’t consciously theorize it). For the sake of brevity I describe here only the historical line. I typically begin with William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, partly because it so provocatively alters most conventional expectations for poetry even as it works on one level as a theoretical critique of typical Western metaphysical dualisms where the mind, the idea, and the form are more important than the body, the emotion, and the situation. Both Plato and Aristotle are characters in the poem, so it readily links up to the metaphysical discourse it tries to challenge. Blake also wrote it during the time of the French Revolution, so this unusual poem’s concluding “Song of Liberty” speaks to new relations between the poetic imaginary and the political realities of the new democracies. Indeed, “reading” the French Revolution dramatizes a key example of the problem of negotiating aesthetics and politics in any historical text. I then include several different interpretations of that important historical event, and those interpretations differ precisely because of their differing assumptions about the relations between aesthetics, imagination, and poetry, on the one hand, and history, politics, and society, on the other. The binary formulation here arises from the familiar characteristics of the larger frame of Western metaphysics, and since students have generally just completed the cluster on ancient Greek origins of that discourse, these links make more sense. We then read Books 9–14 of The Prelude by William Wordsworth in which he offers an interpretation of the French Revolution as the crucial moment in his narrative of the growth of his own imagination. Significantly, this most canonized of romantic texts is a poem that theorizes what it means to become the kind of poet Wordsworth became. By juxtaposing Wordsworth’s poem with Gayatri Spivak’s theoretical rereading of Wordsworth’s reading of the French Revolution in her essay “Sex and 209

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History in The Prelude,” students encounter a counterview at odds with Wordsworth’s idealized history. Of course, we have to negotiate the difficulties of Spivak’s text, but two of her three main points are not difficult to comprehend: first, that Wordsworth “coped with the experience of the French Revolution by transforming it into an iconic text that he could write and read,” and second, that Wordsworth “suggested that poetry was a better cure for oppression of mankind than political economy or revolution and that his own life had the preordained purpose of teaching mankind this lesson” (In Other Worlds 46). Following Spivak’s invocation of Marx, we then turn to Karl Marx’s revaluation of the political consequences of the French Revolution in his ironically titled polemic of 1845, The Holy Family. And here’s the problem: Wordsworth and Marx offer opposing views, and we can’t simply assimilate them in some easy kind of pluralism. That is, whereas Wordsworth believed that the ideals of liberty and democracy were betrayed by the leaders of the revolution because they failed to live up to the ideals with which they began, Marx counters that it was never a question of betrayal: “The interest of the bourgeoisie, . . . far from having been a ‘failure,’ ‘won’ everything and had ‘effective success,’ however much the ‘pathos’ of it evaporated and the ‘enthusiastic’ flower with which that interest adorned its cradle faded. . . . The Revolution was a ‘failure’ only for the masses which did not find in the political ‘idea’ the idea of its real ‘interest,’ whose real life-principle did not therefore coincide with the life-principle of the Revolution” (McLellan 141). Of course, this is a basic practical lesson in materialist history. I often follow this up by making available Mark Poster’s essay “Furet and the Deconstruction of 1989,” from his book Cultural History and Postmodernity: Disciplinary Readings and Challenges, in order to further explore the complications of aesthetics and politics in the ways that critics, historians, and poets have represented this key historical event. (François Furet is the author of the influential 1978 text, Interpreting the French Revolution.) With respect to the other two narrative lines, let me here just list some of the texts to indicate the kind of material I script into the syllabus. In the case of the “rise of imagination” we read Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, Wordsworth’s preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, the etymological essays on “literature” and “culture” from Raymond Williams’s Keywords, and selections from Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, from Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and from the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. I place the latter texts in juxtaposition with Martha Woodmansee’s critique of authorship, gender, and copyright law during the late eighteenth century 210

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in her book The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics. The latter issue carries over in the legal/authorial/institutional story, so we first take a step back, reading selections from Kant’s The Conflict of the Faculties, Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, selections from Wilhelm von Humboldt’s texts describing his ideas for the founding of the University of Berlin (available online), and thus the influence of the German university on later American adaptations of this influential model, as I suggested in chapter 1. In the longer versions of this cluster I also bring in the work of the Scotsmen George Campbell and Hugh Blair in conjunction with W. Ross Winterowd’s and/or Robert Connor’s assessment of the impact of the rhetoricians that have so commonly been excluded from most every theory anthology. The absence of the rhetoricians, even though they were working on similar issues pertinent to rhetoric and writing and belles lettres, from most theory anthologies reflects the fundamental lack of attention to the rhetorical issues of audience and context as a necessary component of any language use. If we have time I sometimes end this cluster with selections from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, further selections from Marx and Engels’s The German Ideology, and selections from Nietzsche as a kind of forerunner for the contemporary critiques of the romantic relations between aesthetics and politics. The general problem cluster in all these narrative lines hinges on the emerging relations between aesthetics and politics. The older sense of literature as a reference to a general notion of “literacy” appropriate to “men of letters” shifted to those special kinds of imaginative and creative writing ascribed to authors of unusual ability and perceptiveness or genius whose ability rose above the limitations of historical context. We have here, as Spivak puts it, the newly articulated grounds for the formation of the canon of Western literature. The sublime objects of literary imagination take precedence over the messy processes of writing and composition, preparing the ground for the subsequent disciplinary divide characteristic of the history of English studies. We witness the imagination triumphing over the material vulgarity of capitalism, even as Wordsworth freely adopted lines from his sister’s journal, which he then scripted into some of his famous poems, and even as he ignored the real material circumstances of the “rustics” wandering past his cottage who were undergoing forced relocations during the industrial revolution as they moved from the country to the city in search of subsistence work. Of course, some students who have long loved Wordsworth have to negotiate some degree of disappointment or resistance to this reading, but the key point I make is that, in fact, this 211

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self-consciously partial and vested interpretation makes Wordsworth all the more important to read because his accomplishment accounts for the remarkable ways that his poetry engages the key issues of his own historical moment. Wordsworth becomes a kind of exemplary figure in the discourse of romantic poetry that so influenced subsequent generations. Theory then emerges from the contentious discursive environments in which writers in this period contended with historical forces, which means in practice that it did not emerge as an academic discipline or appear strictly in nonfictional forms of argumentation. Multiple genres and multiple contexts crossed with each other. My pedagogical commitment is to dramatize a theoretical reduction that I often formulate as a kind of bumper sticker: “The method of opposition became the mode of incorporation.” The canonized English romantic authors sought to oppose industrial materialism through recourse to the powers of imaginative writing, which could transcend that vulgar history. In the grips of Western metaphysical universalism they offered not philosophy but poetry as the answer to suffering, and they thereby created a new category of the literary whose main method of opposition was to transcend the universal truths of the poetic imagination as a way to stand fast against the contingent and oppressively material world of human suffering. As Spivak points out, when in Book 12 of The Prelude Wordsworth asks the rhetorical question, “Our basic animal wants and the necessities / Which they impose, are these the obstacles?” he rhetorically presumes that the answer is no, so that the material world of needs can be transcended by a new poetics of the imagination. But if we resist this reading and answer yes, indeed, the animal wants and needs of us humans are considerable obstacles, we are led to a much different theory of the place of politics in literature programs. That is, for Wordsworth the “social relations of production cannot touch the inner resources of man. The corollary: Revolutionary politics, seeking to change those social relations, are therefore superfluous; poetry, disclosing man’s inner resources is the only way” (Spivak, In Other Worlds 72). In short, “Wordsworth offers his own poetry as a cure for human oppression and suffering because it teaches one where to look for human value” (Spivak, In Other Worlds 70). There are significant institutional consequences of these aesthetic theories, and the other two narrative lines begin to draw out some of these effects. For one thing, English departments could eventually claim an independent status on the basis of defining their objects as those kinds of valued writing that rose above the accidents of history. Paradoxically, the historical 212

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forces of capitalism could simply grant a small, contractually authorized, departmental space incorporating such objects, which had little subsequent effect on the material realities of the more powerful operations of capital itself. The ideological function of literature as part of the cultural backbone of nationalism was no doubt true but, in my view, often overestimated on the basis of its material significance, since neither capital nor empire ever depended all that much on literature departments for its exponential growth. Institutionally speaking, however, the consequences were enormous: English departments became normalized as literature departments, so that the important task of teaching writing slipped into its familiar subordinate status as a service function where most of the labor, if not the spiritual calling, of the profession took place. Of course, my investment in this reading of literary history and theory is also aligned with my beliefs about why the academic labor movement is so often untheorized within English departments as well as within the covers of theory anthologies.

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Lines: 229 to 237 The foregoing brief sketch of one of my problem clusters can hardly do justice to the kinds of “deep” learning and “thick” description necessary for any genuine engagement with new materials encountered over the course of a typical five- to six-week segment in a graduate class. I have tendered a thin description of a thick problem if only to suggest the contours of how one might stage such a classroom interaction. The sketch should demonstrate that theory anthologies have not enabled such problem clusters in either of the two dominant organizational paradigms, the chronological or the schools and methods frame. Even more, the cluster on aesthetics and politics links to the rise of literature over composition, reading over writing in English departments, and here, I suggest, lies another significant problem: the noticeable absence of problem-posing frames from most anthologies of theory might just have something to do with the fact that the most extensive theorizing about problem-posing models of education in our field has come from the compositionists. The absence of this entire field and subject from most theory anthologies haunts their theoretical frames just as it reiterates the institutional hierarchy that might be our most pressing professional problem these days, at least with respect to academic labor and the devaluing of nondisciplinary tasks associated with some kinds of writing. No doubt my own selection of texts reflects my own interests and commitments, but that is exactly one of its key virtues. The point is that the problem-posing model of framing theory need not be called on to exemplify 213

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“Theory” as any kind of foundational canon of key figures. In contrast, the unavoidable foundational gesture necessary for the production of coherence in a problem-posing frame would now self-consciously highlight its own foundational problems, which would register as hypotheses of significance. Users of such texts would only appropriate them if they did indeed share a sense of those same key problems, not because they shared some impossible foundation of a canon of heroic figures that stands above the problems the figures themselves addressed in their own historical contexts. But the problem-posing frame would enable such an anthology to have more space for more texts within any given cluster, thus better negotiating the contextualizing problem itself. Even more important, a problem-posing design would be based specifically on uses in the classroom, and every user of a theory anthology necessarily has to construct some frame other than the monumental one that, say, the Norton anthology provides within the anthology itself. The problem with the chronological frame and even with the schools and methods frame is that they must necessarily be reframed within given courses: the frames for these anthologies inevitably give us much more than we want and much less than we need. Despite the severe limitations we have to representations of any given historical moment, we still have much more access to understanding that community than the canonized texts of theory would lead us to believe. And virtually every contemporary theory, from New Historicism, to cultural studies, to feminism, to postcolonialism, warns us about the costs of decontextualization, even if it is in the name of producing a grand new anthology to canonize the uncanny world of theory. Perhaps, given our own institutional problems of defunding and commodification of what remains of the humanities, more users of the university would benefit from more contextualized theory anthologies that could better serve different kinds of work and teaching than the magnum opus approaches. 15 We cannot safely fall back on the scope of canonicity as an excuse for enabling our decontextualizations to proliferate when many of the users of these anthologies will have few of the other contextualizing resources to hand. In the case of the Norton anthology, the general editor, Vincent Leitch, articulates a view compatible with my sense of problem clusters when he says that in designing the Norton the anthologizers “sought to alert students to the problem-oriented nature of theory as a fundamental part of doing theory” (Theory Matters 45). But I would argue that these worthy goals for this magisterial project seem to have not very well materialized themselves in the product itself: they seem to have come secondhand, 214

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ancillary to the canonizing, disciplinary function of creating the hit parade in the first place. How could it be otherwise given the chronological frame? If my own practice is any indication, I use the Norton anthology as a useful archive, reference, and resource manual: the headnotes are extremely well written, they provide good brief introductions even if they can’t possibly solve the decontextualization problems inherent in such an anthology, and there are handy and relatively thorough bibliographical references. Perhaps this is one of the aims of invoking such a theory canon, but when I say the text is unusable I am referring to its pedagogical uses. 16 The absence of rhetorical and writing theory from the anthology itself reflects its lack of theorizing the rhetorical situations pertinent to the audience and the context of the users for which it is ostensibly aimed. I find I can’t possibly use the Norton because I have to add so many of my own additional sources that doing so outweighs the sixty-dollar tab, and I imagine this is the case for many other teachers of theory in English departments. My point is that when we turn to the curricular level and the actual uses of these books in the classroom there will be tremendous variation depending on different institutional settings, curricular designs and requirements, and changing student populations. Multivalent practices such as I described in the previous chapter require different uses of resources and labor. In my own situation (teaching doctoral seminars in the history and theory of criticism at Indiana University of Pennsylvania) I have found the disciplinary double bind perhaps more pronounced than might be the case at a different kind of university. I have used the aesthetics and politics cluster I describe above in both graduate and advanced undergraduate courses in theory, but each time it has to be modified and situated within the working context of my specific institutional setting. The point is that every working situation calls for practical alternatives arising from the necessity of making local, ad hoc, situational adjustments to whatever anthologized resources one might wish to use. At iup most of our doctoral students are already teachers at various twoyear and four-year colleges, so they are already colleagues in the profession with a good bit of practical experience and knowledge of the discipline, and their ages range from early twenties to early sixties. Since most of the positions they occupy or the ones they will be seeking once they graduate are of a generalist nature, they typically have less need to affiliate strongly with a specialized discipline when identifying themselves on the job market. We also have a wide range of international students, so all of our classes are de facto multicultural. Even with this bare sketch it should be apparent that 215

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most of these students do not expect careers teaching one or two graduate seminars per semester at an elite university. In such a context, to design a syllabus by following the contours of a traditional theory anthology is to ensure that these students are not, literally speaking, the audience for whom the anthology was designed. That is, they become situated, as James Sosnoski has configured this problem, as “token professionals” trying to emulate the Master Critics whom they will never become. Now there are those who will object at this point that there are many virtues to be gained from exposure to these Master Critics, to new ways of thinking, to the rigors of the discipline. As I suggested in chapter 2, Stanley Fish, for example, wishes to reinforce the gates to the discipline as a necessary way of screening out those who don’t pass muster. Fish argues that our jobs will disappear if we don’t define the discipline and police the boundaries with all the rigor we can: “Independently of the potent social fact of disciplinary organization we would have nothing to say” (“Them” 165). In much the same spirit David Shumway acknowledges that, given the unavoidable constraints of disciplinary work, we cannot expect dynamism everywhere: “It should go without saying that much of this production is ultimately sterile, and that much is produced that is of little use to anyone beyond the discipline” (“Disciplinary Identities” 106). But for most of my students, accepting that sterility means swallowing a good bit of pain and frustration as they work diligently to emulate what Sosnoski calls the Magister, “a personification of the institution’s ideally orthodox professor” (Token Professionals 74). Of course, the small percentage of graduate students who will be moving into tenure-track jobs in specialized disciplinary areas will have to emulate the paradigmatic models and affiliate as strongly as possible with the leading figures in those areas. Otherwise they will risk being “disaffiliated,” “those whose affiliations do not mesh with any dominant systems of affiliation” (Di Leo 62). But, even so, the profession is changing so rapidly in some areas that multiple affiliations will be necessary, especially if we begin to see more possibilities for the multivalent university, as I suggested in the previous chapter. For the large percentage of current doctoral students the Magister remains an idealized impossibility, a kind of mythical hero who perfectly represents the exemplary figure behind a Kuhnian paradigm. It’s not always a good idea to try to perform as if one could become the Magister. The effort to reproduce an impossibility can in practice lead exactly to a deadly sterility. From my perspective the Kuhnification of the humanities has justified our tolerance for just this kind of sterility in our “normal practices” when reading and writing so often get 216

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reduced to a decontextualized mimicry of conventional forms legitimated by the knowledge contract. Much of the vitality of our nonmodern domains of experience, home discourses, critical but nondisciplinary practices can and should be contractually recognized as valuable contributions to our working lives, but exclusive reliance on theoretical paradigms can deplete these valuable resources. More than that, many whom Shumway must mean by those “beyond the discipline” are well within the everyday practices and effects of English studies and deeply involved in the nonmodern domains of labor that benefit many users of the university. When we are accused of academic sterility and esoteric jargon by those outside the university, we have a problem with public perception and accountability for what we do. The rhetorical performance of university “arguespeak” is perhaps at its very best when it most engages the academic with the vernacular, the institutional with the more broadly social discourses of everyday life (Graff, Clueless). But too often the sterility is a problem experienced not just by outsiders but by those with varying degrees of investment in the discipline itself: graduate students, undergraduate students, teachers in other subdisciplines. As an alternative, rather than starting with disciplinary definitions that seek to contain the content of the course, I often ask students to begin their coursework with institutional autobiographies, locating themselves in the profession and in their cross-cultural contexts. 17 These inevitably lead to inquiries into the changing social and political circumstances of the modern university and the changing history of the profession: how it got to be where it is and what’s happening now. By thus focusing first on the students’ own problems acquiring allegiances with particular and often conflicting disciplines and methodologies, a somewhat different set of institutionally self-reflective concerns typically arises. One can more effectively negotiate the multivalent direction of interests when the effort is made to hear those interests. I list here three interrelated issues that my students repeatedly express concern about, yet these are also areas that the traditional anthologies tend not to address: (1) the increasing corporatization and bureaucratization of the university in the twenty-first century and the effect on the general mission of English studies, including the kinds of skills students will need for a changing job market; (2) the historically painful splits between literature, composition, creative writing, and technical writing; and (3) the shift from print to electronic environments and the impact of technology on teaching the humanities. My response has been to develop problem clusters that address each of these needs. But no theory anthology that I know of provides much of a resource to address the main 217

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concerns my students have themselves theorized from their own experience of beginning to participate in the profession. Most obviously, the locus of these concerns is on the institutionalization of English studies. I take this to be an indication that we would be wise to focus a good bit of our theorizing and teaching in these areas rather than limit it to the concern for theories of reading literature and/or culture that have guided most traditional anthologies. Taken together, these three areas of inquiry open some challenging questions about the relevance of what Stephen North has called “College English Teaching, Inc.” 18 North adapts Sosnoski’s figure of the Magister to argue that graduate studies in English has historically prepared students by training them in the “Magisterial Curriculum” that was quite pointedly developed through exclusion of leading rhetorical theorists. 19 Simply put, this curriculum was designed to perpetuate the discipline in a series of courses in which students could be taught to imitate the reading practices of Master Critics in the interpretation of the historical coverage of canonized writers in different periods and genres. This is how the romantic aesthetic theories contributed to the institutional disciplining of the objects suitable for English departments. Up to about 1972 this model tended to function pretty well, even as critics trained in this tradition had to adapt as best they could to teaching composition courses when they had to, but generally, the idea of the Magister was to rise above the concerns of writing and pedagogy by teaching graduate seminars in one’s literary specialty. During the post World War II expansion of the university new fields could simply be added to the basic model, as if adding a new paradigm for a new subdiscipline, whether it were theory, women’s studies, or postcolonialism. But in the period of “contraction” after 1972, the job market for English Ph.D.’s crashed as the economy restructured (see chapter 1) and funding practices for higher education shifted significantly from public to private means. The magisterial tradition no longer serves the needs of most students in a changing workforce under new forms of academic capitalism, bureaucratic restraint, fiscal downsizing, multimedia technologies, and changing demographics. The “essential tension” of the Kuhnian disciplinary double binds are intensified when, on the one hand, there is an apparent loss of disciplinary authority and a questioning of borders but, on the other hand, an intensification of institutional and disciplinary boundary disputes as budgets tighten up. Under these conditions graduate students often find themselves preparing for careers that will not likely resemble those of their teachers. Although the rise of composition and rhetoric Ph.D. programs in the past twenty-five 218

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years often serves as an alternative kind of training, the underlying problem of the disciplinary splits between literature, composition, creative writing, and technical writing persistently foregrounds unresolved problems in the profession. But again, most anthologies of theory don’t ever address these concerns. This is true even if one adopts a less-traditional anthology such as David Richter’s Falling into Theory, which explicitly concerns itself with disciplinary issues. What is particularly interesting about this book is that one of its major premises is that “radical changes are afoot in the structure and method of professing literature, along with new ways of organizing traditional disciplines” (Richter, Falling into Theory 12). And Richter uses Kuhn to reassure us that things are not as bad as some say they are: If philosopher Thomas Kuhn is right (and if his ideas about the history of science are applicable to the humanities), there should be nothing too dreadful in the long run about the state of theory into which the field of literary study has fallen. . . . And if the humanities are like the sciences, some new set of professional norms will sooner or later establish itself in the community of literary scholars and teachers, everyone will once more agree on which questions are worth pursuing and how to go about pursuing them, and theoretical discourse will again become optional rather than necessary. (Falling into Theory 12)

Rhetorically speaking, the “everyone” in Richter’s sentence needs considerable qualification, because despite the inclusive reference of the pronoun it is likely to be the elite group of researchers who control the disciplinary norms, hardly anyone from the hoi polloi who inhabit lesser positions in the profession. Although Richter acknowledges that such a consensual model of literary study may never arrive, using Kuhn to reassure us of the limits of disciplinary change is another consequence of the Kuhnification of the humanities. It leads us to believe that “we” can, perhaps sometime in the future, resettle on a more comfortable paradigm of literary study. To entertain hopes of a more self-enclosed vision of the discipline of literary study prevents us from seeing that the future might not involve an exclusive reliance on a paradigm for literature at all, at least not in the traditional sense, and that, in more ways than one, the humanities might not be quite so much “like the sciences” as advocates of Kuhnian paradigms would have us believe. That is, although Richter’s collection does not employ the traditional historical paradigm or the schools paradigm, its principles of organization 219

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and selection are based on questions of “reading”: why, what, and how we read (entirely leaving aside the questions of why, what, and how we write). This organizational structure, therefore, does exemplify one model of the problem-posing organizational frame, and for that reason alone it is useful despite its familiar neglect of composition, rhetoric, and writing. In this context the selections are provocative, but, again, what doesn’t get theorized is that the focus on reading has left writing off the theoretical map and thus outside the disciplinary paradigm of literary study, even though the writing of critical essays is exactly the mechanism of evaluation and grading in literature courses. Indeed, other than for the inclusion of Richard Ohmann, there aren’t any among the many well-known contributors who might be identified as representatives of the fields of composition, rhetoric, or creative writing, even though they represent by far the largest domains of work carried out by most practitioners of the profession. One could justifiably argue that such a broader focus was not the intention of the anthology, but I think that answer only defers the pressing fact that these splits between composition and literature are among the most deeply in need of theorizing and reforming, especially with respect to contractual obligations that specify who gets to do what kind of work. Graduate programs in English studies must be concerned with teaching a new breed of teacher-scholars to meet new kinds of educational, curricular, and social needs in a rapidly changing culture. Such changes require considerable alteration and additions to the basic premises of the knowledge contract. Which brings us to the question of technology in relation to the resources in an anthology. Given reasonable access to online computers, any anthology can then be viewed as the tip of multiple archives that stretch through electronic access to a potentially limitless source of academic and nonacademic resources. As Leitch puts it, any “anthology is just an impermeable selection of this larger archive,” so “electronic ‘things’ will become less ancillary and more at the center of the teaching operation as time passes” (Theory Matters 65). The sheer availability of these resources casts anthologies in a new light: their selective principles of representation are always more visibly in tension with “virtually” the entire set of interrelated archives constituting what we call theory, literature, cultural studies, and the humanities. Richter’s Falling into Theory includes a useful appendix listing various Websites, but it seems to me that future editions and anthologies will need their own Websites as well, since the list of theory sites is growing so rapidly that online extensions become necessary. As a caution, I would not want to be misunderstood as a kind of “cyber-utopian” 220

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who sees new forms of anarchy and democracy inevitable in online communities. Indeed, exactly the opposite is often the case: the fact that technology and cyberspace are being colonized by powerful economic forces that are often detrimental to educational needs is exactly why they are areas in need of theory and investigation (see Noble; Hawisher and Selfe, Literacy and Passions; Joyce). Accordingly, the electronic opening of borders of theory necessarily becomes an in-class activity of theorizing how to do it, partly because there are no clear markers, no clear road maps on how to get there once we leave the printed page of a theoretical essay. Once again, a multivalent pedagogy attuned to the culture of diversity struggles intensely with the issue of contexts for both students and teacher. Every act of theorizing by a person takes place in a living situation constrained by the contractual agreements specifying mutual obligations, but theory anthologies tend to remove it from the lives of students and teachers in the act of representing its paradigmatic methods and practices within a relatively closed professional community of experts. In those instances there is rarely a contract in sight of the theory culled for a given anthology, even though contractual obligations delimit professional possibilities on every count. Again, the risk for graduate students will depend on their specific situations: for many of my students, strong or narrow affiliations with a paradigmatic practice can be a liability in a changing job market, whereas for others the liability will be in failing to identify with a dominant model: “The nature of disciplinary configurations is such that if a young scholar does not affiliate with the mainstream scholars, there is a strong possibility that he or she will fail to become affiliated with that discipline” (Di Leo 521). Those “strong possibilities” are precisely the consequences of our deeply Kuhnified disciplinary identities. In these instances it is self-defensively necessary to protect one’s interests, particularly graduate students, who are in the most vulnerable of professional positions. Nevertheless, our jobs as teachers is to put the activity of theorizing back into the lives of students as they work to read, write, and alter the discipline and the culture they will be creating and sustaining. Again, too much of our work in the humanities lies beside, if not beyond, the disciplinary and the canonized: we need to negotiate how our profession is bigger than our disciplinary practices, as I argued in chapter 2. Whatever degree of autonomy we have in our local institutions, it seems to me we ought to make our teaching a place where knowledge and theory about that knowledge spread and proliferate rapidly when freed of many of their “Kuhnified” disciplinary constraints. 221

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Following a major premise of this study, not only are paradigms more porous than Kuhn described them, but the various kinds of work and labor practices we perform as practitioners of English studies cannot all be made accountable by disciplinary paradigms. Too often a restricted version of Kuhnian paradigms has been used to justify the decontextualizations necessary for the production of theory anthologies. Despite the embarrassment of riches in the innumerable paradigms (schools and movements) collected in the anthologies, the narrower Kuhnian premise has too often meant that the problems the theories generate are not historically specific, especially with respect to the audience of students who are the mostly likely users of these texts. The modern domains of work represented by paradigms are deeply crossed by alternative modernities and nonmodern practices that simply don’t work well under the pressures for closure and stability characteristic of paradigmatic work. Often, of course, we do perform the normal tasks assigned by reigning paradigms, which is why my argument is not meant to put an end to anthologizing, even if that were possible, or to suggest that we can simply disavow the disciplinary function. Nor should we stop reading the theory canon, any more than we should stop reading the literary canon: that’s one often quite large but, for some practitioners in the field, relatively small arena of the everyday labor and work we perform as English teachers, writers, and researchers. I agree with Bill Readings when he argues, “What I am calling for, then, is not a generalized interdisciplinary space but a certain rhythm of disciplinary attachment and detachment, which is designed so as not to let the question of disciplinarity disappear” (176). Ironically, the Kuhnification of the humanities has led less to a questioning “of the disciplinary form that can be given to knowledge” (Readings 177) than to reassertions of the paradigmatic forms of disciplinary knowledge. A revised version of Kuhn such as I offered in chapter 3 might better enable us to attend to the function of theoretical paradigms with respect to the business of anthologizing so that we can be even more critical of the kinds of decontextualizations that happen when theory is removed from its context of production and dissemination. An inquiry into the spectrum of disciplinary, cross-, inter-, and nondisciplinary practices actually carried out in our professional lives brings acts of theorizing out of the models and paradigms provided for us in the anthologies and into the messy and complex daily lives of our students and ourselves where we actually struggle with the politico-institutional realities that we both suffer and enjoy. It also means that in our scholarly work we need more professional avenues such 222

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as journals, organizations, and conferences that can “serve as affiliationfree zones in an increasingly over-affiliated academic world” (Di Leo 61). Such “temporary autonomous zones” (Bey) emerge out of material, institutional circumstances where workers can collectively bargain for such zones as socially important spaces resistant to capital interests alone. Theory has an important role in that work and practice, but most of our current theory anthologies have hardly registered that dimension within their own theoretical radars. In the end, I suggest that the kind of changes now needed in the profession are not merely a matter of shifting paradigms or of establishing new normal practices, however inevitable such disciplinary constraints might continue to be. As the central argument of this book, I am further suggesting that the roughly 125-year-old experiment with using the “ecosystem” of disciplinary models for the production of knowledge as the dominant structuring principle for higher education is already undergoing significant alteration. Working conditions are changing, too often at the hands of capital rather than the workers (students and teachers) whose labor is being capitalized, and the limitations of the epistemological models of modernity do not well serve many users of the university. If this is true, “we must be prepared to reorganize the institutions of our profession to account for the negative effects of affiliation” (Di Leo 62) with Kuhnified normal practices. Since disciplinary paradigms tend to work better under the reign of various manifestations of positivism, they have generally worked more successfully for the sciences, and the humanities have struggled to compete using “paradigmatic” models that are not always appropriate for evaluating the range of practices we actually perform. Strictly speaking, nondisciplinary and postdisciplinary practices often already comprise the larger part of our working lives, as I argued in chapter 2. Consequently, when academic forms of disciplinary work are valorized as inherently superior to postdisciplinary kinds of teaching and learning, we may not always be preparing students for the culture and the profession they will enter. But there’s no reason we can’t begin to imagine a wider range of valuable practices not so much existing in rigidly hierarchical ways but rather as operating across variable continuums of disciplinary and nondisciplinary forms of work. We will, of course, have to invent new criteria, but that’s what institutional and cultural change has always been about—labor unions, expanded domains of professional work, in which evaluation of nondisciplinary activities requires some careful theorizing leading to contractual legitimation of the alternatives rather than simply acceptance of the untheorized 223

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disciplinary categories alone. Thus, literacy projects, curriculum design initiatives, outreach programs, service learning, Website and software development, collaborative teaching and research projects, and other kinds of emerging practices often draw upon and work in tension with disciplinary forms of knowing. This kind of work needs to be more fully represented in theory anthologies just as it does in the contractual language by which we evaluate our professional lives. To find ways that we can function as English professionals within the rapidly changing domains of postsecondary education, we’ll have to be as imaginative, creative, and inventive as we can about how to teach the reading and writing of cultures. Theory can be uncomfortable when it raises questions about ideas and practices we might not always want to look at with such scrupulous eyes. But as bell hooks so movingly put it in Teaching to Transgress, for students and teachers alike we must also find ways to engage theorizing as “a place of sanctuary” where we too can make “sense out of what was [and is] happening, a place where” more users of the university can “imagine possible futures . . . where life could be lived differently” and living in theory can “be a healing place” (61). Any effort to try to realize those goals for a culture of diversity must theorize across a broader range of professional practices than those at the disciplinary end of the spectrum. The next chapter focuses on the disciplinary history of English departments for just this reason.

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7. BESIDE DISCIPLINARY ENGLISH 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Working for Professional Solidarity by Reforming Academic Labor

Even at the dawn of professional literary studies, educational consensus was already profoundly shaky. Gerald Graff and Michael Warner, The Origins of Literary Study in America The difficulty with the separatist position . . . its promotion of “separate but equal” status may result in entrenchments of existing inequities for those inside—a “new ghetto,” but a ghetto nonetheless. Susan Miller, Textual Carnivals The sustainable . . . scenario is radically different. Local cultures are emphasized within the curriculum. Intercultural student exchange is facilitated . . . and the curriculum is inherently interdisciplinary, flexible, and directed toward individual student needs. Derek Owens, Composition and Sustainability

Disciplinary Dreams and Working Nightmares English studies is the worst of academic sinners. The humanistic study of signifying practices has devolved into the most dehumanistic of higher education territories. No other field can shamefully claim, as we can, that in many departments over 75 percent of the courses are taught by “flex labor,” part-time, temporary employees. These circumstances have a great deal to do with the systemic operations whereby the economic restructuring of modernity and disciplinarity has taken an especially hard toll on workers in our field. As Stephen North suggests, “College English Teaching, Inc.,” has some accounting to do for the ways it has arranged its workplace (Refiguring the Ph.D.). In short, our own disciplinary practices have fueled the inequities in our labor force even as many practitioners clamor for the very principles of disciplinarity that were supposed to transcend those troubles. Once again, David Harvey’s description of the restructuring of the labor market provides a remarkably precise account of what has been happening over the past thirty years in English departments: a shrinking core of tenured faculty presides over an expanding array of part-time, temporary instructors and graduate students. As Richard Ohmann puts it in his 1995 introduction to the reissuing of English in America, “English has, it would almost seem, served as a small laboratory for innovative uses of flexible labor” (xxxix). We are now experiencing increasing internal professional 225

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class differences between the core and periphery of the academic labor market at the same time that there are heightened “interfamilial” tensions between the competing subdisciplines of English studies, especially those between literature, composition, and creative writing. 1 A common view of these employment problems in English studies is that we are at the mercy of a “market logic” whereby there’s nothing much we can do but hold tight, cut down on the number of Ph.D.’s we produce, and wait out the cyclical spin-down of the economy. But Marc Bousquet’s groundbreaking work on academic labor has forcefully demonstrated the limitations of this passive plan of inaction. Whereas the neoliberal discourse seems to be taking seriously the job crisis brought on by the relentless “market knowledge,” Bousquet analyzes how the latter term can be seen [226], as merely “a rhetoric of the labor system and not a description of it.” Consequently, “the ideology of the market returns to frame the solution, blocking the transformative potential of analysis that otherwise demonstrates the necessity Lines: of non-market responses” (Bousquet, “Rhetoric” 209). Once framed as —— a market problem, there is no need to transform the inevitable, rational 12.6p system of disciplinarity whereby the university sustains its elite disciplinary ——— archives on the backs of its transient, less-disciplinary graduate student, Norma part-time, and temporary help. This chapter focuses on how we might ac* PgEnd tively transform the disciplinary economy of value in English studies rather than passively wait for the economy to turn some magical corner. Of course, how we got ourselves into this situation is a longer story than any one book [226], can narrate, but a view of the big picture as I have been painting it can be a useful theoretical move as we try to locate possibilities for solidarity and action within our institutions. Framed by the historical archive of the modern university, the terrain in and around English departments has provided some of the primary battlefields in the two hundred year war between societal modernity and cultural modernity. The dream of the modern project was to unify, or purify in Latour’s sense, the social/rational/bureaucratic organization of the nationstates with the cultural/aesthetic/idealistic traditions that gave identity to those nations. In our contemporary age of fragmentation and disaggregation it is no wonder that such modernist dreams for coherence, unity, and totality provide some footholds amidst the maelstrom. 2 According to this logic, where our predecessors failed we must yet press on to the invention of a new disciplinary coherence that can even better resist the pressures of the market logic. 226

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The problem with this plan is that a quick glance at the major post World War II conferences trying to resolve these disciplinary uncertainties reveals that the participants often arrive at more exhaustion than coherence. Peter Elbow’s well-known account of the 1987 English Coalition Conference in What Is English? exemplifies the identity crisis represented by the two sides that always seem to flow from the reports of these events: we hear about, on the one side, all the exhilaration generated by the discussions and, on the other, the disappointment at the unsettled nature of the results when it proves virtually impossible to define the discipline. 3 As Elbow puts it, at the end of the conference English was still “a profession that cannot define what it is” any more than it could when the conference began. He opts for the cheerful kind of head-scratching uncertainty, where “on good days I even say, ‘It’s about time we finally don’t know what we are’ ” (in North, Refiguring the Ph.D. 61). As in most of these conferences and publications, traditionalists invoke past canons and standards; progressives opt for the invention of a more socially responsible discipline. Clearly, my own allegiances fall with the progressives, but not on disciplinary grounds alone. We should stop trying to fit into the procedures of academic disciplinarity all the different kinds of work we perform so that we can then transform the value we ourselves confer on the interplay of interdisciplinary and nondisciplinary activities. As Gerald Graff puts it, “What should concern us is not whether English studies is a discipline . . . whatever that may mean, but whether English studies is conceptually coherent. And . . . coherence should not be confused with disciplinarity” (“Is There a Conversation” 11). The greater the culture of diversity, the more those remarkable differences in what we do should be worthy of celebration and funding for the individuals performing all this work. More recently, one of our leading theorists of semiotics and deconstruction, Jonathan Culler, expressed the compelling need many continue to feel for “Imagining the Coherence of the English Major.” At the same time, he recognizes that he can no longer accept Northrop Frye’s belief, articulated in his magisterial The Anatomy of Criticism, that “ ‘everyone who has seriously studied literature knows that the mental process involved is as coherent and progressive as the study of science’ ” (Culler, “Imagining the Coherence” 85). No doubt in English studies we have abandoned the strictly “scientific” criteria; however, we have not sufficiently modified the disciplinary system of values as the exclusive measure of academic worth. Culler worries that unless “we can imagine a totality of some sort” we will wallow in a nebulous “conglomeration of the various things we are 227

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interested in teaching” (“Imagining the Coherence” 93). But this casts the picture, as disciplinary discourse usually does, as far too binary: either we have totality or we have a nebulous conglomeration. What we have, or at least ought to have in my view, is something different from either: an aggregation, a loose confederation, integration, or “fusion” (North, Refiguring the Ph.D.) of some relatively unified subdisciplinary paradigms that link in diverse, controversial, and provocative tensions with each other and with the nondisciplinary spectrum of highly skilled work necessary for our professional lives. Such terrain can be rhetorically mapped, much more like a hypertext with multiple links but with sufficient coherence to provide alternative paths for different kinds of students seeking majors in the field. And such mapping can be less nebulous than dynamic and flexible in the best sense, at least when the range of activities gets funded in more just ways than what we now have. When disciplinarity alone reigns, there are, of course, moments of truly innovative work, but too often normal practice means that those privileged few mopping up the fields of disciplinary stabilities in published research get better funded than other domains of work such as collaborative learning, teaching, writing, and curricular design, to name just a few. In short, we are asking the wrong questions with the wrong assumptions. We ought to stop trying to “discipline English” in the restricted sense of academic disciplinarity because the latter now works best at a different level than departmental aggregation. English covers far too much ground to ever represent any single discipline. In short, disciplinary coherence operates at the level of paradigms but not at the level of departments. Even when a progressive educator like Anthony Easthope champions the shift from a literary to a cultural studies paradigm, cultural studies, like English, is a more extensive field of professional activities than any paradigm, at least in the Kuhnian sense, could possibly designate. A key to this understanding is that general mission statements and curricular designs are not as dependent on disciplines and paradigms as most of us have come to believe. Rather, the necessary work of articulating mission statements, designing programs, and creating the common ground of professional solidarity is a rhetorical act of naming subject matters. That the subject matters does not mean that we need to objectify, or purify, the range of potential matters of concern under consideration. Indeed, there are many subjects who (and that) will resist such objectifications, as well they should. Think of it this way: the idea that one could objectify or mediate something called “writing” in any single paradigm ought to strike us as patently 228

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absurd, which is why we have had such a hard time doing much other than reducing this most complex of human activities to formal, grammatical rules, or the Aristotelian modes, or a regulated process that we all must pass through in the creation of a text. The disciplining of writing happened at great cost to the many social values of “writing” as a subject matter. Although it has proven easier to objectify certain kinds of writing that many people have valued and called “literature,” the long institutional history of trying to so objectify this unruly body of textual objects has also contributed to our sense of disciplinary uncertainty. In many instances the vagueness and imprecision in broad terms like writing and literature is a working asset rather than a liability, since many things can then cluster under the umbrella meaning. 4 As Michael Bérubé explains, the indeterminacy might “be not only useful . . . but also constitutive of the very means by which we address our subject matter” (Employment 144). The domains of these subject matters simply stretch way beyond the possibilities of any one paradigm or disciplinary matrix. A whole host of paradigms might be invented, as of course they have been, for mediating these subject matters, but even the normal practices evidenced in any one of those paradigms do not themselves capture the field of activities associated with such complex acts as reading and writing. Recognition of the difference, multivalence, and diversity of our subject matter is a starting point for negotiating what it is we do and the basis for professional solidarity across those differences. From this perspective mission statements and curricular designs are provisional representations, public namings of why our subject matters even as it encompasses a wide range of tasks and projects. Such rhetorical acts are crucial, creative inventions providing general social justifications for the funding of our work both inside and outside the academy. As Tilly Warnock argues, “We in English departments must be able to argue persuasively for the value of what we do” (146). But the coherence of subject matter in these general formulations need not, or should not in the humanities, involve the imagination of a disciplinary unity of objects, methods, and the paradigms that mediate those relations. The “conflicts” (Graff ), “dissensus” (Readings), and differences in our midst are the source of our vitality, but only if we include not just disciplinary disputes but also all the devalued work, often meted out in the “cheap teaching” favored by management. As Bousquet argues, “Cheap teaching is a social crime and failure” (“Waste Product” 98) because it serves none of the users of the university very well. To transform our working conditions means that our curricular declarations and designs are not, in themselves, 229

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dependent exclusively on the performances of disciplinary paradigms. Professional solidarity arises not from disciplinarity but from recognition of a common general mission that “we are all teachers of reading and writing” and “we are all committed to teaching language and literature as strategies for coping and as equipment for living” (Warnock 152, 148). The differences in the presumptions we make about disciplines and professions offer more important points of leverage, especially with respect to problems of equitable labor, than one might at first suspect. Indeed, relatively coherent maps of curricular majors in English could not be based on a disciplinary unity because the various subdisciplinary matrices work with more specialized frames of symbolic generalizations, models, and exemplars that are incommensurable only in the sense that you cannot perform two at the same time. In short, a university, a college, or a department now houses not only many disciplines and paradigms but also a wide range of nondisciplinary and cross-disciplinary activities. Alternative modernities and the nonmodern are in our midst, as they always have been, not just outside the ivy (or concrete) walls of our modern universities. Work in the humanities generally involves more of the nonmodern than the sciences, but that does not mean there is some inherent weakness or “softness” in what we do. Given this general theoretical orientation, I offer in the next section two forays into the founding moments of the disciplinary archive of English studies. My analysis is complementary to that of others who have told these stories more fully elsewhere although primarily as an ideological battle. I have turned my lens upon the systemic emergence of disciplinarity as exemplified in these cases through the injurious splitting between reading and writing done to our subject matter right from the beginning as it struggled for legitimacy in the modern university. The first case traces the contours of how Francis James Child moved from his gentlemanly position as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric to his “exemplary” status as the first English professor at Harvard. This brief snapshot of Child’s inventiveness models for us how he became a “sublime master” (Bové) of the new field by creating one influential possibility for a paradigm of the literary side of English studies. The second traces less the fate of the exemplary figure Adams Sherman Hill than the institutional consequences of his founding English A as the prototype for university-wide writing courses that was imitated by virtually every institution of higher education in America. Writing and teaching suffered the same fates of being unable to meet the demands of the new disciplinary ecosystem except as reduced forms of social discipline that protected the 230

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bountiful gardens of disciplinary knowledge from contamination. Whether configured as a ghetto or a desert, many occupying the lowly terrains have seen their dreams of disciplinary fruition turned into a nightmare of cheap labor. 5 But let’s turn from the abstract registers to the case studies. Kick-Starting the Disciplinary Garden by Escaping the “Unflowering Desert” How far Child kicked the chair across the Harvard classroom one afternoon in the mid-1870s seems to be a matter of what we want the incident to reveal or on what side of the lit-comp divide we take our stand. In a wonderfully revealing essay Patricia Harkin examines the different stories that have entered the lore of English studies as legends about one of its founding figures (“Child’s Ballads”). According to the account rendered by one of Child’s admiring students, Francis Gummere, the chair only made it halfway across the floor, a measured sign of the dignified disdain Child registered for his years of grading themes. While lauding Child’s wonders as a teacher, Gummere clearly sees Child’s greatness embodied in his heroic crossing of the great divide between the old liberal arts colleges and the emerging research university. As pioneer of the new field, Child exemplified how the science of philology could be creatively adapted to bring a whole new kind of scholarly practice to literature. Unlike the wayward impressions of literary tastes characteristic of the belletristic tradition carried on by the likes of Longfellow and Lowell, Child’s newly minted criteria for the gathering and compilation of hard evidence were based on historical and comparative objectivity, and they raised the disciplinary bar. Child’s scholarly standards, together with those of his compatriots who had also traveled to Germany, set firmly on American soil the model for the disciplinary methods Child had learned during his three-year study of philology at the University of Göttingen. 6 The transition across the great divide separating the “drudgery” of grading themes from the spiritual rewards of literary research was more gradual than Child himself might have liked, at least according to some accounts, and that’s where the legend of the chair comes into play. In Gummere’s version the idealized Child asks “solemnly” but portentously of his companion, “ ‘Do you know . . . that I corrected themes in Harvard College for twenty-five years?’ ” Child had only placed “his foot on a light chair,” and he “never lifted his voice unduly; but some sort of physical emphasis was imperative, and this was furnished by the chair. As he pronounced the ‘twenty-five years’ with most exact and labored utterance, his foot was 231

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released, and the chair found a new site half-way across the room” (Harkin, “Child’s Ballads” 27). The dignified manner of the “physical . . . imperative” of the (presumably) gently sliding chair metonymically registers the triumph of research over teaching, literature over composition, and career calling over job drudgery as Harvard became a modern university. Gummere sees nothing but elation and triumph in that gesture, quietly graceful as it may be for the first real Magister of English studies whose eminence as an exemplary figure in the emerging paradigm could not be undone by any too violent image of his own behavior. Child was sliding or kicking the chair at about the very moment when Charles Eliot made him the first professor of English at Harvard as he outbid Johns Hopkins’s President Gilman in one of the first contractual alterations that signaled the coming of age of the new discipline of English studies. 7 As Harkin explains, the “Hopkins offer changed the economic frameworks, and Eliot’s new judgment was that Child’s teaching literature would make Harvard competitive with Johns Hopkins” (“Child’s Ballads” 31). But the founding gesture of leaving composition in its literary wake has been recast by others in a different light. As recently as 1982, when Donald Stewart retold Child’s incident with the chair, the shift in the tone and content of the anecdote registers what by then had become for many workers in English a long-standing anger at the very shift that Gummere celebrated many years earlier. In Stewart’s words, “ ‘Child angrily kicked a chair across a room, complaining bitterly about the years he was wasting correcting student themes’ ” (Harkin, “Child’s Ballads” 32). There was no “halfway” in this version of the narrative. Literature’s triumph was composition’s demise, and Child becomes refigured as a literary elitist who has no truck with the drudgery of student compositions. All the fine histories we now have of the rise of literature at the expense of composition reveal how in the course of the many years since the first Harvard English professor enjoyed his respite from grading themes “composition” faced some pretty rough calls as it got cast into the ghetto. 8 Henry James referred to it as a “loathsome chore” and a “burden”; Child’s successor to the Boylston chair, George Lyman Kitteridge, repeatedly called it “drudgery,” as did Charles Eliot, who also saw it as nothing but “routine work.” By 1967 William Riley Parker had called the grading of themes and teaching of composition “slave labor,” unrewarding “service,” a “dismal, unflowering desert” (see Harkin, “Child’s Ballads” 23–29). No wonder Stewart and others whose professional identity is affiliated with writing might personally feel and thus represent the significance of Child’s kick 232

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with more vehemence than practitioners of the more sanctified disciplinary gardens of literary criticism. The ideological force of the kick originates when the aesthetic-poetic version of cultural modernity triumphs over the reductively mechanical version of what writing came to be in most composition courses that for so many years modeled themselves after the 1885 formation of English A at Harvard. As Susan Miller explains, “The dual curriculum in English after its establishment at Harvard between 1873 and 1895 was quickly outlined and nationally delivered as an archetypical negative for reproduction across the country” (52). But besides the ideological triumph of the “high” sensibility of literature over the “low” drudgery of composition, my brief foray into this historical archive is to more fully emphasize the function of disciplinarity in these institutional battles. And the latter emphasizes the power of societal modernity, with its rational bureaucracies and institutional mechanisms for reproducing specific sets of material social hierarchies. In this respect, Child’s career shift as he re-created himself as perhaps our first sublime master or exemplary figure of English is especially revealing partly because he himself had to cross over from the older college’s curriculum into the modern disciplinary university. Indeed, Child first began as a tutor of mathematics at Harvard. This was not at all unusual, since mathematics, the classical languages (Greek and Latin), and a mix of classical (Quintilian and Cicero) and eighteenth-century British (George Campbell and Hugh Blair) versions of rhetoric formed the fixed, nonelective undergraduate curriculum. And since there were no separate departments, professors were expected to perform multiple duties. Child’s personal transformation into a literary scholar crosses through philological study in Germany, as it did for most professors trying to imitate the new disciplinary models of academic work. But it took twenty years or more after his return from Germany for his scholarly accomplishments to empower the institutional formation of a new department designating the discipline of English. As Boylston Professor of Rhetoric, Child was immured in the classical curriculum, so his rhetorical tasks were delimited by the traditions of mental discipline and recitation called for by the collegial mission to produce “virtuous men.” The recitations were, of course, oral readings, usually verbatim, by students learning Latin and Greek, and English gradually entered into these exercises. Writing took the form prescribed by the classical declamations and disputations, in which “students are assigned a thesis that they must defend or refute in oral or written compositions” (Crowley 48). It must 233

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have been the work associated with marking these disputations according to strict grammatical regularity that triggered Child’s chair kicking. Taken altogether, one can imagine a kind of weariness or drudgery about these themes, given their prescribed formats, because the classical curriculum had little room for the production of the new. As W. Ross Winterowd explains, rhetoric had been defanged from its social and political contexts in the reduction to form, style, and propriety (see also Halloran; Reid). It was this reduced form of rhetoric as mechanics that got reiterated in the declamations and disputations that must have tired out students and professors alike. Indeed, these versions of “mental discipline” in the old colleges had little to do with the ecosystem of disciplinarity as a research endeavor, since it had not yet been imported from Germany, but at the same time it was certainly part of the more general disciplinary society as Foucault describes it. As on every other American campus, a college education at Harvard, then, was reiteration of the already known, not the discovery of new knowledge. What exactly is it that Child brought from Germany that played out so well for him and some others in America? What exactly is it that enabled him to produce new forms of knowledge under the emerging research emphasis so as to escape the drudgery of his proscribed position? The general answer, of course, is modern science with its impressive methods of invention. This modern, empirical discourse could demonstrate its control of nature with a reliability that every emerging division of knowledge could not help but admire and aspire to. But the question was, How could the discipline of science be carried over in practice to a field like literature that otherwise seemed inimical to the discourse and practices of the laboratory? Societal modernity’s call for rational organization in the structure of educational institutions that could then be bureaucratically regulated faced some stiff challenges from the belletristic tradition. “Taste,” after all, was not something that one could measure in the same way as, say, caloric intake. But preparations for such a reduction were well under way by the late eighteenth century. The eighteenth-century rhetoricians had paved the way for one kind of stability: George Campbell (The Philosophy of Rhetoric), Hugh Blair (Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres), and others had purified classical rhetoric of the sublime, inventive, creative, so that “rhetoric left the agora, the public arena, and retreated to the drawing room” (Winterowd 66). This did not have to be the winning form for rhetorical stability in America’s colleges. Indeed, when John Quincy Adams took over the role of the first Boylston professorship in 1806, he revived a much more vital, socially 234

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engaged version of classical rhetoric based on Quintilian and Cicero and suitable for the literate “citizen rhetors” necessary for the new democratic republic (see Harkin, “John Quincy Adams”). As Ronald F. Reid argues, “On the rare occasions when Adams mentioned modern English rhetoricians, it was usually to disagree with them.” This was a remarkable moment in the history of higher education in America because Adams had a keen sense of “the relationship between social institutions and rhetoric” (Reid 243), but, unfortunately, it seems to have been relatively short-lived. That is, Adams’s virtues were squeezed out as the depoliticized versions of Blair, Campbell, and Richard Whately slipped back in through the work of the subsequent series of Boylston professors, Joseph McKean, Edward T. Channing, Francis James Child, and Adams Sherman Hill (see Reid 244–57). “Invention was stripped of its analytical schemes” as “British literary and rhetorical concepts would ultimately dominate American rhetoric” (Reid 247, 249). The “marked decline” (Reid 257) of rhetoric as a social practice was furthered also by the rise of science. Thomas Miller argues that the new science of the human mind and the universal principles of human nature became the rationales for reducing rhetoric to the categorizing of the best and proper uses of those universal laws. These rhetorical reductions register as one phase of the emergence of the disciplinary society. That is, “discipline and punish” was about as active in the Enlightenment versions of the liberal arts colleges as it was in the prisons and mental institutions of the day because improprieties and errors were “under surveillance” and could be punished quite effectively through the norms established in the old colleges. But philology was much better than rhetoric at this game, because language could be objectified in historical study that did not depend on idiosyncratic rhetorical performances or on the waywardly subjective composings of any individual. In this sense language could be seen as based on universal principles and laws, much like the Newtonian version of the physical world. However, whereas the laws of the internalized “human mind” might be difficult to objectify, as the eighteenth-century rhetoricians had tried to do, language could be seen to have an external, objectifiable referent in the various European languages, with their philological roots grounded deeply in Greek and Latin grammar. And as Gerald Graff explains, “Grammar for Hegel, as for later philologists like Friedrich Max Muller, was the alphabet of the Spirit itself ” (Professing Literature 29). In Germany Child was reschooled not in rhetoric but in philology, or what would later become a discipline and department of its own in linguis235

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tics. Despite this training, his love, his “calling,” was for literature, and he invented the passage from one to the other: literature could be objectified and systematized along the lines that philology objectified language through the study of detailed patterns, etymological roots, and syntactical forms pertinent to the history of those literary texts. In some pretty impressive new ways the disciplinary side of literary research would adopt the new sets of objectifying practices, since their objects had a kind of formal integrity and stability of form. Thus, in one of his first scholarly books, his 1855 edition of The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Child’s preface and annotations document with especial care the sources, allusions, and some of the errors in earlier editions in order to produce this standardized text. By 1863 he had written Observations on the Language of Chaucer, a book that directly imported the philological study of linguistic form into Chaucer’s literary language. But his monumental five-volume study The English and Scottish Ballads really established Child’s exemplary status. He produced the initial prototype for the book in 1864, but the expanded and revised volumes appeared between 1882 and 1898. Nothing like this had ever existed, so to that extent alone Child had produced new knowledge. With inexhaustible scholarly rigor Child traced multiple variants of the ballads, correcting inaccuracies that had crept into their publication history. The whole project was backed by an investment in personal labor such that his research examined in considerable detail the myths, legends, and literary traditions of much of the Western world, ranging from ancient Greece and Egypt to medieval Italy, Norway, and elsewhere. He wrote detailed introductions and extensive citations for each of the ballads. In short, Child had created a bridge between cultural modernity, with its valuing of the literary aesthetic, and societal modernity, with its need for rational institutional organization. He did so mainly by not paying much heed to the belletristic concern for beauty, taste, and sensibility as a methodological principle but, rather, as a kind of bonus value that added prestige to the calling. 9 Child was motivated by his great love for the beauty of the ballads as well as for the great authors of English literature, but he recognized that there was no way to turn love and sensibility into a method. From a disciplinary perspective it was not the ballads themselves that mattered so much as the knowledge produced about the ballads that had been so skillfully converted into the exchange value of published research. Given Child’s exemplary productions, university presidents could hire others to perform paradigmatic imitations of Child’s model as part of the normal practice opened up for the fledgling discipline to create its own 236

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new territory of objective knowledge. And, for the most part, that is exactly what happened as the new forms of academic disciplinarity began to shape the contours of emerging fields. Thomas Kuhn’s terms for the disciplinary matrix enable us to see exactly how Child inaugurated a “revolutionary” new normal practice or paradigm for a new kind of literary scholarship that could mediate the relations between its textual objects and the methods it deployed to produce knowledge about those objects. Recall that Kuhn described the symbolic generalizations, models, values, and exemplars as part of the new disciplinary matrix associated with the formation of paradigms. Child’s symbolic generalizations were the “universal grammars” established by the historical and comparative study of linguistic, etymological, grammatical, and stylistic characteristics of the language of specific kinds of textual objects. 10 As a “revolutionary” founder of the new paradigm of literary research, his models were his own inventive adaptations of philology to the study of ballads and other literary texts. His values were clearly the scientific concerns for accuracy, precision, and objectivity, joined as they were with his love of the ballads themselves as well as the canonized literary authors. In fact, part of the political valence of this project materializes in these values (which Kuhn tended to neglect): sources for the ballads might have come from all over the world, but of course they were produced in Great Britain, and that nationalistic cast was not lost on Child’s own sense of the value of this national tradition. His synthetic performance joining the symbolic generalizations, models, and values established his own status as an exemplary figure for the emerging discipline. No one else had quite done things this way before. Prior to his labor, the ballads he studied might well have seemed casual, unimportant, or anomalous to the more rigorous philological standards of disciplinarity, just as they might have seemed less than literary to the belletristic tradition of fine art. Child’s revolutionary performance was to demonstrate that they were not on both counts: philological complexity matched literary complexity by the sheer weight of evidence he brought to bear upon the ballads. Indeed, Child’s multivolume study has been recently reprinted by Loomis House Press as a sign of its persistent influence. To this extent, as Harkin puts it, Child got to do “what he wanted to do— what (from collecting ballads to tending roses) he thought important to do—rather than what the institution expected” (“Child’s Ballads” 34). Certainly, that’s another retelling of Child’s story, one that wisely emphasizes Child’s ability to bend the institutions to his own interests. Child himself is neither the problem nor the solution; rather, it was the institutional 237

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consequences of his own exemplary performance that served to establish an influential form of normal practice for English, and those practices then became the source of institutional demands. To that extent he did indeed change “the conditions of academic labor” (Harkin, “Child’s Ballads” 34) as others found ways to ground their own expertise on Child’s impressive accomplishments as a master of the new field. As Graff and Warner put it, this rigidly disciplinary side of the emerging field of English studies competed with the belletristic tradition, formerly represented by writers such as Longfellow and Lowell, whose chairs at Harvard were endowed as gentlemen of taste, not analyzers of technical matters pertaining to history, bibliography, and grammar. From this perspective the history of the profession of English studies is “not the triumph of philology” but the conflict “between competing professional models” (Graff and Warner 6). This is a very useful formulation, especially if we keep in mind my distinctions between discipline and profession (see chapter 2). That is, the disciplinarians could never completely colonize the terrain of professional tasks, especially where the spiritual as well as nationalistic values of the literary held such powerful sway. Cultural modernity would not so easily fit into Child’s innovative adaptation of societal modernity in the form of a new academic discipline of English. Consequently, practitioners of the new field struggled to carve out spaces for their own work, sometimes by enacting a version of positivistic scholarship that could claim full disciplinary status, generally by following an historical or formalistic bent. Much of their work, however, continued to occupy a professional academic space below, beside, or other than that rewarded by the emerging standards of disciplinarity. The contentious battles between competing forces seeking disciplinary unity for the entire profession subsided slightly only during the relatively brief sway of the New Critics, which I say more about in the next section. But in these founding moments Child’s invention of a new disciplinary space was accomplished in tandem with the “other” subordinated space allotted to the role of writing. When Adams Sherman Hill invented English A at Harvard in 1885, he did so to try and defuse the rising clamor in American newspapers and magazines about “the growing illiteracy of American boys” (Kitzhaber 45). It was supposed to be a stopgap measure, “a temporary course in remedial writing instruction,” which, as Robert Connors explains, would be required “of all incoming freshman” but only “until the crisis had passed” (11). Charles Eliot had hired Hill to assist Child in transforming the new English depart238

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ment along the lines of the German university model, but the problem was that in the German model writing was a presumption necessary for any disciplinary work. In America students were clearly unprepared to meet these minimum disciplinary standards, so English A was established as a kind of remedial course. 11 Hill was a “lawyer-turned-newspaperman” (Baron 146) whose basic assignment was to recast the traditional four-year program in rhetoric of the classical curriculum into a one-year course in composition. That the course lasted in the Harvard catalog until 1951 suggests that the crisis was a long time passing, but English A modeled the disciplinary hierarchy that would structure English departments throughout the land. The discipline applied in English A was not an exercise in emerging forms of research as the linchpin of disciplinarity, as we have seen in the case of Child’s work, but was instead an initial gatekeeper, protecting the more advanced domains of “new” knowledge from contamination from below. In other words, English A was cast outside and below the more specialized ecosystem of academic disciplinarity, but it was directly in the line of Foucault’s general description of the disciplinary society: a place for the disciplining of the docile bodies of young men, but with a ramped-up force drawn by association with the new forms of disciplinarity as well as with the new corporate economy. The narrowly conceived problem of getting one’s commas in the right place through learning the rules of proper usage rose right out of the classical curriculum of the old colleges, hardly skipping a beat. Foucault’s description of the disciplinary society had already established the conditions for this kind of surveillance, so there was very little new about it. That is, English A could claim to be part of the discipline of English but only as a kind of charade, the wearing of the feathers of prestige earned elsewhere under the new forms of academic disciplinarity emerging from Child’s exemplary research on ballads and literary heroes like Chaucer and Spenser. Hill brought about some significant alterations in the rhetorical preeminence of oratory and the performance of declamations in the classical curriculum. With “rhetoric’s abandonment of oratory,” “the term ‘rhetoric’ fell out of fashion” as the new courses tended to be called “ ‘composition,’ or simply ‘English’ ” (Reid 253). Even written exercises assigned in the old college meant that the teacher determined the subject matter as well as the proper forms for argumentation. Hill’s work as a journalist writing about the affairs of the world might have contributed to his willingness to have students write themes about their everyday life. But even with this focus on the individual experience, the ideology of individuality and autonomy 239

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aided the necessary qualification of those writings: they had to be objective examinations of those experiences. The only kind of imaginable objectivity that Hill and his successor, Wendell Barrett, could inscribe within these parameters would have to be grammar and proper usage. While in Chicago John Dewey was imagining new possibilities for educational experience and philosophical inquiry, the newly minted English department at Harvard was reducing the dynamics of experience and inquiry to an oppressively administered mechanical correctness of form.12 Under these constraints the “daily theme” became a new instrument of surveillance with which to implement the standards of correctness. Indeed, English A was a place where students could be subjected to Harvard’s disciplinary demands by forcing “them to recognize the power of the institution to insist on conformity with its standards” (Crowley 74). The exams administered in this class and for admission to the college “were not intended to test students’ ability to use English; rather, they tested their knowledge about stuff taught in an emerging academic discipline called ‘English’ ” (Crowley 75). But using “discipline” in this sense has nothing to do with producing new knowledge for the emerging research university, although it has much to do with reproducing correctness. “Discipline” in this sense is simply a form of social control. From this perspective English A was more of a carryover from the old college idea of “mental” discipline that could now be more efficiently and technically administered on the basis of standards, forms, and correctness of character as well as grammar, which simply had to be inculcated through imitation. There was nothing “new” about any of this, in Arjun Appadurai’s sense of research as creating the new. Rather, the institutional function of such disciplinary work reduced the epistemological dynamics of disciplinarity to exchange value as a marker of easily coded differences—not unlike the kinds of standardized exams and objectifications used by affirmative action, as I suggested in chapter 4. While waving the flags that proclaim the rising standards of the modern, disciplinary university, in English A disciplinarity had been reduced to little more than social control masking itself as educational value. The primary textbook used in English A was Hill’s The Foundations of Rhetoric (1892), which follows in the path taken by a long line of rhetoric textbooks ever since the work of Campbell and Blair. This tradition “marked the change from rhetoric as an architectonic, creative, and analytical art to rhetoric as a series of rules, injunctions, and suggestions for students” (Winterowd 70). 13 Hill’s book exemplifies this tradition insofar as it is 240

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largely devoted to lists of “the qualities of good use” (Winterowd 60), the rules for correct speech and writing, and the conventions of grammar and diction. By “adopting Campbell’s three rules of purity . . . Hill made grammar a major part of rhetoric. Somewhat given to pedantry, Hill, the ‘high priest of correctness and conformity to good usage,’ turned grammatical correctness into an ideal of composition—almost to the exclusion of other considerations” (Reid 255). In Winterowd’s judgment “the devastation wrought by this doctrine of usage is, of course, incalculable, for it has condemned and proscribed the native dialects of millions of students in American schools and colleges, contributing significantly to racial and class prejudice” (60–61). But also, of course, that is what they basically intended, given what I suggested in chapter 4 was a principal aim of Eliot’s plan for the purification of the new university. These systems of purification had emerged earlier in the eighteenth century through the power of the exam, the seminar, and the laboratory (Hoskin). English A elaborated on the disciplinary principles of the exam, which could so successfully objectify error. As Susan Miller argues, “The practice of attending to mechanical errors allowed written texts to become instruments for examining the ‘body’ of a student, not just the student body. This attention allows a teacher (an ‘auditor’ in both aural and accounting senses) to examine the student’s language with the same attitude that controls a clinical medical examination.” Thus, in English A and the new Harvard entrance examinations we find the perfect exemplification of how disciplinary forms of formal objectification under dominant scientific paradigms seek to objectify and falsify “errors” in the object through a method similar to the “clinical medical examination.” Indeed, “writing, in fact, exposes errors and infelicities that speech might elide” (S. Miller 57). Control and command operate much more than investigation and inquiry, as always happens when disciplinarity gets reduced to its lowest common denominator. These forms of disciplinary control emerge directly out of the classical colleges’ need to repress student disorder, where “college faculties acted as disciplinary tribunals, periodically reviewing violations of rules such as those requiring students to attend chapel services, early every morning, to remain in their rooms for hours every day, and to avoid the snares of the town” (Graff, Professing Literature 25). To this extent, teaching English A served as a kind of extension of the disciplinary tribunals of the classical colleges, and the course operated much less as a paradigm in Kuhn’s sense of an exemplary model for the production of new knowledge than as a 241

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narrowly conceived form of social control enacted through the reduction of writing to the mechanical measurement of standards proscribed by the experts precisely to eliminate the new and the different. Even if we conceive of Hill’s textbook as a rudimentary (or “low”) form of paradigm, here indeed is where such a reductive version of paradigms becomes “an arrested social movement” (Fuller, Thomas Kuhn 37) in the worst possible sense. The contrast between Hill’s and Child’s work highlights the shape of the new field. Whereas Child’s love of literature fueled the transition to the modern university insofar as he was able to work out in practice societal modernity’s version of technical analysis and diagnosis upon cultural modernity’s literary objects, Hill had a different task. In contrast, all the efforts in the world to try to perform Child’s set of objectifying operations on student writing could only yield propriety, grammar, or, at best, the modes of discourse. But there was a payoff for this reduction, not to be lost on practitioners in the field: “English, unlike the other humanities, was able to construct itself through composition as a service to other disciplines within the university and indirectly to the emerging corporate economy—and thus gain credit and resources that, say, history and philosophy did not” (Russell 41). The split between reading (literature) and writing (composition) was deeply fueled by these economic forces, which enabled the alibi that the “discipline” of English could be seen to comprise both ends, when only one really counted under the conditions of academic disciplinarity: “By constructing composition as a practical, remedial service, with no systematic training necessary to teach it and no research expected of those who did, large numbers of courses could be taught by low-paid, part-time staff, usually women” (Russell 51). Russell believes, therefore, that the injurious split occurred in “constructing literature and composition as two separate activities, one professional, the other not” (40). In such a formulation Russell equivocates disciplinarity and professionalism, but, again, I think there are good reasons to make a distinction. That is, the “low-paid, part-time staff ” are professionals in that not just anybody is hired to teach these subjects, so these teachers have a degree of professional status, no matter how low it is, and they are indeed contractually obligated to fulfill their duties in the academy no matter how exploited the terms of those contracts. But their professional work does not count for much under the terms of academic disciplinarity legitimated by the modern knowledge contract. Converting some of what they do into the establishment of the more strictly disciplinary parameters of research and training, as the field of composition has now quite successfully done since the 1960s, will no 242

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doubt be an important part of refiguring English studies. But the work of teaching and engaging the dispersive, experiential, nondisciplinary, carnivalesque characteristics of many forms of both reading and writing needs professional recognition not just in the terms of disciplinary hierarchies of value. “The invention of Freshman English enabled the creation of English studies” (Crowley 59), but only, I would add, in tandem with Child’s exemplification of the new possibilities for the literary discipline. The professional worth of writing teachers needs to be greatly enhanced because it is cruel and exploitive not to do so. And that kind of transformation is as much at the level of job action and collective bargaining as it is at the level of disciplinary purification and justification. Consolidating the Split between the Garden and the Desert From one perspective, what Child and Hill, together with their colleagues, accomplished was better than what a lot of their followers have been able to do ever since in the way of configuring the subdisciplinary desert and planting the disciplinary garden. Indeed, making English into a respectable academic discipline that could organize a coherent curriculum has generally been a contentious project. 14 English professors have struggled ever since, at times with success but often with great difficulty, to adapt what they do to disciplinary practices such as identifying stable bodies of knowledge and methodically verifying truth claims, practices better suited to the needs of scientists exemplifying the virtues of the modern knowledge contract. 15 Of course, while the strict processes of disciplining have become the quintessential measure of academic value, the institutionalized protocols for disciplinary practices often exclude or delimit a significant range of socially valuable intellectual labor. 16 This is especially the case for certain activities many English practitioners perform: research or teaching that focuses on ameliorating the local needs of specific groups of people, postprocess tasks of invention and composing that do not always narrowly define objects of investigation (see Kent), work that engages alternative discourses or rhetorical modes other than expository argumentation (see C. Bernstein; Blitz and Hurlbert; Owens, Resisting Writings; Schroeder, Fox, and Bizzell; Sirc), and writing for broad audiences through publication in nonacademic magazines and books (a feather for academic celebrities but a risk for junior faculty seeking tenure credentials). In English departments disciplinarity perpetuates some of the basic conditions established by Child’s and Hill’s models for both facilitating and justifying the subordination of writing to literature, even though, ironically, writing serves 243

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a fundamental role in the practices of examining and grading across all disciplines. The institutional principles of disciplinary knowledge will always favor those domains where the objects of knowledge such as literary texts (or, as in the disciplining of cultural studies, cultural texts) can be more successfully designated than the carnival of unruly composings that students bring into the academy. The guild nature of the disciplines means that the expository arguments suitable for scholarly publication produce knowledge if those arguments can be measured or “refereed” by an audience of trained professionals (who might be considerably divorced from the local contexts and issues). Disciplinary practices can be performed merely to reinforce “loyalty to the guild rather than to the college or university” (Ohmann, English in America 220) or to the students or the local community or the public, for that matter. The disciplinary measure of success, therefore, purposefully displaces any accountability to people immediately affected by a practical innovation such as the development of an interactive Website linking local high school, community college, and university English departments in a collaborative network. While it is no doubt possible to give credit for such work, academic forms of disciplinary pressure will inevitably tend to give greater significance to the published article about the Website than reward those who created it and participated in its ongoing success. From the opposite direction efforts to speak beyond the disciplinary guild to nonacademic audiences also run the risk of being “unscholarly,” and these risks persist despite an increasing concern within the profession to gain what Bérubé calls “public access.” Such instances register forms of disciplinary injustice, although in other contexts such disciplinary distancing of local interests from broader knowledge claims has tremendous value for certain kinds of work. Argument is what the academy does best, and becoming “masters of our specific disciplinary technologies” (Michael 3) is part of what it means to be a critical intellectual in the contemporary world. Even though some of the most influential academic works successfully negotiate the tension between the academic and the vernacular (Graff, Clueless in Academe), the press of disciplinarity can curtail such performances within a pretty narrow range, more accessible by tenured faculty than by those trying to affiliate with a paradigm. When claims for knowledge are in dispute, disciplines can sometimes serve as critical arbiters for equality, even though race, class, and gender differences as well as corporate interests often compromise claims of disciplinary autonomy. Non- or postdisciplinary activities will be in tension with disciplinary forms of argumentation, so 244

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the hard work will always depend on understanding when and for whom the discipline provides a measure of justice. The picture is especially complicated in English because of the range of professional tasks we regularly perform. Knowledge production under the conditions of disciplinarity seeks to narrow that range by specifying the primary objects of study such as literary or cultural texts and the secondary critical methods for producing knowledge about those objects through expository prose. Any successful paradigm, as in the case of Child, mediates the particular relations between objects and methods. Even so, textual objects themselves always exceed the mediations of any given paradigm’s models and symbolic generalizations about those objects. And here lies the great irony: disciplinarity simultaneously devalues the rhetorical practices of poetic, aesthetic, and imaginative forms of discourse and artistic production even as it claims to produce knowledge about those forms. As James Berlin succinctly cast the story of our disciplinary history, poetics took precedence over rhetoric, but it did so not as the active creation of poetic texts but through the secondary activity of publishing expository arguments about poetic texts themselves. 17 Consequently, the domination within institutional evaluation practices of disciplinary discourse has often meant the crippling and devaluing of some of our most crucial concrete labor practices. Working under the knowledge contract’s version of managed disciplinarity, English departments grew dramatically in symbiosis with the tremendous growth of the university in the first half of the twentieth century. Despite the statistical successes in rising numbers of faculty and students, English professors competed for disciplinary justifications equal to those of the sciences (Graff, Professing Literature), even while the intellectual tasks of English professors did not always measure up to disciplinary criteria. Graff details the battles for the literary terrain between the scholars and the critics, but the most painful disciplinary squeeze happened to writing practices that followed the social control model of discipline worked out in English A, even though they were the skills most highly in demand. In order to identify their objects and methods as well as literature professors did, composition specialists had little choice but to adapt accordingly. Disciplinary pressure for such specification led to the predominance of what Berlin has called “current-traditional” rhetoric, a kind of rescripting of the principles Hill outlined in The Foundations of Rhetoric that were really principles of grammar, not dimensions of classical rhetoric. By reducing classical concerns for the social significance of universals to narrowly conceived 245

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grammatical objectifications suitable for scientific research, such formalist adaptations of rhetoric to disciplinary criteria followed the reductions of classical rhetoric to what Winterowd called the “managerial rhetorica” of Campbell and Blair. Of course, a great deal of writing gets excised from the academy as it narrows the range of writing practices at all levels, with, of course, dire consequences for the politics of writing specialists within English departments (Crowley; S. Miller; Ohmann; Scholes; Winterowd). As we have seen in the exemplary case of Child, because “literature” had become a privileged term in cultural discourse since the romantic period (1770–1830) it could better meet the requirements for disciplinary discourse. This was particularly the case when the corporate models of management were tied to the political mission of the nation-states, and literature could be seen to inculcate a form of nationalist identity and cultural pride (Readings; S. Miller). As I outlined in chapter 1, the principles of scientific management had thereby adapted the disciplinary conditions for the production of knowledge insofar as they served as viable institutional mechanisms to measure and evaluate success in terms of the quantity and quality of publication. Teaching, which had always been associated with English A’s instruction of writing, became simply superfluous in upper-division literature courses because the latter were supposed to “teach themselves” (see Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars): all the valuable labor investment was in the emerging paradigms of literary and critical research. In short, both pedagogy and writing were “defined as extrinsic to the ‘serious’ work of the discipline, the systematic analysis of language and literature” (Graff and Warner 3). Consequently, under this disciplinary regime teaching became so clearly subordinated to research that, for instance, the mla abandoned teaching in 1916 by revising a clause in the constitution that originally described “the object of the Association as ‘the advancement of the study of the Modern languages and their literatures’ ” to read “ ‘the advancement of research in the Modern languages and their literatures’ ” (Graff, Professing Literature 121). With its formation in 1911, ncte became the home for teaching and writing in the profession, and the basic splits between composition and literature, teaching and research, became solidified as prestige accrued, naturally enough, to the more specifically academic forms of disciplinary research. Historical studies such as those of Graff, Shumway, Applebee, Leitch, and others document the intellectual content of the battles to make the unruly field of the literary into a respectable academic discipline, so I will 246

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not rehearse them here. The point I draw from these ongoing battles is that although the category of the literary may be easier to objectify than even the broader subject of writing, that relative ease, of course, does not mean that consensus can be reached on this object with the same kind of disciplinary precision modeled by the sciences. So historical scholars, literary critics, linguists, and creative writers battled to win the war that would end when their paradigm could represent the field as a unified whole. Needless to say, it is an endless war because there can be no victors, only perpetual quarreling between paradigms, none of which can ever claim to objectify the field or subject matter in any final way. But even so, a temporary plateau was reached with the rise of New Criticism during the period from the 1930s to the 1960s. What is relevant here is that the basic principles of New Criticism gave rise to the greatest period of disciplinary stability for English departments. They authorized English departments to develop curricula that enabled them to define their objects and methods, the primary characteristics of disciplinary discourse, with almost as much confidence as the sciences (see Kamuf 77, 84). Ideological claims for the spiritual richness of the unmediated, unparaphrasable “verbal icon” of the poetic experience justified study of the “intrinsic” properties of the text as an object of knowledge, but the ideological claims mattered far less than the powerfully consistent disciplinary practices that became institutionalized in everyday use. The New Critics no longer had to fall back on philology, or linguistics, to substantiate the scientific basis of their object and methods. Although the New Critics themselves evidenced a much wider range of ideological beliefs about the transcendent values of literary art than many of their critics have acknowledged, their curricular successes depended less on such literary values as upon their working practices with respect to the discipline. With literature as the object, close reading as the method, and expository critical writing about canonized texts as the verifiable procedures for producing knowledge, the program for an English major could now be succinctly mapped out by organizing a series of courses based on the coverage model of the periods and genres of English and American literature beginning with Chaucer and leading up to the modernists. The period/genre curriculum provided a relatively objectified map of the disciplinary objects constituting the field of knowledge. 18 But, again, what tends to slip out of view are the categories of difference and the culture of diversity, and not just among the disciplinary objects but among the workers in the profession itself. No one particularly needed to pay attention to the fact that the profession of literary studies “was for 247

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all practical purposes a brotherhood based on race, citizenship, and class, bound together by what might be called, in a play on both its literal and figurative senses, the old school tie” (North, Refiguring the Ph.D. 22). Even more, with the basic machinery of the transformations of English A into the university-wide composition courses set up as the gatekeeper, the field had successfully reduced the disciplinary procedures to techniques of social control, as many have now documented in the case of English A. Since English A converted to composition, service courses hardly depended at all on the disciplinary procedures for producing new knowledge, and since anyone with sufficient talent to pursue graduate study in English must have already acquired such rudimentary discipline as grammar, graduate students became a ready labor force to occupy the unflowering desert. With college enrollments nearly quadrupling between 1945 and 1970, the basic inequities of the disciplinary system of English could be tolerated if not camouflaged by the postwar economic boom in corporate America. Challenges to the system from new areas of investigation such as women’s studies and African American studies could be addressed by adding to the existing curriculum without fundamentally changing the orthodox curriculum of literary periods and genres, because there were always enough students to fill whatever classes were offered. Moreover, the corporate structuring of disciplinary hierarchy consolidated itself during the period of New Critical hegemony. North describes how undergraduate and graduate English education took the shape of what he calls “College English Teaching, Inc.” (Refiguring the Ph.D.). In this system the main task of tenured senior professors was to replicate themselves through graduate education via the Ph.D. and the apprenticeship program: graduate students could do the dirty work of servicing the industry by teaching the composition courses, while the professors could develop their literary research specializations in graduate seminars. The ongoing corporate need for writing skills could thus be met in a system calling for increased numbers of Ph.D.’s even when graduate training itself had nothing to do with teaching or writing: “What has always made the credit-generating factory possible was the understanding—often tacit, to be sure, but unmistakable—that such teaching could be turned over to the less-than-fully-compensated and/or less-than-fully-qualified since it was not itself directly tied to the discipline’s core activities” (North, Refiguring the Ph.D. 235). In short, the “discipline” set the criteria by which the “less disciplined” could be exploited, and, in times of relative bounty, few complained vociferously. By 248

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the 1970s, however, College English Teaching, Inc., began to experience deeper signs of crisis. The Curriculum Is the Message: Toward a Sustainable English Studies William Riley Parker got it wrong: there are flowers in the desert, but you have to know where to look for them. The ecology of the desert has its own kind of sustainability, even if humans cannot inhabit such a space for very long without help. Ecologists have now taught us a great deal about how such harsh environments have their own sustainable if fragile ecosystems that can be so easily disrupted by human intervention, waste, and exploitation. But to bring the metaphor home, the ecosystem of academic disciplinarity can be toxic to some forms of human survival, especially in the humanities quarters of the academic world, where it is now proving to be not very ecologically sustainable. The latter term, as Derek Owens explains, has become a kind of buzzword since it “started surfacing with growing regularity in the early 1980s” (Composition 21). But in the strong and good sense in which he defines it, “sustainability means meeting today’s needs without jeopardizing the well-being of future generations” (Owens, Composition 1). The growing problem of the exploitation of “flexible” labor practices in English studies has been too well fueled by the disciplinary economy of value that continues to jeopardize the well-being of many students and teachers. How we can sustain work in English studies so that the genuinely flexible contours of our labor in a multicultural, global context do not just operate according to the unecological, exploitative, and deceptive forces of the “faux local” (Gee, Hull, and Lankshear) powers of global capital may be the most crucial phase of our various strategies for professional solidarity and well-being. The disciplinary ecosystem in English has contributed to the toxic division between reading and writing, and these divisions have been deeply inscribed within our curricular structures. Reconfiguring injustices in our workplaces thus inevitably calls for curricular alterations in the distribution of rewards for specific kinds of tasks so that more nondisciplinary possibilities acquire professional recognition and status. Such possibilities cannot materialize if the curriculum is identified only with the principles of disciplinarity. Even progressive as well as conventional efforts to reconfigure the discipline are often deeply linked to a paradox or contradiction that may seem to fly in the face of good sense. As I have suggested, in times of economic contraction, budget restraint, and the exploitation of part-time labor, we can understand the drive to shore up the discipline, to 249

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make disciplinary English stronger by more rigorously defining its subject matter and more precisely identifying its subdisciplines. Academics seek, that is, to resist further administrative budget cuts and loss of tenuretrack faculty by resorting to the traditional mechanism of resisting market forces: disciplinarity. If we could just define our objects more precisely and our methods more specifically, then such disciplinary integrity should justify our continued preservation if not expansion. If we could appear less “soft” as intellectual dilettantes and more “hard” as knowledge-producing researchers vital to the culture and the economy, then the sharpness of our rhetoric would have more powerful political effect in staying the course against market pressures. At least that’s the dream of modernity, and sometimes, in strategic places at the right time, it has the desired effect. But here’s the problem. The academic versions of disciplinarity simply work better for some other disciplines, especially the sciences, where disciplinary specificity and rigor can have direct market consequences in terms of securing more grants, public funds, and corporate endorsements for such research. The “better” the discipline, the better able it is to attract private corporate grants and funding agencies, and administrators have not lost sight of this handy rule of disciplinary accounting, especially in public education. 19 Intellectual discipline thus leads to financial discipline as certain kinds of work get commodified into exchange value, and it does so in English as well, except in significantly intensified ways. Under the terms set by the long-standing disciplinary split between literature and composition, the former having disciplinary power to produce the new and the latter being squeezed into the preservation of minimal standards serving the elite, virtually any form of disciplinary tightening will enhance the power of the literary/cultural/composition research specialists over the sea of low-paid temporary composition instructors. And administrators may, perversely speaking, love the consequences of such disciplinary “enhancements.” They can see in the very principles of the disciplinary system the justification for “cheap teaching” (Bousquet, “Waste Product”). Because disciplinary research in the humanities does not generally produce shortterm revenues, maintaining large numbers of full-time English researchers is costly. To management’s good fortune, however, writing, the one marketable skill that everyone needs, gets staffed by less-disciplined, part-time employees. And our very disciplinary history verifies that that’s exactly how we have done things from Child’s moment and the inauguration of English A on down: composition workers have floated literature’s boat for much of the 125-year history of the modern university. 250

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Historically devalued by disciplinary criteria favoring literature, writing is now called for by market forces as a “skill” necessary for any corporate task. We’ve hardly skipped a beat from the days of English A, when Hill’s version of “managerial rhetoric” based on mechanical recipes of style for the gentlemanly classes got recast as a mechanical skill and drill ready to serve capital’s flexible needs for more “information” on the way to profits. Indeed, flexible accumulation favors separating writing into smaller, independent units or programs, free of the imposing size of English departments, so that the smaller unit can then be more quickly fine-tuned to shifting market needs, whether toward electronic forms of literacy, professional writing, technical writing, or business writing. Disciplinarity has nicely greased the skids for this kind of exploitation because its powerful divisiveness shatters the grounds for professional solidarity. Since writing has rarely benefited from disciplinary privileges, administrators can justify the hiring of less than fully disciplinized, part-time employees because “that’s the way the discipline works.” We will always be very hard-pressed to argue that more disciplinary rigor and specialization will heal the wounds that our disciplinary history has in fact produced. “The disciplinarization of composition, marked by a great blossoming and new vitality in rhetcomp scholarship, has been accompanied by the near-total conversion of composition work to a system of flexible managed labor” (Bousquet, “Introduction” 5).20 Under these conditions disciplinary divisions sustained by the narrow terms of the modern knowledge contract only serve to weaken broader forms of professional solidarity. As composition theorists have been arguing for years, teaching writing and reading at any level calls for all the skills, resources, lore, and knowledge of a wide range of activities and practices, even though some forms of disciplinary criteria may not highly honor such work. Writing is one of the most complex activities known to humans, partly because it crosses all disciplinary borders and mixes modern, nonmodern, vernacular, and street literacies, so that any effort to stabilize these plays of difference will inevitably short-change in sometimes costly ways the complex set of practices, theories, and performances called for in verbal and textual acts. Many of those who advocate postprocess theory in composition try to resist this closure upon any notion of a fixed process shared by all writers (Kent; Vitanza). This movement is directly affiliated with multivalent practices and the culture of diversity, but when the focus turns to workplace conditions, the conundrum of postprocess theorists is that they must fight to acknowledge the very mix of modern and nonmodern practices that cannot 251

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be just reduced to another paradigm. It is therefore well to refer to this cluster of activity as a movement, just like a social movement, rather than another paradigm, another method, which the pull of disciplinary economy of value will always pressure it toward. As a movement, which this book aims to contribute to, it has the same kind of coalitional force within the professional field as other movements for the creation of dignity in our workplaces and collective bargaining in determining the zones of relative autonomy for evaluating the work we do. This movement needs as well to consider the changes in work and labor that reorientations to language and writing call for under a renegotiated knowledge contract. 21 Solidarity of labor across our different tasks calls for highly experienced individuals to work at all the tasks of teaching, writing, and research and in the links among those activities, not just in the disciplinized arenas of specialized research. There’s more than enough work to go around here, and none of them needs to be, in principle, the dull drudgery represented by Parker’s inaccurate metaphor of the unflowering desert. Narratives of teaching and cross-cultural encounters, avant-garde happenings, multimedia explorations of pedagogical experiences, publication in nonacademic venues, for example, all should be evaluated with the care equivalent to that given disciplinary endeavors, even though the former activities are often not amenable to disciplinary standards of measurement, since they may eclectically adapt in ad hoc ways different objects, methods, and forms of argumentation that mix such areas as creative writing, literary and cultural analysis, and composition theory. “A multi-disciplinary coalition of rhetoricians will help consolidate the work in written and spoken rhetoric, histories of literacies and communication technologies, and the cultural study of graphic, audio, visual, and digital media” (Mailloux, “Disciplinary Identities” 23). As I suggested above, “coalition” is a good word because it ought to register not just as an intellectual linking but as a political alliance and professional solidarity tied to collective bargaining. In order for such coalitions to happen, however, it will have to go beyond disciplinary identities and specializations not by negating them but by recognizing that such a broader spectrum of intellectual and rhetorical practices will never be fully sustainable under strictly disciplinary criteria of evaluation. There are also political and intellectual reasons why smaller “disciplinary” units (such as writing, literature, and cultural studies) cut their group members off from the potential support of their peers when they become institutionalized across departmental barriers. So long as the modern departmental bureaucracies survive (and I suspect they will be around for 252

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quite a while), we have to understand that the departments are not disciplines but convenient arrays of associated paradigms with quite porous as well as conflicting institutional borders linked to a wide range of nondisciplinary activities. Within the solidarity of a field that can be rhetorically represented in some pretty forceful articulations about the reading and writing of cultures we can more successfully form coalitions, fusions, and links between subdisciplines and the surrounding arena of nondisciplinary activities. Specifically trying to break large departments into smaller departmental units based on compartmentalized subfields of knowledge and methods plays easily into the hands of management, especially when we package, commodify, and represent our work in disciplinary terms that further enable the “outsourcing” and “downsizing” of our limited resources. Of course, short-term gains to such a strategy can and sometimes do accrue, as evidenced by the familiar enough history of literary elitism and condescension to compositionists. The long-term consequences of such elitism will eventually cast literary separatists into what James Sosnoski has called the “underworld of the university system” (Modern Skeletons 29), a kind of inversion of the writing ghetto brought about because there is little in the long-term economic future to sustain literary privileges when global capital has little need for national identities fostered by the study of literary traditions. The aesthetic and the political, the literary and the rhetorical, the textual and the extratextual are deeply entwined, and their disciplinary separation has been costly. At the same time, it is crucial that the subject matters of composition, rhetoric, and writing have their rich cluster of disciplinary paradigms, just as the literary people do, and the past thirty years of scholarship by compositions has clearly invented such a terrain. Yet the point is that disciplinarity itself will simply not serve to integrate those differences in productive ways. Administrators out to cut budgets are the only ones to gain from the internecine warfare among competing subdivisions. In the end, disciplinary isolation disrupts solidarity and makes any small unit or program more vulnerable to administrative surveillance.22 Because of these disciplinary contradictions within English studies, curricular innovations from literary scholars, even when they claim to break down the hierarchies between reading and writing, often disable the institutional force of their worthy innovations by insisting on, as Robert Scholes puts it, “making English studies more rather than less disciplined” (Rise and Fall 108). Two significant proposals for curricular reform—Scholes’s own curricular model for English studies and Paul Jay’s important work on globalizing literary studies—do not sufficiently alter the institutional role of 253

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the discipline of English studies. Because neither addresses disciplinarity as the precondition for curricular change, the fine changes that they do recommend, including the broadening of the disciplinary terrain, will not adequately respond to the increased class differences emerging from the uses and abuses of academic labor meted out by the current knowledge contract, especially with respect to the disciplinary hierarchies between reading and writing practices. Without making more fundamental changes in the evaluation of labor practices, contractually working out spaces for nondisciplinary labor, these innovations will simply re-create the old disparities of power within the profession. Scholes’s proposal for a reformed English studies curriculum has many attractive features, all aimed at linking reading and writing, even though he prefers to call them consumption and production. 23 He proposes that rather than the outworn tripod metaphor for our field of language, literature, and composition we return to the medieval trivium of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric, and he describes in considerable detail an attractive array of new courses investigating his capacious understanding of these key terms. What such a curriculum would most obviously displace is the nowdefunct “story of English” as the rise of a canon of British and American authors to disciplinary status and the subordination of rhetoric and writing. A key goal of this curriculum is precisely the one I advocate: the integration of reading and writing. Under the new rigors of his disciplinary trivium, Scholes proposes a “realignment” of “two types of canonicity,” “between canons of texts and canons of methods” (Rise and Fall 111). It should be clear from my previous discussion of the rise of disciplinarity that realigning objects and methods will indeed alter the content of the discipline, but it will not significantly alter the conditions for disciplinary discourse, since “methods” is one of the central characteristics of disciplinary discourse. 24 Scholes grants that “discipline, like canon, is a word that scarcely conceals its potential for abuses of power. We need disciplines in order to think productively. We also need to challenge them in order to think creatively” (Rise and Fall 108). These seem like wise admonitions, although disciplines are not always a necessary or sufficient prerequisite to “think productively.” But, more important, challenging disciplines means challenging the exclusive academic hierarchy by which disciplinary discourse always wins the evaluative war of institutional power. Within the department one of the key points of contact for the exercise of that power takes place through evaluation and hiring committees and the particular criteria they deploy to make crucial personnel decisions. These 254

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criteria must be very deliberately altered at these key points, with new kinds of evaluation practices whereby colleagues assess the worth of a much wider range of labor practices, and they must do so in terms not just of their “disciplinary” contribution but in terms of their suitability to the people benefiting from the activities and practices being assessed. Among other consequences, disciplinary evaluation criteria inevitably become measures of competitive individualism as colleagues strive to acquire symbolic capital primarily through their publications. Evaluation committees become one among an array of micromanaged points in our institutions where disciplinarity gets meted out through the hierarchical delineation of labor as prescribed by the modern knowledge contract. Without significant alteration, in alliance with collective bargaining negotiations, disciplinarity thereby both discourages and devalues the kinds of collaboration and collective action necessary for many of the diverse forms of rhetorical, political, and intellectual work that English professors actually perform. The point is that we do have some agency and some autonomy in these practices, and we must make use of them to alter and amend these crucial evaluation practices, along with the ideological critique that justifies such reform. Without considerable study and focus on how to alter these practices, disciplinary criteria reign in powerful de facto ways. Scholes never mentions these points of contact in his analysis because his focus on curricular content and method without attending to labor issues leaves routine disciplinary evaluation practices in place; again, he wants to make English more rather than less disciplinary. Thus, for example, although Scholes claims that “the skill of a writer is a happy one because it is based upon play” (Rise and Fall 102), disciplinarity doesn’t often value play unless it produces “serious” forms of knowledge in expository prose that clearly identifies its own objects and methods. Disciplinary criteria will, for example, more highly value an expository article about a highly playful and innovative performative literacy event such as a collaborative improvisation by students and faculty at the local writing center but not the event itself, no matter how creative and impactful it might have been on the audience. By not revising the basic conditions of the disciplinary version of the knowledge contract, Scholes’s curriculum will continue to diminish the value of certain forms of labor that he himself says he values. That is, the power of disciplinarity is such that various kinds of creative nonfiction, textual and rhetorical innovations, multimedia studies, pedagogical experimentation, collaborative teaching and research projects, community literacy endeavors, and other activities not always reducible to 255

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traditional expository forms of argumentative writing will continue to be subordinated in disciplinary value even though they may have considerable social as well as market value for some forms of business and industry. Graff ’s notion of the mix of academic and vernacular voices in our research and teaching endeavors points in this direction, but it tends not to go far enough if it limits such performances only to the disciplinary forms of arguespeak. And such hierarchies of value get, as it were, naturalized into the criteria deployed in the evaluation and hiring committees unless they are self-consciously altered. With respect to the representation of our work to the wider university and public, I find Scholes’s use of the medieval trivium of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric a troublesome set of terms to “sell,” which of course we must do, since we don’t have any choice over whether or not we get commodified, just about how we exercise some control over the commodification of our interests. Just to use one simple example, I can well imagine a conversation between administrators in the Burkean parlor: “So, those English folk think they do dialectic, do they? Well, we’ll see about that.” It’s just a hard sell for a department chair to bring that term to the bargaining table. Without more substantial challenges to and revision of the basic conditions of disciplinarity accompanying Scholes’s reformed curriculum, there’s nothing to prevent the new organizational terms from adapting to the traditional disciplinary hierarchies, where the experts in the subdisciplinary specialties compete for the tenured positions by writing expository research essays and books in rhetoric, dialectic, and grammar while part-time writing instructors struggle to teach large classes of first-year undergraduates. Evaluation committees have to be offered other criteria, other models, to avoid these disciplined consequences of the unequal divisions of academic labor. Teachers engaged in various kinds of non-, extra-, or postdisciplinary forms of investigation calling for collaboration with students to improve their learning and their contribution to local communities will find their work diminished by strictly disciplinary criteria unless they produce identifiable forms of argumentative publication. Without a fair assessment of the value of these other activities as determined by nondisciplinary criteria, the disciplinary practices will ensure that a small core of highly trained faculty will have the resources to study the complicated terrain of dialectics and rhetoric, while many of the most valuable practices of most faculty will continue to be devalued or forced to adapt to back-to-the-basics forms of grammar so that they can be more easily exploited in a flexible market. All those nondisciplinary practices will likely remain deeply subordinated 256

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forms of labor within Scholes’s new model of the discipline of English unless disciplinary reform accompanies the curricular remodeling. Likewise, in an important and provocative PMLA essay entitled “Beyond Discipline? Globalization and the Future of English,” Paul Jay demonstrates the limits of the older, dominant “nationalist paradigm” for literary study as exemplified by Scholes’s articulation of the “story of English.” Like Scholes, Jay advocates expanding and altering the basic content of the discipline of English to reflect a new, more proper emphasis on “literature’s relation to the historical processes of globalization” (33). He advances the “need to make a programmatic commitment to the study of English in a newer, global framework, one that recognizes the transnational character of English in the past and the global context in which it will be produced in the future.” In themselves, these are superb goals designed to stretch the borders of the discipline, because, as Jay comments, without “such a commitment, we may see the discipline of English become ever more marginal, in the university of the future” (46). However important such expanding borders must inevitably be, Jay’s title is ironic to the extent that it should really read “Beyond the Current Content of the Discipline of English Literary Studies,” because the changes he recommends don’t get “beyond” (or beside) disciplinary English at all in the sense in which I am arguing that they must. That is, although Jay mentions that writing and composition are equally important and that he only excludes them for purposes of space in his article, he does not envision any particular change in the disciplinary practices as I have outlined them in this book. He advocates remapping the literary terrain in order to “develop new terms and paradigms to describe what we do” (Jay 44). But, as I argued in chapter 3, paradigms themselves inevitably call for a reassertion of the structures of the disciplinary matrix. Moreover, whether one teaches Nathaniel Hawthorne or Chinua Achebe will likely not matter so much in terms of public accountability if the pressing need is for literacy and rhetorical skills. As Evan Watkins puts it, “Just as a political praxis of change is not only a matter of inventing new concrete work practices, it is not a matter either of changing the texts we teach, reforming the ‘canon.’ Such reform can of course be made part of a ‘war of position,’ but the point is that it must be made so against the working organization of English” (Work Time 17). Bracketing off the literary skills from the literacy component strikes at the core of the disciplinary problem in realigning curricula. The disciplinary presumptions of Jay lead him to focus primarily on a shifting of the objects (texts) and methods (theories) of the discipline. But the human contexts of many of our workplaces are 257

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now for the most part so crossed by the international and global mix of student and faculty populations that the kinds of writing tasks, narratives, stories, and investigations need to be integrated directly into the work of curricular reform at the beginning, not after the content has been shifted. Our professional concerns are simply greater than the terrain meted out by the disciplinary economy of value. Any significant reform of English studies, therefore, calls for an integration of writing and reading activities more fully than most of what we have yet seen in the design of English curricula. North offers one of the few models for what he has called the “fusion” option for reinvigorating English studies, and I share his assessment that without the hard work of rebuilding the subdisciplinary splits that have characterized the history of the profession we won’t even be able to “begin the negotiations that might result in substantive change” (Refiguring the Ph.D. 237). Besides healing the disciplinary splits within the field, this kind of broader institutional reform aims not only to legitimize emergent kinds of nondisciplinary academic work but to recognize many practices that are already taking place but that have been systematically devalued such as narrative, creative writing, radical forms of pedagogy, electronic and community literacy projects, nonacademic publications, multimedia composing, and others. Such practices may always be challenges to and in tension with strictly disciplinary forms of academic research, which is as it should be, so long as disciplinary research does not continue to get preferential treatment. While the current crisis of English studies has been most commonly seen as evolving out of a need to expand the objects and methods of the discipline, my argument calls for the more fundamental task of altering the strictly hierarchical role of academic disciplinarity itself in determining the range of institutionally authorized labor practices of English professors (see Mahala and Swilky). While critical forms of expository argumentation under the conditions of disciplinary discourse remain deeply humane practices when they serve the interests of social justice for more people, it is also the case that “disciplinarity” has never provided suitable evaluative criteria for all the work we perform in the humanities. It will be best to see the range of tasks carried out by English professors along a horizontal spectrum from disciplinary to non- or postdisciplinary practices. Such a shift calls for different kinds of evaluative criteria appropriate for different kinds of work, and those differences must not be seen as necessarily subordinate to disciplinary methods of evaluation. This argument, therefore, raises large questions about the material processes whereby certain kinds of professo258

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rial labor get legitimized and authorized within our specific institutions. The production of cultural value in academia has proceeded according to the supremacy of disciplinary practices to the exclusion of other modes of accountability. We live larger professional lives than disciplinarity can easily account for. Significant curricular reform will depend upon our success in altering some of the basic institutional practices, and for this to happen we will have to renegotiate the modern terms of the knowledge contract that we have long taken for granted. It’s time for a change at this basic level. My more ambitious claim, then, is that, in the case of English and the humanities at least, we may have reached the end of the 125-year history where the dominance of the disciplinary models of the knowledge contract should continue to be the exclusive measure of academic performance and curricular design. This involves more than just expanding the borders of the canon or becoming increasingly interdisciplinary, no matter how vital and inevitable such practices may be to the overall project of curricular transformation, mainly because such expansions can be carried out without altering the fundamental principles of disciplinary selectivity. Some of the most innovative, exploratory, and vital tasks performed by English professors become systematically devalued as the purview of the academic underclass, exploited under the very disciplinary conditions designed to protect them. Although economic exploitation of part-time and temporary instructors has affected all departments, disciplinary divisions between reading and writing have deeply exacerbated internal class struggle within the field of English. Disciplinarity itself is, after all, a Western discourse. The recognition of multiple cultural crossings calls for new, more sustainable “economies of value” that would include various nondisciplinary reading, writing, and interpretive practices emerging from different cultures within university labor practices. Speaking globally, there are many emerging alternative modernities adding to the mix of nonmodern tasks essential to the social welfare of citizens needing to read and write their cultures. And there is considerable need for such literacy when “the United States ranks forty-ninth among the 158 members of the United Nations in measures of literacy” (Faigley 69). Without sufficiently renegotiating the knowledge contract we will continue to reinscribe the social hierarchies of class differences in strikingly unjust ways within the ranks of English departments themselves even as we advocate for the social justice of representing different groups and peoples. Although we cannot easily alter the market forces in the current regime of “flexible accumulation,” we had best design curricula that more fully 259

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integrate reading and writing practices so that we can resist the isolation and exploitation of what Sosnoski so aptly calls “token professionals,” a large segment of our professional ranks whose labor never quite counts for much under strictly disciplinary criteria. The ultimate irony of such reforms might be that by making the range of our professional practices more “flexible” than the focus on disciplinary criteria might otherwise allow we regain some of the autonomy that would enable us to heal the class differences being exacerbated by the “flexible accumulation” models of late capitalism. We simply don’t have any choice about whether we will experience economic flexibility because that’s a rapidly globalizing phenomenon of the contemporary social and cultural marketplace in which we must operate, so we must draw on the spaces of relative autonomy still left to us to determine as far as possible the terms of how that flexibility will affect those of us who work in English departments. One would hope, therefore, that reformed and integrated curricula sustained by renegotiated knowledge contracts could better resist the “flexible accumulation” carried out by management practices that have used disciplinary justifications to further the exploitation of nondisciplinary peripheral labor. Of course, none of this will be easy, but that’s the hard political work of disciplinary and curricular revision. The arts and the humanities have always entailed more than modern forms of disciplinary discourse, and this imaginative and rhetorical excess accounts for the uneasy relations in the disciplinary status of English studies. 25 Given the wide-ranging economic, social, and technological changes taking place in our culture, it becomes possible to see humanistic work as engaging a spectrum of practices that take place along a horizontal continuum from disciplinary to nondisciplinary or even antidisciplinary modes. This continuum need not be hierarchical but differential with respect to distinctions between modern and nonmodern forms of labor. Such a reconfiguration of academic institutions “would thus work to show the variety of discourse possible at the site of the academic, the availability of alternative sites for carrying out different sorts of projects, and the politics of which projects to attempt, in what ways” (Horner 120). Obviously, hierarchies of value will continue to be exercised, since the basic evaluative task of professionals is to make such judgments, but they need not emerge on the predominant disciplinary scale. Since disciplinary constraints can sometimes foster forms of social injustice, the production of knowledge may need to be subordinated to the search for justice and understanding for a more sustainable future. We need not, therefore, require that all hu260

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manistic literacy practices fit within the system of disciplinary forms of argumentation and exclusion, because arguing and representing run well beyond the boundaries of our paradigms. Fundamental to such an integrated and potentially more sustainable vision of English studies will be a thorough refiguring of the role of writing in both graduate and undergraduate education. There’s a lot of dynamic work going on in the profession of English studies besides the winning performances of the disciplinarians. If our concern for reforming English studies resonates with a commitment to equitable labor conditions, then this book is a cautionary tale with a potentially happier ending. Instead of worrying that things are “shaky” from a disciplinary perspective, we can imagine them as flexible and adaptable within our larger professional spheres so as to better meet the needs of more users. There are possibilities for retooling evaluation practices and revisioning humanities labor as running across a spectrum of disciplinary and extra-, non-, or postdisciplinary activities that need not be measured according to the predominant disciplinary yardstick. And the human labor involved in these expanded curricular and evaluation practices calls for a “rhetoric of solidarity” (Bousquet, “Composition” 12) throughout our professional ranks as we reimagine the activities of reading and writing our cultures for a more sustainable future.

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A Miniepilogue

In the final sentence of her classic study The Rise of Professionalism Magali Sarfatti Larson voices the hope of negotiating the limitations and contradictions of managed labor: “For this, professional workers, in solidarity with all workers, must find the means of claiming and realizing the full potential of all work.” Many of us working in universities might well improve our working conditions if we could collectively find the means in our specific locations for the “practical redefinition of professional roles” (Larson 244). In the context of this study such redefinition calls for renegotiating the terms of the knowledge contract so as to legitimize through specific contractual obligations domains of professional labor that do not always operate according to disciplinary paradigms. The work of many users of the university contributes enormous social value even as it emerges in the nondisciplinary forms of pedagogical lore, alternative discourses, curriculum development, community service, creative performance, avantgarde happenings, fluxus events, and multimedia explorations. We need to collectively find ways to leverage different ways of evaluating such labor, not within the academic models of disciplinary knowledge but beside, rather than below or beyond, the paradigms that can yield fruitful kinds of scope and stability for some but not all research domains. In our age of disaggregation stability in paradigms and in relationships is a good we should not always abandon, but the goodness is more of an ethical than epistemological nature. When the stability itself injures or oppresses certain groups of people, then it must be reworked, and the ethical imagination of everyone involved in the reworking needs to have a voice in its determination. That’s what the culture of diversity in a multivalent university might mean. How to bring it about through collective action is a question that can only begin to be answered within the local institutional contexts in which we all find ourselves working. But there are bonds of solidarity that cross from the local to the global that virtually any version of a sustainable future must forge out of present conditions. This is not easy, especially in these times of economic restructuring. As Terry Eagleton reminds us, “In a world which has witnessed the rise and fall of various brutally totalitarian regimes, the whole idea of collective life comes to seem vaguely discredited” (12). For this reason “we need to imagine new forms of belonging, which in our kind of world are bound to be multiple rather than monolithic” (Eagleton 21). 262

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In every local context of every modern university we work amidst the mix of modern and nonmodern networks where we all have to mediate between the various institutions and rhetorics that constitute our interdependent lives. In my own theoretical account of those networks as evidenced in this book, my interdependencies (like anyone else’s) are much more in evidence than my independence. Indeed, I have borrowed most of the key terms for my analysis. From Latour I took the nonmodern; from Foucault, disciplinarity and biopower; from Marx, commodification and exchange value; from Kuhn, paradigm; from Sedgwick, beside; from Butler, performative; from Appadurai, alternative modernities and culture of diversity. Some but not all of these are what James Sosnoski has called “signature terms” (“Theory Junkyard” 83)— those that are closely linked with particular writers who have themselves borrowed the terms and reworked them in ways associated with their own labor. Some arise as neologisms that continue to circulate among various intellectual communities. Then there are the general terms such as discipline, profession, modern, postmodern, capitalism, labor, collective, solidarity. There are, of course, many others, since my pilfering of terms knows few boundaries. In each case I have reworked the terms, twisted them, even if only slightly, from the semantic register in which I received them, but always with an eye to the solidarity across those differences as we try to collectively share visions of imagined futures alternative to the ones that might otherwise be foisted upon us. Wrestling with cultural rhetorics is one part of the necessary work of reading and writing our cultures under the pressures of empire and globalization. Such “cultural work” refers “to the ways in which a book or other kind of ‘text’—a movie, a Supreme Court decision, an ad, an anthology, an international treaty, a material object—helps construct the frameworks, fashion the metaphors, create the very language by which people comprehend their experiences and think about their world” (Lauter 11). And the complex skills necessary for such understandings constitute a form of cultural capital that stretches beyond any disciplinary parameter to stabilize them. The knowledge contract must be rewritten because truth, knowledge, and inquiry take place across a spectrum of activities that call for contractual legitimations beyond and beside the domains of a modern, disciplinary economy of value. Besides, “those negotiating with harsh employers would be well advised to seek a contract as tightly worded as possible” (Eagleton 146–47). Whether our professional headquarters are in linguistics, creative writing, literature, communications, rhetoric, composition, critical theory, cultural studies, or any other educational endeavor, we all have to wrangle 263

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with what we’ve been given in the discursive orders that mediate the material conditions in which we locate our lives and our work. Terms do good work when they serve “causes of justice” rather than deepen “oppression and exploitation” (Dirlik and Williams 82). But in our age of misinformation the words and images bombarding us daily can mislead and manipulate large populations. Cultural rhetoricians such as myself can become culturalist in an unfortunate way when our work invokes, even if unconsciously, an idealist rather than materialist sense of language. And materiality names a powerful dimension of being in the world that always exceeds the normalizing rhetoric of any given paradigm, Marxist or otherwise. Materialism in this sense is not a paradigm but a rather ugly word for naming everything that passes in, through, and around the body, “touching feeling” (Sedgwick), desire, the imagination as energy and aspiration, suffering and joy, love, the sheer physicality of our personal, social, and natural environments. Foucault called the material shaping of our identities a result of biopower to register the “bio”-logy, the physical/physiological regulation, intensification, and denial of desire in contingent sociohistorical circumstances. Without paying close attention to the materiality of these forces as they affect any understanding or analysis, we risk losing the social, the concrete set of institutional practices, economic inequalities, and class relations in which all discourse operates. From another direction, rarely will the terms of cross-cultural understanding fit within the symbolic generalizations of any one paradigm, method, or school of thought. Truth does not disappear, but it does get complex and, thus, labor intensive when the social contexts up for grabs are themselves so complex. For that reason we face “the inevitability of a significant realignment in how colleges and universities structure the humanities and humane social sciences” (Lauter 23). The lesson of this book is that we can’t let the language that gets solidified in the paradigms that try to arrest its interaction with new social circumstances deter us from the hard work of contractually renegotiating our changing working conditions in an unstable world. As I have implicitly argued on every page of this book, such mediations and translations take time and labor, just as writing this book took the support of many people and tenure and a sabbatical, all of which I am very grateful for. On that point John McGowan has it just right: we academics don’t deserve tenure and sabbaticals because of the special nature of what it is we do; rather, universities still model rewards that workers in all areas of the university, of the economy, and of the world deserve. The position of 264

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university practices, tenure included, functions within the new ecosystems of globalism that link education, capital, and world poverty. We can’t easily evade those links even as capital tries to do just that by, for instance, calling on us to wave flags of patriotism to wipe out the evil of terrorism so that it becomes “un-American” to even begin to think about a political analysis seeking to understand the links between terror and capital. What, you might well ask, do tenure and sabbatical leave time have to do with terrorism when the former seem to be issues so internal to the workings of higher education and the latter seems so external to its traditional functions? Well, as Evan Watkins argues, rather than conceiving of tenure in narrow terms as a means of preserving academic freedom, “the tenuring process can indicate a direction for a countereducation of the university, as a way for universities to participate in the educative formation of political agency” (Everyday Exchanges 191). The fact that most of the world’s workers don’t have these privileges means we have to imagine a future where it might be possible and an education that might begin to bring it about. Isn’t that, after all, what a liberal arts education ought to be about? As Gary Rhoades puts it, “Educating for literacy, working for dignity” (“Afterword” 256). Such a general mission certainly falls under several of the traditional rationales for higher education, even as academic institutions rarely live up to their own ideals. There’s nothing in the nature of resources, natural or human, that prevents such transformations of labor from happening. Imagining such a transformed world hinges on the historical truth that “the condition of the poor is intolerable partly because the resources to alleviate it exist in abundance. Starvation is appalling partly because it is unnecessary” (Eagleton 180). There is a great deal in the nature of politics and economics that keeps those inequities escalating, and our educational task is to intervene in our local contexts to ameliorate those injustices when institutional systems operate to unfairly contain, divide, and discipline our labor. But there’s also a new breed of scholar-activists among us whose innovative work in the academic labor movement as well as in their blending of teaching, research, and service makes possible new forms of solidarity. As part of this project these new kinds of literacy workers have been developing, among other things, a sophisticated critical rhetoric that powerfully resists the contortions of academic capitalists to put the final spin on higher education. As the boundaries between disciplinary, nondisciplinary, and postdisciplinary practices and work within and without the university become even more blurred, many individuals have now forged 265

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some important new alliances that are based not on flexible accumulation but on collective solidarity for a more sustainable future. Any imagined future must be contractually negotiated within and against the forces that would co-opt it for special interests. As Eileen Schell argues, “With a rhetoric that opposes binaries and encourages agency and coalition building, we are in a good position to articulate a broad educational agenda that acknowledges worker rights and the fundamental need for a democratic, accessible, and diverse system of higher education” (“Toward a New Labor Movement” 110). Many of those now working on such coalitions signal “a shift in awareness of labor issues and a building up of strategic alliances between workers and national and international labor organizations” (Schell, “Toward a New Labor Movement” 100). That such work is now happening, even if in piecemeal and fragmented ways, within the universities, colleges, and community colleges throughout the country represents one sign among many that alternative modernities can be forged within the political realities of higher education in these times. Randy Martin says it best: “These are pathways carved within the university that lead to different futures and possibilities for the present—roads very much taken that give different ways of valuing the work we do together” (“Foreword” ix). That we do work together means that we should contractually protect from abuse any of the many individual users of the university, not just the select group of individuals whose subject positions enable them to profit from the system underwritten by the terms of the modern knowledge contract. We still have a long way to go on the roads that lead toward a revitalized education for those who need it most. Many have already figured it out: no sense waiting to head out for that future.

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Writing the Knowledge Contract 1. Newman’s volume has a complicated publication history. It begins with the 1852 publication of Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Education. Addressed to the Catholics of Dublin, which he expanded into The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated (1873), which he continued to revise and edit through the ninth edition, published in 1889, the year before he died. For more details see Frank M. Turner’s “Note on the Life of John Henry Newman” in Newman. 2. “A good cold war pluralist, Kerr . . . had no trouble with the University as a vast employer and prodigious producer. . . . He had a bit more trouble with the notion that between employment and output lies labor” (Martin, “Getting the General Idea” 301). Kerr himself believed that “pluralism in higher education matches the pluralistic American society. The multiversity . . . is the child of middle-class pluralism” (Uses 88). That it was “middle class” begins to suggest the class-based limitations of this version of pluralism. 3. For the downside of pluralism the best critique is Rooney’s Seductive Reasoning. 4. In this context see Zebroski’s explication of Ralph Tyler’s 1949 book, Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction, where “Tyler lists four kinds of learning experiences: (1) those to develop skill in thinking, (2) those helpful in acquiring information, (3) those helpful in developing social attitudes, and (4) those helpful in developing interests” (176). Zebroski then associates the first kind of knowledge with what he calls “knowing-how to or procedural knowledge” and the second kind with “knowing-that or propositional knowledge” (177). 1. Working outside the Knowledge Contract 1. Ohmann’s now-classic 1976 study, English in America, was one of the first to highlight the connection of literacy knowledge to the “military-industrial complex.” His recent Politics of Knowledge provides a crucial analysis of changes since that earlier book. 2. “Electronification” “substituted information command for knowing or learning (whatever that may be)” (Spivak, “From Haverstock” 28). Knowledge can be lots of things besides propositional knowledge about disciplinary objects, including distributed learning, dialogic networks, intuitive, tacit, affective, collaborative, intersubjective, and so on, that register important ways of knowing and understanding that work outside or beside more strictly disciplinary forms of knowledge. David Noble provides one of the most cogent distinctions between education and training, where “education is the exact opposite of training in that it entails not the disassociation but the utter integration of knowledge and the self, in a word, self-knowledge” (44). 3. “No one can any longer separate knowledge from power, reason from performativity, metaphysics from technical mastery” (Derrida, “Mochlos” 15). Kant

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clearly meant to separate out the constative truth of philosophy from the performative commands of state powers, as the content of his texts reveals. But as a textual performance Kant’s work can itself be seen as a contractual intervention intending to limit the powers of the state and the church. For Readings, Kant’s idealism meant that the “university is a fictional institution. Reason can only be instituted if the institution remains a fiction, functions only ‘as if ’ it were not an institution. If the institution becomes real, then reason departs” (6). My difference with Readings on this point is that he misses the very real powers Kant is negotiating in the “conflict of faculties,” especially those that threatened his own well-being. The fact that something is fictional or constructed out of language does not mean that it does not have real, material consequences in institutional life. They are necessary fictions or, as Nietzsche called them, “regulative fictions” (Kaufmann 448). Indeed, Kant himself had actually recast the problem of knowing from reason to aesthetics in The Critique of Judgment, where the sublime moment yielded the ineffable fusion of subjective and objective, transcendental ego met transcendent formalism, beyond the binary logic of reason and the dialectic. The aesthetic sublime provided the philosophical terms for romantic idealism and cultural transcendence. In his influential later text on language, On Language: The Diversity of Human Language-Structure and Its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind (1836), Humboldt provided a comprehensive theory of why some languages better approximate the rules of a universal grammar and, of course, why languages of Indo-European descent do so better than others (see Yarbrough 125). See Larson on the ties between modern professionalism and industrial capitalism (6) and Newfield on the ties between higher education and industry (Ivy and Industry). Veysey has chronicled the rise of the modern university and the remarkable uniformity in the formation of the modern, departmentally administered university that came of age between, roughly, 1869 and 1914. Between 1981 and 1993 the grip Project (Group for Research in the Institutionalization and Professionalization of literary studies, sponsored by the Society for Critical Exchange) provided an extended series of symposiums and publications on these issues. Publication of some of this work can be found in The GRIP Report, volumes 1–9. See Graff ’s Professing Literature, especially chapters 4–5, in which he documents the significance of scientific models in the construction of English departments. This section is based on a revised version of three paragraphs published in “English Incorporated: An Introduction,” coauthored by myself, Claude Mark Hurlbert, and Paula Mathieu as the first chapter in our coedited book, Beyond English, Inc.: Curricular Reform in a Global Economy. I appreciate Mark’s and Paula’s willingness to let me adapt this material to my analysis in this book.

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10. There’s an irony in these changes in the knowledge contract that plays out in terms of Kuhn’s description of paradigms as characterized by exemplars, symbolic generalizations, and models: Frederick Taylor became the new exemplary figure, the student “hour” became the symbolic generalization for academic labor, and the assembly line became the model for academic efficiency. The irony is that paradigms are supposed to describe the internal consensus justifying the autonomy of scientific communities, but in this instance paradigm formation is being recast in terms of forces external to the university. These issues are explored more fully in chapter 3. 11. Brint narrates a telling incident in 1916 where the relations between the academic powers of quantitative measurement and industrial interests were literally configured in a parade in honor of the new mit campus “when floats sponsored by the major corporations of early 20th-century America chugged down the streets of Nantasket Beach” to celebrate a “university designed in large part to serve the technical needs of American industry” (In an Age 8). 12. On this last point Weber wisely cautions that a corporation is itself not a name for a single structure, since different corporations utilize very different managerial and administrative structures: “The question, however, that remains to be answered is: What exactly is a corporation?” (228). 13. Additionally significant was the 1981 Bayh Dole Act, which enabled institutions of higher education to compete for patents. As Martin puts it, with this act “the university was invited to follow the yellow brick road of patent lust” (“Getting the General Idea” 301). 14. “The labor process is not independent of the knowledge process, which is constituted culturally, nor is it independent of the social ‘life process’ ” (Aronowitz and DiFazio 274). 15. See, especially, the work of Michael Bérubé, Marc Bousquet, Terry Caesar, Deborah M. Herman, Lisa Jessup, Benjamin Johnson, Patrick Kavanagh, Kevin Mattson, Cary Nelson, Christopher Newfield, Richard Ohmann, Gary Rhoades, Corey Robin, Eileen Schell, Julie M. Schmid, Sheila Slaughter, James Sosnoski, Evan Watkins, Joel Westheimer, and others. Also see the electronic journal Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor (http://www.workplace.edu), founded by Marc Bousquet and currently edited by Chris Carter and Mark Wolf. 16. Consider Larson’s recounting of one such instance of prejudice: “During a strike of college teachers in the sixties, the accusation was heard that these professors were behaving ‘like longshoremen.’ Later, I was told by the organizers of a union of employed architects in the San Francisco Bay area that most of their potential members resisted unionization, as something ‘unprofessional’ ” (x). Obviously, given the rise of faculty unions over the past several decades, this prejudice has weakened, although, given the remarkably conservative nature of the university in general, it has hardly disappeared.

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17. “As a work force, a higher percentage of faculty are unionized than of workers in the private sector of the economy (12 percent) or the general workforce (16 percent)” (Rhoades, Managed Professionals 10). 18. In the same critical spirit Harding finds unionization of scientists also narrowly focused: “Unions of scientific workers, like unions in other settings, have focused on improving salaries, benefits, and working conditions but not on redistributing the control of the scientific workplace to break down class, race, and gender stratifications” (75). 19. In her powerful exposé of the exploitive and even illegal activities carried out by the exclusively online University of Phoenix, Cox describes the fate of the humanities in the information university this way: “The humanities will become (some might argue they’ll simply continue to be) an affluent affectation, like $600 Prada bike messenger bags” (29). Of course, industry may continue to need and call for reductive versions of writing instruction as one of the most basic kinds of educational need. 20. My own case is itself an argument for such unionized activity: in the two universities at which I have taught the proportion of full- to part-time faculty must seem like an aberration from the national average. At iup, for instance, we have a maximum of 10 percent temporary faculty. Unfortunately, we also experience exactly the same disciplinary and curricular splits between literature and writing, so that temporary faculty are confined to humanities distribution courses for nonmajors. The job, then, is to unite curricular, epistemological, and labor issues by bringing those relations to the bargaining table during contract negotiations as well as working them out through traditional committee and departmental channels. 21. “Whatever the discipline’s claims, it reproduces the conditions of a classstructured society at nearly every level: in graduate training, in the job ‘market,’ in promotion and tenure practices, in publishing and funding” (Shumway and Dionne 13). 22. Ross cautions us to beware of conceptualizing an idealized evenness for the fields of knowledge: “Humanists preferred to think of the field of knowledge as an even spectrum, running from hard sciences to the fine arts” (172). The main qualification is that it’s clearly not an “even” spectrum but an uneven and often discontinuous series of multiplicities. It might be useful to recognize that we actually have to use multiple metaphors and terms to describe work because of its uneven variability. 23. “Disciplines are the fundamental tools for interdisciplinary work, the source of instrumental and conceptual material for problem-solving, the base for integration, and the substance for metacritical reflection. . . . ‘[D]isciplined interdisciplinarity’ . . . moves outward from mastery of disciplinary tools” (Klein, Interdisciplinarity 106). Or, as Leitch puts it, “academic interdisciplinary work,

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including cultural studies, does not alter the existing disciplines” (Theory Matters 165). Perhaps even more forcefully, “the concept of ‘interdisciplinarity’ . . . can be seen as sustaining in normative roles the disciplinary arrangements of knowledge that prevail in most universities today” (Lauter 19). 2. Professions, Disciplines, and Paradigms 1. See the special issue on “academostars,” minnesota review ns 52–54 (2001). 2. For an expanded analysis of the World Bank and the imf in education see Claude Mark Hurlbert’s presentation “Beyond English, Inc.: The Case of the World Bank” at the 2002 College Composition and Communications Conference. The Education Reform page of the 2003 World Bank Website was substituted with a briefer account in 2004, but the same basic language of “efficiency in education services” and “better outcomes of education investments” remains (http://www.worldbank.org/wbi/education/educationreform/). Tellingly, perhaps, the words “ethical,” “diverse,” and “multiplicity” have disappeared from the revised Website. 3. I see more signs that the “convergence” between capitalism and contextualism is more exploitive than ameliorative, but, as Newfield has argued, some of the new forms of progressive management practices that emphasize horizontal, collaborative sharing of decision-making processes are more fruitful than the highly vertical, hierarchical, industrial capital models typical of academic administration (“Recapturing”). 4. See chapter 5 for a more extended critique of the methodology fetish. I share McGowan’s more healthy skepticism: “Method, like amazon.com, is vastly overvalued. Methodology is an even bigger boondoggle” (95). Feyerabend offered a succinct critique of the method fetish as a distortion of historical differences (14). See also Chow, who criticizes the dominant view that “knowledge, in this regard, is a matter of a progressive production of methodological detail” (1). 5. See Kuhn’s analysis of the significance of measurement in the formation of the modern sciences in his 1961 essay, “The Function of Measurement in Modern Physical Science,” reprinted in The Essential Tension (178–224). 6. For Marx, ideology was both material and ideational, since it referred to the links between practice and belief. 7. Smith makes a similar argument in Millennial Dreams. 8. See especially the case studies of a high-tech factory in California and a community-based manufacturing community in Nicaragua (chaps. 4–6 in Gee, Hull, and Lankshear). 9. Bhabha explains that colonized peoples are internal to Western cultural identity: “The Western Metropole must confront its postcolonial history, told by its influx of postwar migrants and refugees, as an indigenous or native narrative internal to its national identity” (6).

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10. In Anxious Intellects Michael offers a persuasive defense of the strategic use of universal values. In After Theory Eagleton provides a compelling defense of objectivity. In Empire Hardt and Negri make it clear that “in the context of state terror and mystification, clinging to the primacy of the concept of truth can be a powerful and necessary form of resistance. . . . The master narratives of the Enlightenment do not seem particularly repressive here, and the concept of truth is not fluid or unstable—on the contrary!” (155). 11. In a similar way Derrida has argued that the dominance of disciplinary discourse explains the common experience of radical critique, “the fact that even when it claims to be revolutionary, this discourse does not always trouble the most conservative forces of the university” (“Principle of Reason” 16). 12. Unfortunately, Noddings tended to essentialize caring as a feminine attribute, but it is not necessary to do so. “We can begin by thinking of care as a socially constructed interaction, not as a natural instinct or impulse that women possess[,] . . . so that care-work becomes a part of everyone’s lives” (Schell, Gypsy Academics 80–81). 13. Compare Foucault’s notion of social obligation with Readings’s notion of obligation and justice in the dissensual university. Foucault’s sense of “care of the self ” was “to explore strategies (both conceptual and practical) for keeping power relations mobile and symmetrical and preventing them from ossifying into states of domination” (Gaonkar, “On Alternative Modernities” 11). 14. “All of these projects—historicism, political criticism, and interdisciplinarity— are forms of liberalism, and it is against liberalism that I have waged a lifelong and largely losing battle” (Fish, “Them” 170). 15. McGowan says it well: “Modernity in its full purity is never lived anywhere” (147). 16. Russell has adopted, perhaps a bit less critically than I have here, some of Latour’s formulations in an essay on the disciplining of writing, “Institutionalizing English,” which I discuss in chapter 7. 17. Latour himself hedges his own formulation of the modern Constitution by admitting that the practitioners of the modern always had both reason and power in mind: “By separating the relations of political power from the relations of scientific reasoning while continuing to shore up power with reason and reason with power, the moderns have always had two irons in the fire” (38). 18. In Heuretics: The Logic of Invention Ulmer proposes to replace “the logic governing argumentative writing” (which I associate with disciplinary rhetoric) with what he calls “associational networks” (18), and his use of the term networks is consistent with Latour’s use of the same term. 19. “Grief, hatred, bitterness, anger, rage, terror, and apathy as well as emotions of self-assessment such as pride, guilt, and shame—these form the core of the hidden curriculum for the vast majority of people living and learning in a highly stratified capitalist society” (Worsham 233). In these instances, the “hid-

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den curriculum” signals the affective consequences of the regimes of modern disciplinary society under late capitalism. Fuller criticizes Latour and other members of the science and technology studies group for presenting an apparently radical critique of science while avoiding the more difficult political realities that follow from their arguments (see Thomas Kuhn, chap. 7). In Fuller’s eyes Latour becomes a kind of updated philosophical justification for Fish’s neopragmatism, where nothing much has to change in the way of material practices even as we introduce radical ideas. In this way we often speak of the “discipline of English studies” as a synonym for the “field of English studies” or the “profession of English studies.” Such uses are not necessarily wrong or unacceptable, since many people use the phrase this way. See North’s explanation of these differences (“On the Business” 110). In his earlier book, The Making of Knowledge in Composition, North admitted that for most practitioners composition “is a ‘field,’ a ‘profession,’ and a ‘discipline,’ terms that seem to be treated interchangeably, as if in obedience to an unspoken rule” (363). My efforts are clearly to speak the rule and break its hold on our self-descriptions of what we do. I draw here on the key works of Larson and Abbott. Larson further distinguishes “profession” and “bureaucracy” as “two subtypes of a larger category—that of rational administration” (191). The latter term reflects the larger Weberian analysis of rational bureaucracies. Guillory discusses this distinction at length (253–54). Of course, there are other uses of the term discipline in ordinary language such as to designate the regulation, punishment, or control of behavior, any submission to authority or rules, or its use as a verb to accomplish these goals. These common uses of the term often play a key role in educational situations when administrators refer to budget cutting as new levels of fiscal “discipline,” as if it were a virtue akin to disciplinary knowledge itself. Indeed, a familiar kind of academic double-speak happens when administrators claim to share our interest in “disciplining the field” when what they mean is controlling and restricting our budget and what we mean is controlling our subject matter independently of economic controls. See the elaboration of the meanings of “discipline” in chapter 4. “Professional services can involve teaching, healing, advocating in court, building, designing, accounting, researching, or any one of a number of other activities requiring advanced training in a field of learning and on-routine mental operations on the job” (Brint, In an Age 3). See also Axtell, who, in the first chapter of The Pleasures of Academe, describes the wide range of activities constituting the working life of most professors, which rarely gets recognized in the usual fte figures of hours of class time per week. See Rhodes, who, in chapter 3 of The Creation of the Future, lists some of the “prices” of professionalism and advocates a liberal expansion of the narrow perceptions of professional expertise.

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25. In his later book, Chaos of Disciplines, Abbott seems to first describe disciplines as if they have opened to all sorts of new kinds of work, as if they were now a “caravansary . . . filled with all sorts and types of people” (6). Despite all these diversities, within the university the struggle for power still plays by disciplinary rules, and this is exactly what Abbott later explains: “In the United States, for the last century, the map of disciplinary social structures has been remarkably constant, even while the equivalent map of cultural structures—the pattern of knowledge itself—has shifted. The departmental structure of the American university has remained largely unchanged since its creation between 1890 and 1910” (Chaos 122). 26. On this point I differ markedly from Larson, who tends to divide discipline and profession exactly along this cognitive-economic axis in which the two poles are “totally independent from each other” (18). The two components here reflect the core discipline and the wider profession, but they are never “totally independent.” Unless we theorize ways for professional but nondisciplinary labor to potentially be as much a part of the “core” (in the sense of the center of power) of academic work, there will be no way to alter the dominance of that hierarchy. 27. See Watkins’s analysis of the similarities and differences between the market practices of dog breeders and literary scholars in chapter 4 of Everyday Exchanges (184–85). 28. Abbott uses the distinctions between what he calls “pure professionalism,” which indicates academic disciplinary work removed from any direct client contact, whether students, patients, or consumers, versus what he calls “paraprofessional” work such as I have just listed. But I think it’s important to recognize that a lot of what he calls “para-professional” can be revalued as essential to professional practices. The “para” simply recognizes that they are often devalued kinds of professional work. 29. A number of Foucauldian critics (Paul Bové, Keith Hoskin, Ellen MesserDavidow, John Mowitt, David Shumway, James Sosnoski, David Sylvan, and others) have extended his work toward a critique of the modern university, and I am deeply indebted to this body of work. 30. Hardt and Negri distinguish between the disciplinary society and the society of control, but I believe this is an incorrect reading and follows from their sense of a rupture between the modern disciplinary and the ensuing society of control evidenced in the new forms of empire. But Foucault never made these distinctions. In a footnote, Hardt and Negri admit that “the passage from disciplinary society to the society of control is not articulated explicitly by Foucault, but remains implicit in his work” (419). I disagree. We still live very much in a disciplinary society, even in its late capitalist versions. 31. See especially the work of Ann Laura Stoler, Robyn Wiegman, and Etienne Balibar.

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32. Even in those locations the picture is not as pretty as the covers of their viewbooks and ivy-covered walls would have us believe. “Our handful of elite universities . . . protect their conservativism with a viciousness not necessarily imaginable outside that charmed circle” (Spivak, “From Haverstock” 1). 33. Of course, astrology could be studied as a cultural practice under an interdisciplinary field like cultural studies or rhetoric, but that is a different matter altogether. 34. “Thus cultural studies in English has been used as a way to open the field to a broader range of texts without radically challenging most disciplinary assumptions” (Grossberg 134; see also Readings, chap. 7; Brenkman). 35. Although he might complicate my argument in this context, Yarbrough offers a useful distinction that might better suit the case at hand by distinguishing between force and power (22). In these terms much of the work in an English department requires a great deal of actual force, even though it enjoys very little power, because the disciplinary economy does not supply social credit to many of its forms of labor. 36. See Robbins’s Secular Vocations, in which he provides a powerful defense of professional intellectual labor even as it takes place within educational institutions. 37. For example, in We Scholars Damrosch’s entire critique of the problem of the modern university is its ever more specialized branches of isolated academic workers. 38. In Chaos of Disciplines Abbott deploys the mathematical concept of fractalization as an algorithm to describe the continuous splitting of disciplines in the production of new, more specialized paradigms. Abbott’s model provides a conceptual elaboration of Kuhn’s basic contention: “Specialization and the narrowing range of expertise now look to me like the necessary price of increasingly powerful cognitive tools” (Road 98). 3. Paradigms Performed 1. In 2001 Anne Killkenney performed an electronic search for the word “paradigm” in the mla database bibliography from 1960 to 2000. Her results, however informal and unscientific, demonstrate the spread of the word within the modern languages disciplines since the 1962 publication of Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 1961–65, 5 sources; 1966–70, 18; 1971–75, 43; 1976–80, 73; 1981–85, 100; 1986–1990, 121; 1991–95, 145; 1996–2000, 106. The number of citations increased during every five-year period except for the most recent. 2. “Kuhnification” is the term Fuller coined, especially in chapter 7, “Kuhnification as Ritualized Political Impotence.” In contrast to my focus on English studies and the humanities Fuller focuses on the impact of Kuhn on science studies: “The science studies community currently suffers from self-inflicted Kuhnification” (Thomas Kuhn 318).

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3. For an instance of the placing of Kuhn in relation to deconstruction see Schultz: “Kuhn has an idea of the ‘reconstruction’ of previous science that positions his work closer to deconstruction than to other views by philosophers of science” (32). 4. “The record also clearly shows that Kuhn disavowed every one of these [radical] appropriations of his work” (Fuller, Thomas Kuhn 3, see also 74). Bird suggests that the very term revolution might have suggested deeper social and political connections, but Kuhn avoided them: “We might think of such [revolutionary] modes as including social and political pressures, propaganda, the exercise of power and so on. . . . Kuhn scarcely mentions such things” (144). 5. Many of Kuhn’s critics have persuasively argued that the binary division between normal and revolutionary science practices is just that: it is too binary, and it does not fit the empirical history of science studies, which often reveals gradients between the stable, normalized practices and emerging, preparadigmatic, and more mixed, hybrid forms of scientific investigation. See, for example, Toulmin. 6. Upon occasion Kuhn does discuss forces external to the community, especially in historically extended scientific crises such as the Copernican revolution. In these instances “an extended treatment would also discuss the social pressure for calendar reform, . . . [the] medieval criticism of Aristotle, the rise of Renaissance Neoplatonism, and other significant elements besides.” In such major social-scientific revolutions there would be no way to dismiss the external forces. Yet, always for Kuhn, the determining epistemological factors emerge from within the scientific community itself. Thus, in the Copernican revolution “technical breakdown would still remain the core of the crises.” Regarding the external considerations, Kuhn asserts: “Though immensely important, issues of that sort are out of bounds for this essay” (Structure 69; see also Essential Tension 119). 7. Indeed, there is a long line of critics who have attacked the corporatization of the modern university, perhaps beginning with John Jay Chapman and Thorstein Veblen (see Aronowitz 17). See also Hurlbert and Mathieu’s account of Sinclair Lewis’s study of the corporate controls of the expanding universities. For detailed studies of the increased corporatization of the university see also Barrow; Bousquet, “The Informal”; Etzkowitz, Webster, and Healey; Giroux; Newfield, Ivy and Industry; Readings; Rhoades, Managed Professionals; Slaughter and Leslie; Soley. 8. Susan Peck MacDonald has provided an enormously useful study to qualify this sense that there is simply one form of “academic discourse” as she performs a rhetorical analysis of discourse in several disciplines. I address these issues further in chapter 5, but here it’s useful to note that despite this diversity there are some fundamental shared characteristics of academic disciplines, so that many “home” discourses simply do not find a home in academia. 9. Of course, the place of such universals within what Kuhn and others have called

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his “complex relativism” deserves consideration, but it is beyond the scope of my analysis here. See chapter 2. From my perspective, to suggest that paradigmatic differences eliminate concern for an external, objective reality is both romantic and foolishly idealistic. Harding attempts a similar revision of Kuhn without focusing on the notion of paradigms: “A complete account would require looking at the mutually causal relations between ideas and social formations—not just at changed ideas as an independent force in history, or at scientific ideas as the mere effects or epiphenomena of independent changes in social structures” (209). Compare this view to Yarbrough’s invocation of the term logos in ancient Greece: “When logos was the key term, in a time prior to the distribution of knowledge into sovereign disciplines, everything in every aspect was subject to deliberation. Questions of aesthetics were not distinct from questions of science, questions of logic were connected to questions of morals, questions of psychology blurred with those of physics. It was not then out of line to consider whether the concept of the atom was a morally responsible idea, or whether democracy was sufficiently productive economically” (20). Kuhn made considerable efforts to acknowledge the confusion he initiated and to respond in subsequent publications to some of the criticism. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions he particularly acknowledges Margaret Masterman’s “The Nature of a Paradigm” because she listed up to twenty-one different uses of the term. Since the term has now passed into popular culture as well as academic circles, it is inevitable that such confusions will proliferate. Most common uses of the term, however, naturally enough follow conventional uses of the meaning of paradigm as a model, although Kuhn greatly revised this common use in both Structure and other writings. “Kuhn’s views have significant affinities with Kant’s, which he later acknowledged” (Bird 124). Paradigm shifts thus refer to a kind of dynamic or mutable rather than fixed Kantianism: “What for Kant is static is for Kuhn mutable— Kuhn is a dynamic Kantian” (Bird 127). Bird offers a number of useful revisions of Kuhn, which I have adopted in this study, and one of those is his suggestion that “Kuhn’s wrong turning” was when he moved away from his earlier naturalistic and historical studies and adopted the Kantian tendency to proceed through “first principles.” Without the Kantian and Cartesian residue “a far more radical picture would have emerged” (Bird 280). For example, Ross speaks of the “world’s dominant paradigm of rational inquiry.” Latour sometimes speaks of the paradigm of modernism. Taylor speaks of the “empiricist paradigm.” Hardt and Negri speak of the “paradigm of power,” the “paradigm of modernity,” and so on. These uses are not wrong, of course, since so many people use them that way, but they certainly do not correspond to Kuhn’s more restricted meanings of the term. However, there are misuses of the term that draw inappropriate analogies. For example, in The

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Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms Murfin and Ray claim that Foucault’s notion of episteme is “analogous to paradigm, as understood by historian of science Thomas Kuhn” (139), but this is incorrect: Kuhn’s notion of paradigms was never as general as Foucault’s notion of discursive formations and episteme. The contemporary studies of cognitive science on visualization and modeling confirm that no such shift of worldviews need accompany a move to different models. See Sosnoski (Modern Skeletons) for the distinction between theories and models. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Rorty champions Kuhn’s hermeneutics while being critical of the latter’s use of the term worlds (see esp. chap. 7). Rorty prefers the more pragmatic sense of shifting vocabularies, which is useful, but again, such epistemological revaluings in terminology have to be connected always to the work and labor situation as well. The role of gender plays out interestingly in the etymology of the term matrix, since the word links the Latin term for womb, which was originally a “pregnant animal,” to the cognate word mater, or mother. Today, just like in the movie The Matrix, the connotations of this term reflect a deeply patriarchal social order in which the complex, apparently decentered networks are in fact controlled by central, typically male, and North American centers of power. But since one of the modern definitions of the term matrix as an “environment or surrounding substance within which something originates, develops, or is contained” (see definition 1 of “matrix” in the Reader’s Digest Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary [1987], 1045) is also a “network of interconnections,” the term moves closer to Latour’s sense of the nonmodern “network.” For Kuhn, however, the disciplinary matrix is a hierarchically inscribed set of practices; in short, this is a vertical, modern matrix, not a horizontal, flat, or rhizomatic nonmodern network. Treichler narrates some troubling instances of Foucauldian professors abusing their powers in classroom situations. “We can’t regard the relationship between symbolic generalizations, models, values, and concrete problem situations on the one hand and the disciplinary matrix on the other as that of elements or subsets to a set. The relationship between the former items is that of linked moments of a single unity” (HoyningenHuene 157). This was a two-day conference in May 1990 at mit where nine papers were presented. Revised presentations were collected in Horwich. In the field of composition studies Bizzell worked for nearly two decades recommending the adoption of Kuhnian paradigms as useful configurations of the social construction of knowledge. Her Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness contains a series of sequentially published essays, beginning with her initial championing of Kuhn in an early (1979) essay in which he is her hero for his recognition of the culture-bound nature of paradigms and thus the rhetorical

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nature of all disciplinary work. She gradually develops a more critical view of Kuhn, although she still champions the rhetorical nature of paradigms as the answer to disciplinary revision. See chapter 7, in which I address these issues in the context of English studies. In the concluding paragraph of his important 1982 essay, “The Limits of Professionalism,” Weber evoked but did not develop the importance of “speech acts” and performance theory in the understanding of the limits of disciplinary work (32). Similarly, Bledstein acknowledges the performative level of professional career making. The careerist “committed himself to a continuous performance in the service of universal ends” (Bledstein 112). Bledstein did not adopt performance theory, however, as his reference remains narrowly tied to a performance of idealized notions of the universal ends of knowledge. More recently, Leitch put it this way: “From my experience of these professional paradigms, critical methods are recipes for personal performances that tend toward ritualization” (Theory Matters 9). This view of “performativity” contrasts with the version disseminated widely in Jean-François Lyotard’s influential study The Postmodern Condition. His view of the postmodern forms of knowledge is that epistemology has been put quite exclusively in the service of global economic forces, so that “performativity” is simply a way of naming the competitive “performance” of knowledge in market economies of accounting ledgers and actuarial tables. Such a view of performance is quite at odds with that developed by performance studies, such as that developed by Richard Schechner and Peggy Phelan of the Tisch School for the Performing Arts at nyu. “Before performance studies, Western thinkers believed they knew exactly what was and what was not ‘performance.’ But in fact, there is no historically or culturally fixable limit to what is or is not ‘performance.’ Along the continuum new genres are added, others are dropped” (Schechner 2). Paradigms can be conceived as a “new genre” of performance suited to the framing and presenting and highlighting of particular kinds of academic behavior rewarded by the knowledge contract in higher education. By 1982 Kuhn himself had decided to revise this division between normal and revolutionary science, entertaining, as he put it, the idea of “gradual linguistic drift”: “If I were re-writing The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, I would emphasize language change more and the normal/revolutionary distinction less” (Road 57). It is for exactly these reasons that in 1994 Kerr proposed some specific ethical criteria to be considered in relation to disciplinary performances (“Knowledge, Ethics”). It explains Sosnoski’s “Man-Driven Theory Machine,” Harkin and Sosnoski’s description of “Theoroids” (103), and the feminist resistance to patriarchal forms of disciplinary science (see esp. Harding; Haraway).

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4. Radical Diversities 1. Higham suggests that it was the introduction of the elective system that allowed for the complete overthrow of the lingering resistance to disciplinary specialization. The elective system was institutionalized in the 1870s, and Harvard was not fully departmentalized until 1891, but this historical sequence can obscure the pressure of the new forms of disciplinary knowledge in specialized research areas that led to the elective system in the first place as a stage on the way to departmentalization. 2. “Although new departments and instances of existing ones would occur sporadically in American universities after 1910, nothing like the proliferation of the nineties was ever to repeat itself ” (Veysey 322). 3. Appadurai justifies the need for such a focus: “What is lacking is a sustained effort to examine the links between intellectual and cultural diversity” (“Diversity” 25). 4. See Mohanty’s critique of the discourse of diversity as a liberal practice. As Lawrence Levine argues, multicultural diversity has always been a fact of American life, but it is becoming more difficult to deny it because of increasingly noticeable demographic changes. 5. In this context see also Wiegman. 6. Here he exactly mirrors the conservative position advocated by D’Souza in Illiberal Education and The End of Racism. 7. Despite the detail and scholarly resourcefulness he brings to the task, Wood’s book is in many ways a hypocritical study. His hypocrisy arises because he advocates standards of evidence and truth even as he avoids and distorts evidence and truth that complicate or contradict his own argument. There are many instances of such hypocrisy. Perhaps the most serious surround his claim that there once was a perceptive, natural recognition of cultural diversity, much superior to our own: “Our quick-to-judge cultural ancestors almost always saw deeper into cultural diversity than we do” (Wood 75). Such a claim flies in the face of most empirical evidence, and he’s the one arguing for “standards” and verification of facts. 8. In 1965 President Johnson issued Executive Order 11246, which formally inaugurated the possibility for affirmative action. Taking a step beyond “equal opportunity,” eo 11246 was a milestone, but it was never argued in terms of “diversity,” a term that becomes much more significant in the Bakke decision. 9. “The Supreme Court ultimately found in favor of Bakke. . . . The vote, however, was narrow (5 to 4) and the written opinion resembles a crazy quilt. There were six separate opinions among the nine justices, stitched together by coalitions on a few narrow points. In the history of the U.S. Supreme Court, only a few other cases have produced so fractured a result” (Wood 100). 10. Because of the generally conservative makeup of the current Supreme Court, many people were surprised by this decision. In some ways it seems quite un-

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derstandable, given that Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote the court opinion, and for her, Justice Powell had always been the exemplary figure she sought to emulate. The case revolved around the Law School’s use of racial preferences in admissions standards. University officials tried to avoid use of the term quotas by speaking in terms of attaining a “critical mass” of minority students who might therefore be better able “to contribute to classroom dialogue without feeling isolated” (Wood 132). But, once again, the whole question of the potential value of educational diversity got reduced on both sides to a numbers game, just as it did in the Bakke case: differences in gpa and lsat scores were lowered for underrepresented minority groups. Hanauer reviews two recent books by E. Shohamy (The Power of Tests) and M. Newman (The Design of Academic Literacy); both of them offer considerable evidence for Hanauer’s claims. For a similar critique see Fox. Wood objects to Bowen and Bok’s “soggy apology for diversity” on the grounds that, in contrast to his own study, they were “biased” and that “data tell us nothing about whether diversity is educationally constructive” (125). For Wood, “fairness and academic standards” are always naturally linked together, and he claims to maintain his “neutrality” and “objectivity” in the “pursuit of truth” (136), despite the fact that his standards for evidence are, in too many instances, awfully low and thus not very truthful. Many liberal writers champion the fluid nature of disciplines. For instance, Charles Bazerman’s choice is clear: disciplines are “powerful but nonetheless fluidly interpreted and reconstituted social facts of disciplinary institutionalization and control” (63). Of course, the labor that gets excluded through disciplinary controls tends to disappear when one focuses on the epistemological fluidity. The interdisciplinary literature tends to analyze differences in terms of variance from the disciplinary, and these epistemological distinctions tend to ignore working conditions and labor issues. So we find terms like compact, strong, hard vs. soft, weak, would-be disciplines, high-paradigm vs. low-paradigm fields, and so on. Klein summarizes these studies (Interdisciplinarity 104). As Sosnoski, Harkin, and Feldman have argued, the intersection of the diverse functions comprising teaching, research, and service happens through the creation of microcultures within the university that need not always be based on paradigms but on shared participation in projects such as the collaborative learning networks they describe. Collective bargaining must work to legitimate such curricular alterations and collaborative projects. See also Flower’s development of what she calls “intercultural inquiry.” Note here that Slevin works outside the Foucauldian model, where the disciplinary society indeed includes all practices that get evaluated in higher education, as Shumway and Dionne explain in Disciplining English. Gallagher adopts exactly Slevin’s efforts to revive the “older” meaning of disci-

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pline in the task of developing what he calls “pedagogy-centered disciplinarity” (106–27), so my reading here directly contests Gallagher’s recommendations, even though I share many of his goals of incorporating more kinds of diversity and alternatives into our professional lives. But it is far too limiting to suggest that the wide ranges of pedagogical acculturation should always reproduce disciplinarity. Slevin’s article “Engaging Intellectual Work,” on altering evaluation practices, moves in this direction, as does his work in his book on evaluation practices, The Next Generation, in which he addresses “some of the problems in graduate education across many humanities departments” (163). Graff complicates the general overview I have briefly summarized here, and his qualifications are crucial: “But though the college spoke for the ruling class, it was a ruling class that felt curiously displaced from the rising sources of power and influence,” since “education was not even a necessary prerequisite for the professions it trained men in. Consequently, as industrialization proceeded, the gulf widened between the college and American life” (Professing Literature 21). No doubt, my general claim here conceals the fact that a number of the most progressive liberal arts colleges do indeed ameliorate these disciplinary isolations through innovative curricula and engaged forms of learning. But these institutions tend to be small, private, and expensive and so unrepresentative of most undergraduate education. Anyone who doubts the disciplinary character of some otherwise progressive liberal arts colleges might consult Savery’s account of how traditional disciplinary criteria defeated efforts to create greater diversity among the faculty. As I borrow from Nussbaum her careful scholarly articulation of the Stoics, I should also point out that, unfortunately from my perspective, Nussbaum directs all of her modifications to the level of pedagogy and the classroom, as if curricular and particularly disciplinary practices were almost immaterial. Without an analysis of material economic conditions, her version of liberal education might at best lead to a sense of outrage at the injustice of exploited, part-time flex labor but little other than a moral boost to ending such practices. Socratic and Stoic principles in teaching alone will hardly bring overworked teachers into the cosmopolitan arena of world citizenship. In the important 2000 issue of Public Culture devoted to cosmopolitanism Pollock et al. suggest that “cosmopolitanism comprises some of today’s most challenging problems of academic analysis” and wisely caution that “cosmopolitanism is not some known entity existing in the world, with a clear genealogy from the Stoics to Immanuel Kant, that simply awaits more detailed description. . . . We are not exactly certain what it is, and figuring out why this is so and what cosmopolitanism may be raises difficult conceptual issues. As a practice, too, cosmopolitanism is yet to come, something awaiting realization” (577). In this context see Gilroy’s important study of what he calls the “black Atlantic,”

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which represents “the specific counterculture of modernity produced by black intellectuals” (5). Vitanza has referred to this dominant model of teaching as “pederasty.” See his essay “Three Countertheses.” For another instance consider Delpit’s analysis of the limitations of liberal ideas about native literacies that leave nontraditional students unprepared for their encounters with mainstream culture. Should “teachers . . . know the solutions to the problems and the answers to the questions the course will aim for in advance of teaching the course? Emphatically not” (Yarbrough 240). Otherwise, “it means that education has then turned into a game, that nothing of the way things are has been taught or learned as its result, that no conversation either with the students or with past voices has taken place” (Yarbrough 241). In this context consider Dewey’s views on conflict. Dewey “believed the elimination of conflict to be ‘a hopeless and self-contradictory ideal,’ for social life, like individual life, entailed an ongoing reconstruction of conflict-ridden, ‘disintegrating coordinations.’ This view of conflict as an inevitable and potentially functional aspect of social life distinguished Dewey from those other reformers, including his friend Jane Addams, who regarded it as unnecessary and thoroughly disfunctional” (Westbrook 80). Similar to Latour’s notion of the nonmodern networks, Readings conceives of teaching as “a relation, a network of obligation” (158), and it takes both time and resources to fulfill those obligations. Porter et al. articulate the need to link classroom practices to institutional and disciplinary critique. Roskelly and Ronald reread the tradition of romantic/pragmatic thought in America in light of this relation between self and other. In this way Emerson’s version of “Self-Reliance” is seen less as a championing of American individualism than a negotiation of self/other (Roskelly and Ronald 59). See also Newfield, Ivy and Industry, chap. 7. In terms of cultural mediations of diversity Gaonkar associates societal modernity with convergent and cultural modernity with divergent forms of activities. But it is less dualistic and doesn’t always line up that way, even if most often it has. 5. Pragmatic Interventions Ohmann lists a number of significant events in the years between 1892 and 1894, including a special issue of the Dial that “ran a series of articles on programs in English at 18 American colleges and universities.” Harvard appointed a “Committee on Composition and Rhetoric to examine the writing of its students,” and “the National Educational Association appointed a committee of ten prestigious gentlemen to consider what the curriculum of secondary schools should be” (Ohmann, Politics of Letters 26–27). Ohmann’s point is that

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English as well as other key disciplines across the newly departmentalized university should be situated “within the long, historical crisis of capitalism” (Politics of Letters 6). In short, “the new universities came into being along with the professional-managerial class they educated” (Ohmann, Politics of Letters 32). See also Newfield, Ivy and Industry. “Dewey’s ideas about education are far more radical than they are represented to be by his foes and friends alike” (Gallagher xv). In this context see also the work of Fishman and McCarthy. This letter appears in Perry (519); it is also cited in Westbrook (55). Dewey’s first two books, Psychology and Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics, both appeared in 1891. “In his two major publications at this time . . . Dewey’s passionate rhetoric and activist fervor echo that of the young left Hegelian Marx” (West, American Evasion 81). It is during exactly this historical period of the 1890s that Ohmann discusses what many magazine historians have called the “ ‘magazine revolution’ of 1893,” when McClure brought out his magazine and other entrepreneurs lowered the price of each issue as sales soared, signaling the emergence of a widely shared “mass culture.” See chapter 9 of Ohmann, Politics of Letters; see also Ohmann, Making and Selling Culture. See especially Westbrook 51–58; West, American Evasion 80–84. West describes the final incidents preceding the collapse of the Thought News project: “A lead editorial in the Detroit Tribune lashed out at the putdown of ordinary newspapers. Dewey was lampooned as the new Benjamin Franklin, with Thought News the ‘kite’ which ‘he proposes to bring philosophy down to life and make it, like the lightning, turn the wheels of society.’ It later suggested that the first ‘mystery within the social organism’ Dewey and company should try to solve was the interest of Michigan male students in Ypsilanti factory girls. In an article headlined ‘He’s Planned No Revolution,’ Dewey recanted, backpedaled, and disassociated himself from Thought News. No issue of the newspaper ever appeared” (American Evasion 81). “We cannot properly separate words from things, culture from nature” because “there is no ‘medium’ called language or culture standing between ourselves and our world” (Yarbrough 239, 242). This articulation matches Latour’s conception of the inability to purify one realm from another, as I discussed in chapter 2. “Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language,” and it is, of course, beyond the scope of my argument to clarify all these diverse uses. It is useful to recall the etymological ties to agriculture, as in the care and “tending of something, basically crops and animals” (Williams, Keywords 76, 77). Roskelly and Ronald also discuss the Dewey School, and their emphasis on pedagogy complements my focus on the disciplinary and institutional consequences of those experiments.

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10. My views here reflect my sense of the dominant modes of education in the public school systems in America. There is a growing body of innovative teaching and research now emerging that grows out of the progressive movement and incorporates much that is similar to Dewey’s educational programs. See, for instance, recent work in teacher empowerment, whole language movement, and Integrated Thematic Instruction, all of which suggest the need for broadbased educational transformations that reach all levels of primary, secondary, and higher education. 11. In this context see Graff ’s articulation of the misleading either/or binary sustained by usual descriptions of the opposition of traditional and progressive education. Graff, following the work of Deborah Meier, advocates a way to straddle this divide (Clueless 261–74). 12. As Westbrook explains, the arguments Dewey developed in The School and Society (1899) and The Child and the Curriculum (1902) “placed Dewey at odds with both the proponents of a traditional ‘curriculum-centered’ education and romantic reformers who advocated a ‘child-centered’ pedagogy.” For Dewey, the very debate between curriculum versus child “was evidence that yet another pernicious dualism was afflicting American culture” (Westbrook 98, 99). 13. Kamuf provides an overview of Condorcet’s 1792 “Report on the General Organization of Public Instruction,” which envisioned for France “a complete educational system totally financed by the state from primary school up to a national society of eminent scholars in all disciplines” (51). The amazing thing is that even in these early attempts at institutionalizing education for all citizens, Condorcet “could think of no good reason to differentiate between the proposed education of girls and boys, young women and young men; he even went so far as to argue for complete coeducation, rather than any ‘separate but equal’ principle” (Kamuf 53). The point is that progressive educational ideas began well before Dewey. 14. Johnstone likewise suggests that Dewey conceived of “rhetoric as the primary agency of moral growth, and consequently as the principal means to the development of wisdom” (193). 15. The list would be quite extensive but would no doubt include the work of Richard Bernstein, John Diggins, Ann Douglas, Chris Gallagher, Nelson Goodman, Giles Gunn, Steven Mailloux, John McDermott, John McGowan, Chantal Mouffe, Christopher Newfield, Richard Poirier, Ross Posnock, Hilary Putnam, Kate Ronald, Richard Rorty, Hephzibah Roskelly, Cornel West, and others. 16. “The number of pragmatisms may very well outnumber the number of pragmatists” (de Waal 29). See also Westbrook 122; Roskelly and Ronald 92. 17. Of course, method in common usage is a much larger term than its more restricted uses in academic disciplines, since it refers to virtually any ordered, systematic procedure, so that there is indeed a method for making a pie crust, replacing a muffler, or planting tomatoes. In the realm of academic work method

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refers much more to philosophical and epistemological registers and thus, as I have been arguing, plays a vital role in disciplinarity. See especially Gadamer. James speaks, therefore, at various times of “the principle of pragmatism,” or “pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy,” or the term pragmatism “applies itself conveniently to a number of tendencies that hitherto have lacked a collective name” (378, 379). In “Feeding on American Fiction” I described why a multivalent pedagogy could be configured as “a large restaurant with many different rooms” (137). This configuration parallels James’s configuration of pragmatism as a hotel with many rooms off the main corridor. This sequence of educational events is not unlike that of James, who also attended the Lawrence Scientific School, but James went on to earn his M.D. at Harvard and taught anatomy and physiology before his appointment as an assistant professor of philosophy in 1880. After this point, however, James had little direct concern for the scientific or medical disciplines. De Waal lists “some of the more significant ones: [Peirce] worked extensively on the calculation of the shape of the earth. He did pioneering work on the magnitude of stars and on the form of the Milky Way. He invented the quincunicial projection of the earth resulting in a world map that has a minimum of distortion of the distance between two points; a projection that was used during the Second World War for charting air routes. Peirce was also a pioneer in mathematical economy and he was the first to use a wavelength of light to determine the exact length of the meter. And . . . he invented the electronic switching-circuit computer” (1). During his sabbatical West produced with his brother and a childhood friend a cd called Sketches of My Culture, which, according to West, Summers called an embarrassment to the university (Wilson and Smallwood a8). He had also taken a role in Al Sharpton’s exploratory bid for a presidential nomination. This entire episode was first reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education (18 January 2002); later articles on Summers and his handling of this issue appeared in Chronicle of Higher Education (26 April 2002; see Van Der Werf ) and Vanity Fair. The seven principles depend on key words such as experience, inquiry, consequences, and contingency, which are important kinds of values and beliefs. From my perspective only the obligations deriving from the modern knowledge contract obligate us to try to see such values as a method (see Roskelly and Ronald 84). See especially Mailloux, Rhetorical Power, Reception Histories, and Rhetoric, Sophistry, Pragmatism. See, for instance, the critiques by Gunn; Yarbrough; Bizzell. Gunn is especially worried that the method itself may, by limiting reception history to accounts of dominant tropes by which the text has been historically received and interpreted,

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foreclose interpretations that differ from those dominant models of reception (see the discussion on 143). See also the contributions to Cain. 6. Work of Theory Anthologies 1. Rabaté argues that “there is yet a much more complex history of Theory to be written. It might lose its capital ‘T’ in the process, but that for now would be a worthwhile project” (Rabaté and Lambert 53). 2. In chapter 8 of Theory Matters Leitch provides a fine analysis of how and why Bourdieu’s most recent work, represented primarily by two texts published in 1998 and 2001 (Contre-feux and Contre-feux 2), may be some of his best, especially for its more activist stance relating intellectual work and theory to the plight of all kinds of workers. This more overtly political theorizing, even if it’s the “best” Bourdieu has done, doesn’t quite count within the frames of the Norton anthology’s selection of theory. More important, it wouldn’t fit within the frames of most any anthology of literary theory currently produced. 3. “Textbooks are the apparatuses of orthodoxy. And orthodox textbooks are the principal means by which institutions control their subjects” (Sosnoski, Token Professionals 75). See also Gale and Gale. 4. Adams and Searle articulate this double bind on the first page of their introduction: “An anthology must establish boundaries, rough as they may be. . . . We recognize at the same time the broader range of theory now thought important and even the view that there can be no firm boundaries established for such concerns or for literature itself ” (1). 5. Although there is a section on pre-Columbian, Native American oral literatures, including myths of origin, these constitute a relatively small section of the first volume. 6. Leitch proposes five organizing frames, but the first two, “leading figures” and “key texts,” are really variations of the chronological, historical paradigm; the fifth is just a mixture of the other four; and what could be the most important alternative (what Leitch calls “significant problems”) gets reduced to a history of ideas approach, which depletes the radical potential of problem posing as articulated by Paulo Freire and the pragmatist tradition generally. I have much more to say about this point later in this chapter. 7. Bennett first identified what he called the “chronological model” in his 1990 review of the Adams and Searle anthology. 8. “Theory can be taught and learned and ‘canonized’ without allowing or accounting for matters of language difference, idiomacity, cultural and historical specificity, originality of expression, and so forth” (Kamuf 13). The editors of the Norton anthology tried to mediate this problem with detailed headnotes that serve as introductory essays to individual theorists and extensive annotations. These can be valuable resources in consulting an archive, but they hardly

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overcome the real problem of loss of the historical context of the discourse communities in which these theories emerged. As Sosnoski argues, theories are not really methods, although they are commonly treated as such, partly because of the effect of the Kuhnification of the humanities, where disciplinary paradigms require specific methods. See Sosnoski, Token Professionals, chap. 12, “Theories Need Not Be Methods.” In this context one of the best theory anthologies that utilizes the schools and methods organizational paradigm is Julie Riivkin and Michael Ryan’s Literary Theory: An Anthology. But the limitations are considerable because, as Williams explains, the “food-group” principle “tacitly seals off a ‘theory’ or an approach from other approaches, thus eliding the alliances, affinities, arguments, and aversions among various theory groups” (“Packaging Theory” 289). In a recent issue of symplok¯e devoted to “theory trouble,” Paul Allen Miller likewise complains that, “unfortunately, theory in most American universities is taught as critical methodology” (8). Richter, for instance, articulates the “dialogue” this way: “The clash of one principle, one method, one logic with another cannot be evaded. . . . We can, however, set the voices at play, engage them in contrapuntal dialogue with each other, and enter that dialogue ourselves” (Critical Tradition 14). Of course, it should go without saying that, for many, it is not an easy task to enter that dialogue “ourselves,” since the pronoun glosses the social and intellectual differences among the “we” imagined as audience for the book. For my argument to make sense it is necessary to understand that the terms school, system, and paradigm often function in similar if not identical ways. As I explained in chapter 3, Kuhn himself recognized that he used the term paradigm in at least two ways in Structure, but for our purposes here these refinements and differences of usage do not significantly alter my argument. The editors of the Norton anthology are all well aware of this contextualizing conundrum, as is evident in “Symposium: Editing a Norton Anthology.” Finke, for instance, advocates “a more interactionist framework, one that recognizes that teachers and students . . . are not simply their passive recipients” (195). The question I raise is, How well can these goals be realized within the frames they have deployed? I usually call the problem cluster for Cultural Turn I “beginning Western metaphysics, 425–350 b.c.,” and I have often used a few different clusters for Cultural Turn III such as “institutionalizing English, 1870–2000,” “cultural studies, postmodernism, and cyberspace, 1970–2000,” and “reading, writing, and academic labor, 1970– .” With respect to the Norton anthology, M. Keith Booker’s accompanying guidebook, Teaching with the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism: A Guide for Instructors, specifically addresses the issue of pedagogical reframing or, one might say, the taming of the Norton anthology beast. Booker engages many complex tasks

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involved in trying to bring the vast set of theories into relation to each other and to the students. He articulates what he calls the “modular” approach, which, I believe, is based on the same basic principles as what I called the problem clusters. But, given the scope of the Norton anthology, the modular models cannot possibly achieve the contextual goals they aim for because the context has been too deeply removed from the anthology itself. Fortunately, there are signs that new kinds of “teaching theory” texts are emerging. For example, Nealon and Giroux provide a highly engaging introduction to theory, although, of course, their book is not an anthology. A new anthology such as Everyday Theory (which is now in press at the time of this writing) offers new ways of combining a theory anthology with a working reader, linking acts of theorizing to everyday culture in ways that traditional theory anthologies have not succeeded. Sadoff arrived at a similar assessment; Culler suggests that “the desire for representativeness . . . has in this case trumped pedagogical utility” (“Comment” 243). Discussion of these institutional autobiographies can often be fruitful in the process of having students themselves design and construct sets of readings and problems using an expanded archive of online as well as print resources. In “Packaging Theory” Williams’s description of his own theory cluster on “The Rise of Professionalism” provides a useful starting place for resources on this problem. Leitch, as he describes it, came “lately” to an alternative possibility: “asking students to write alternative and counterhegemonic headnotes” (Theory Matters 48), although I find such an assignment difficult to imagine being taken on by new students to the field when such “counter” narratives generally require pretty extensive knowledge of the canon they are trying to counter. North is also playing off John Crowe Ransom’s famous call in The World’s Body for the professionalization of “Criticism, Inc.”: “Rather than occasional criticism by amateurs, I should think that the whole enterprise might be seriously taken in hand by professionals. Perhaps I use a distasteful figure, but I have the idea that what we need is Criticism, Inc., or Criticism Ltd.” (329). In this contest see also Bourdieu and Passeron’s discussion of “magisterial discourse” (109). 7. Beside Disciplinary English See especially Bousquet, Scott, and Parascondola; Nelson, Will Teach for Food; Schell, Gypsy Academics; Schell and Stock. George Levine explains that the “twotiered system” of elite literary researchers and lowly writing instructors is “intellectually incoherent,” so “the profession badly needs a whole new orientation toward the question of the relation between teaching and scholarship” (13, 12). Indeed, these disciplinary dreams are nothing new to English: “The quest for a precise definition of the discipline of English has been a persistent one since the

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founding of English studies as an academic subject about a century ago” (Graff, “Is There a Conversation” 15). See North, Refiguring the Ph.D. 60–61; Elbow 112, 117. Similar ambiguities emerged from virtually every similar event. For example, Joseph Harris’s account of the important 1966 Dartmouth conference reveals how forcefully the American contingent devoted so much of its energies to disciplining English, whereas the English participants tended to fall back on the Leavisite versions of experience. At the 1987 Wayzata conference sponsored by the Commission on Writing and Literature many participants hoped that “rhetoric” might provide the new disciplinary center, and thus the conference ended with “a spirit of cautious optimism” (Lunsford, Moglen, and Slevin v). More recently, the Nineteenth Alabama Symposium on English and American Literature was organized around the general question, “Is There a Discipline in This Department?” (Raymond 1). Warnock used the Burkean rhetorical strategy of suggesting “Yes, no, perhaps” (146). Horner names a key complication: “There is an ambiguity in the term writing, like the term work, arising from its use to designate both an activity and the product of that activity” (209). I would say this is putting it mildly. One of the important historians of composition studies, Albert Kitzhaber, expresses his regrets that composition was “ ‘laced with dreams, prejudices, and makeshift operations’ ” (North, Making of Knowledge 16). But by just shifting orientations, “dreams” become imaginative possibilities for our work; “prejudices” become the starting point of the interests we seek to explore in relation to others’ interests and prejudices; and “makeshift” could be the inventive, ad hoc adjustments we make to our contextually diverse “operations.” In short, all that Kitzhaber wishes to exclude could well name important areas of our professional work that takes place beside and in tension with the disciplinary paradigms. While I have chosen to focus on Harvard as the “manly” site for the origins of English, I would not want this particular strategic focus to obscure the historical fact that the academic terrain of writing courses became staffed primarily by women (see Schell, Gypsy Academics 21; Brody). As Harkin explains, it was in 1851 that Child was appointed the fourth Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard with the understanding that he would be granted three years’ leave to study philology in Germany. Consequently, Child did not actually assume his new duties until his return to Cambridge in 1854. Graff describes this moment as perhaps “ ‘the first case of an “outside offer” improving an English professor’s lot’ ” (Harkin, “Child’s Ballads” 28). I have drawn especially on the accounts offered by James Berlin, Robert Connors, Sharon Crowley, Lester Faigley, Gerald Graff, Patricia Harkin, Albert Kitzhaber, Susan Miller, Thomas Miller, Stephen North, Robert Scholes, and Ross Winterowd. Child’s modeling of the new disciplinary field of literary studies aided and

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11.

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abetted the cause of Theodore H. Hunt, whose essay in the first issue of PMLA in 1884–85 was entitled “The Place of English in the College Curriculum.” “Hunt promises that literature ‘will substitute the disciplinary for the aesthetic method and give true literary inspiration rank above mere verbal finish’ ” (Yood 528). In other words, disciplinary method as Child invented it became the new ground for the “place of English” within the modern university, even as the new methods carried with them the added value of “literary inspiration.” The generic gap between ballads and canonical writers like Spenser and Chaucer made less difference in the mid-nineteenth century than it might in our post– New Critical discipline, where the former would now find a home in the subdiscipline of folklore. Nevertheless, Child’s procedures were quite at odds with the belles lettres crowd, who would continually see a killing of the spirit of the literary in the new disciplinary model developed for studying great works of art. The 1890s reports from the Harvard Committee on Composition and Rhetoric decried the appalling lack of grammatical correctness in its college admittees. The committee mostly blamed the situation on the preparatory schools, since grammar was unsuitable to the attention of Harvard’s new research scholars. These committee reports were enormously influential at the time, although we might now be struck by the fact that the original members of the committee were laypersons appointed by the Board of Overseers of Harvard. It is no wonder, then, that since the board was largely made up of businessmen and lawyers, corporate interest was well behind the grammar train. Roskelly and Ronald demonstrate that the romantic/pragmatic tradition following in the wake of John Dewey and others developed a much more reflexive version of aesthetic engagement with the social imaginary. See also Newfield, Ivy and Industry. The problem was that the institutional battle did not have space for this alternative form of modernity: the bureaucrats have quite resoundingly won the terms of the new academic estate. Every effort to disciplinize writing tended to fall into more objectifiable categories or schools such as James Kinneavy’s Theories of Discourse, James Berlin’s three models of composition, and the schools and methods of contemporary theory. Winterowd lists the long line of textbooks that constitute this tradition of reducing rhetoric to proper usage (70–71). There has always been an uneasy alliance between the principles of disciplinary knowledge and the working tasks of practitioners of English studies (see Bérubé; Goggin; Graff, Professing Literature; North, Refiguring the Ph.D.; Raymond). Mailloux cites Gadamer as a rhetorician and philosopher who “rejects the methodological model of the natural sciences as an accurate description of the disciplinary practices of the human sciences” (“Disciplinary Identities” 14). Messer-Davidow, Shumway, and Sylvan explain that “as inquiry came to assume

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a disciplinary form, alternative configurations of knowledge were excluded” (viii). “As a positive discipline, literature and literary studies will have been themselves invented through a series of delimiting demarcations within that other invention we call poetic” (Kamuf 77). Ohmann notes that by 1970 there was considerable variation within the major English departments in America: “The emphasis at Yale is interpretation of major works, at Hopkins intellectual trends within the field, at Berkeley the context of literature.” Despite these variations, Ohmann maintains that all these curricula “have a common basis” (English in America 222), and it is to that disciplinary basis that I refer here. “While private colleges were left largely to their own devices, the public sector in higher education by the mid-1990s was struggling to accommodate to a level and intensity of state surveillance and supervision unlike anything to which traditionally it had been accustomed” (Lucas 237). “As the field of composition grew more ‘disciplined,’ the arguments in its journals came to be less about teaching than about research or theory—even as they testified to the value of classroom work. . . . [W]hile it seems clear to me that the process movement helped establish composition as a research field, I am not nearly so sure it ever transformed the actual teaching of writing as dramatically as its advocates have claimed” (Harris 55). To this extent I share Horner’s recommendation that “we should define both the distinctiveness of Composition and its relation to other fields not in terms of a canon of texts, journals, techniques, or official ideology but in terms of the activities in which we engage” (141). “Activities” will, of course, still be professional but not necessarily disciplinary forms of professional work. In Terms of Work Horner tends to see professionalism as only an equivalent term for the negative effects of disciplinary constriction and stability, so that, in his terms, “an allegiance to professionalism can undermine compositionists’ best efforts” (175). As I argued in chapter 2, I think it is important to make some distinctions between discipline and profession. France, Lalicker, and Teutsch offered Horner a “friendly amendment” (278) that amounted to making a distinction (similar to my own but in different terms) between discipline and profession. In his response Horner basically accepts (with a few minor reservations) their recommendation: “I would second France, Lalicker, and Teutsch’s amendment” (“Redefining, Resisting” 285). A leading compositionist, Bartholomae has in a recent PMLA article echoed the same concerns for integration rather than fragmentation of interests: “The divisions within English severely limit our ability to argue locally and nationally for the importance of our work” (1954). See Owens’s positive spin on Scholes’s suggestions (Composition 129–31). Scholes himself explains that his goal is “to reconstruct our field as a disci-

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pline,” suggesting his investment in disciplinary discourse. His answer, “to put it in grossly simplified form, is to replace the canon of texts with a canon of methods—to put a modern equivalent of the medieval trivium at the center of an English education” (Rise and Fall 145). 25. While some may lament the “demise of disciplinary authority” (Menand, “The Demise”), it might be better to think of it as the demise of the exclusive reign of one form of knowledge, thus opening university spaces for new kinds of practices better suited for the more broadly conceived role of the university in the contemporary world.

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Abbott, Andrew, 41, 77–78, 85, 88–90, 120, 142, 273n22, 274n25, 274n28, 275n38 academostars, 50, 117 acculturation, 20–21, 99, 169, 174, 282n17 Achebe, Chinua, 257 Adams, John Quincy, 234–35 aesthetics, 27–28, 55–56, 203, 204; and cultural traditions, 226; literary, 236; philosophical study of, 204; and poetics, 233, 245; and politics, 55, 207– 15, 253; in relation to reason and the sublime, 268n5; in relation to science, 277n11. See also imagination; politics affiliation, 4, 54, 76, 116, 169, 206, 251; of contractual labor, 122; with disciplines, 215; disruption of, 120; English studies as an, 86; free zones, 223; religious, 144; strong or narrow, 221; systems of, 100, 216 affirmative action, 126–34, 240 American Association of University Professors (aaup), 98, 164 American Social Hygiene Association (asha), 125 anomaly, 39, 93, 97–98, 116. See also Kuhn, Thomas; paradigm anthologies: of theory, 16; literary, 198– 99 Appadurai, Arjun, 14, 133, 136–37, 144– 50, 263, 280n3; on alternative modernities, 61, 72; on cultures of diversity, 126; on the idea of research, 31, 240 Applebee, Arthur, 246 Aristotle, 57, 147, 209, 229, 276n6 Aronowitz, Stanley, 44, 174, 269n14, 276n7 Arthur Anderson Corporation, 21 Balibar, Etienne, 127, 274n31 Barret, Wendell, 240 Barrow, Clyde, 32–35, 99, 276n7 Bartholomae, David, 292n22 Bayh-Dole Act, 269n13 Becher, Tony, 46, 77 Bentham, Jeremy, 80, 82

Berkeley Free Speech Movement, 2 Berlin, James A., 245, 290n8, 291n12 Bernstein, Charles, 243 Bernstein, Richard, 285n15 Bérubé, Michael, 43, 66, 119, 190, 229, 244, 269n15, 291n14 Bey, Hakim, 223 Bhabha, Homi, 271n9 Bildung, 27–28, 145, 169 biopower, 49, 81–84, 107, 125, 138–39, 141, 263–64; and disciplinary knowledge, 3; globalized, 121; operation of, 128, 133–35; and racial violence, 127 Bird, Alexander, 100, 105, 276n4 Bizzell, Patricia, 189, 243, 278n21, 286n25 Blair, Hugh, 211, 233–35, 240, 246 Blake, William, 209 Bledstein, Burton, 41, 75, 77, 94, 125, 279n22 Bleich, David, 197 Blitz, Michael, 39, 243 Bok, Derek, 132, 281n12 boundaries: blurred, 101; breaking the, 122; crossing of, 162; disciplinary, 2, 41, 86, 94, 97, 108, 168, 193; between disciplinary and nondisciplinary, 265; disputes, 218; expanding of the, 135; flexible, 67; institutional, 197; of knowledge production, 100; making, 118; of paradigms, 261; policing of the, 216; between teaching and research, 158. See also disciplinary Bourdieu, Pierre, 41, 45, 187, 192, 287n2, 289n19 Bousquet, Marc, 50, 226, 229–30, 250– 51, 261, 269n15, 276n4, 289n1 Bové, Paul, 62, 196, 230, 274n29 Bowen, William G., 132, 281n12 Boyle, Robert, 71 Brenkman, John, 275n34 Brint, Steven, 20, 36, 45, 269n11, 273n24 Brooks, Cleanth, 202 Brown v. Board of Education (of Topeka), 129, 131 Bush, George W., 19, 21

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

business: of anthologizing, 22; executives, 32, 38; and industry, 256; interests, 32, 36–37, 77, 98; investments, 8; unionism, 40; writing, 251 Butler, Judith, 16, 114–18, 120, 204, 263 Cambridge University, 102 Campbell, George, 211, 233–35, 240–41, 246 capital: academic, 34; corporate, 45, 88; cultural, 170, 173; fast, 10, 51, 73; global, 45, 73, 253; interests, 31–32, 37, 223; and modernity, 151; not-, 8, 45; owners of, 90; payoffs, 38; symbolic, 4, 35, 143, 157, 255; and terror, 265; and the university, 11; and world poverty, 265. See also capitalism; global capitalism: crisis in, 159; crisis of, 283n1; differing stages of, 120; and disciplinarity, 37; as fluid and dynamic, 30, 121; global, 36, 49, 52, 168; industrial, 29, 52, 58–61, 75, 162, 268n7; late, 4, 9, 36, 52–53, 58, 63, 69, 158, 162–63, 168, 260; and liberalism, 160; limits to, 59; monopoly, 162; multinational, 58; vulgarity of, 211. See also capital; global; globalization Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (cfat), 32–34 Castoriadas, Cornelius, 45 Child, Francis James, 230–46, 250, 290nn6–7, 290n9, 291n10 Chow, Rey, 81, 120, 127–28, 134, 271n4 the church, 1, 22–23, 26, 31, 60, 68, 78, 140, 185, 268n3 citizen, 8, 15, 20, 45; engaged, 157; of the world, 147, 189 Civil War, 29–30, 143 Clark, Burton R., 28, 46 class struggle, 11 Clifford, James, 202 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 210 collective: action, 10, 15, 17, 66, 74, 88, 109, 150, 255; bargaining, 9, 13, 14, 17, 40, 42–43, 51, 54, 72, 123, 135, 158, 168, 171–72, 243, 252, 255, 281n15; tasks, 49; working conditions, 18. See also solidarity; unions

commodification: and defunding of education, 7–8, 214, 256; and information transfer, 73; of knowledge, 24; pressures of, 36–37; of the professions, 88 commodified: into exchange value, 62, 250; forms of education, 154, 168; forms of knowledge, 23; information, 10; university, 55 composition, 118, 193, 203, 263; as a field, 292n20; and literature, 17, 192– 93, 197, 213, 219–20, 226, 231–61; teaching of, 217–20; theory, 252. See also English; rhetoric; writing Conant, James Bryant, 96, 122 conflict of faculties, 25–26, 60, 115, 268n4. See also Kant Connors, Robert, 211, 238, 290n8 Contemporary Literary Criticism (Davis and Schleifer), 201–5 convergent thinking, 94 Cooke, Morris L., 33–35 Cornell University, 124 cosmopolitan, 124, 137, 146–47, 167, 181, 185, 282n23; self, 12, 15; discrepant forms of, 148; forms of professionalism, 151; values, 149 craft labor, 32 Crowley, Sharon, 233, 240, 243, 246, 290n8 Culler, Jonathan, 7, 227, 289n16 cultivation: and care, 137, 144; of cosmopolitanism, 147; of intellect, 1; in relation to Bildung, 27–28; in relation to discipline, 144–45; of self, 7, 55, 65. See also diversity cultural studies, 201, 214, 244, 263, 288n13; in English, 275n34; and the humanities, 220; and institutional politics, 17; and pluralism, 5; and postmodernism, 63; in relation to academic disciplinarity, 86, 271n23, 275n33; shift from literary to, 228, 252 Davidson, Donald, 152 Davis, Robert Con and Ronald Schleifer,

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201–5; Contemporary Literary Criticism, 201–5 Decew, Judith Wagner, 40 deconstruction, 26, 62, 96, 189, 200, 210, 227, 276n3 Delpit, Lisa, 283n26 democracy, 8, 40, 69, 208, 210, 277n11; and anarchy, 221; creative, 160, 163; as a keyword, 136; town hall, 167 democratic, 18; citizenry, 166; participation, 163; principles, 42; radically, 111; societies, 121; system of higher education, 266; voice, 175 deregulation: of the economy, 23, 36 Derrida, Jacques, 41, 110, 202, 267n3, 272n11; on academic responsibility, 17; on constative and performative, 115; on deconstruction, 26; on principle of reason, 80; on pure and applied research, 101; on universalism, 61, 148, 182 De Waal, Cornelis, 179–80 Dewey, John, 152, 159–76, 183–86, 189, 240, 283n28, 284n2, 284n6, 284n9, 285n10, 285nn12–14, 291n12; on disciplinary critique, 12, 15; on social reform, 17; on vocationalism, 173. See also pragmatism Di Leo, Jeffrey, 100, 216, 221, 223 Diogenes the Cynic, 147 Dirlik, Arif, 264 disciplinarity: the abandonment of, 194; and anthology disdain, 194; compulsory forms of, 115; core of, 102; critique of, 16; the decentering of, 46; as defense against market forces, 36, 250–56; definitions of, 13, 15; and the devaluation of poetics and aesthetics, 245–48; as distinguished from the disciplined society, 80–91; and diversity, 15, 124–58; and the division of labor, 12, 158, 183, 187; dominance of, 122, 134, 228; educational shift toward, 75; evasion of, 184; experiential reality of, 3; and the exploitation of part-timer workers, 117; flexible forms of, 151; as fulfilling the knowledge contract, 74; and gender, 115; the globalized ef-

fects of, 162; hierarchical role of, 258; as historical center of university, 109; history and rise of, 11, 15–16, 89, 137, 144, 224, 254; institutionalization of, 3, 178; inter-, 41, 48, 134, 270–71n23; managed, 245; as material practice, 4, 7; mix of capital and, 72; and modernity, 110, 225; overhauling the grounds of, 124; the panopticon as model for, 106–7; paradigms as the core of, 102; pedagogy centered, 282n17; permutations of, 8; philological standards of, 237; power of, 58, 48; principles of, 175, 225; production of, 23; and professionalism, 242; and professional solidarity, 230; the proprieties of, 97; question of, 2–4, 222; rational system of, 226; reductive forms of, 241; research models of, 136, 234, 239–40; revision of, 73, 134–58, 256; spaces for, 56; and specialization, 91; standard of, 76; toxic forms of, 249; and universalist discourse, 62; variabilities of modern, 70; as Western discourse, 259. See also disciplinary; discipline; modernity; nondisciplinary; nonmodern; professionalism disciplinary: anti-, 39, 47, 65, 109–10, 145; argumentation, 64; authority, 20, 49, 293n25; boundaries, 2, 35; constraints, 3; critique, 107, 163; cross-, 7, 46, 193, 209, 222, 230; definitions of, 13, 15; double bind, 215; economy of value, 24, 32, 39, 41, 48, 51, 62– 65, 76, 86, 117, 149, 156, 195, 226, 249, 252, 258–59, 263; frameworks, 19; habitas, 45; history and rise of, 11, 89, 224; innovation, 98; inter-, 2, 7, 46–48, 222, 225, 227, 259, 270n23, 281n14; justifications and legitimations, 10, 24; matrix, 104–8, 112, 138, 161, 165–67, 170, 229, 237, 257; measurement, 131, 142; models, 24; normalization, 4; post-, 39, 47, 99, 141, 223, 244, 256, 258, 261, 265; reason, 108; self-regulation, 25–26; society, 48–49, 75–76, 78, 83–84, 136, 141, 234, 239, 273n19, 274n30; stability,

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disciplinary (continued) 53, 64; status, 38, 74–75, 117, 207; technologies, 244; tools, 3; trans-, 47; uncertainty, 229. See also disciplinarity; discipline; modernity; nondisciplinary; nonmodern; professionalism discipline: different meanings of, 15, 74, 136–50, 273n21, 273n23; as distinguished from profession, 13, 48, 50–91, 105, 263; of English, 12, 16, 82–87, 90, 95, 202–3, 225–61; links between educational and cultural, 125– 34; maps of the -s, 3; in ordinary language, 273n23; as quality of character, 124, 137, 144–45; in relation to cosmopolitanism, 146–50; in relation to paradigms, 105–8, 50–91; in relation to pragmatism, 159–89; in relation to theory, 190–224; as a system of instruction, 138–43; the ultimate, 49. See also disciplinarity; disciplinary discourse analysis, 4, 53 dissaggregation, 2, 190–91, 195, 226, 262 diversity, 50–51, 76, 79, 124–65; cultural, 14–15, 126, 129–34, 144–45, 149, 151, 172, 280n3; culture of, 14–15, 129, 133–36, 146, 156–58, 166, 168, 196, 221, 224, 227, 247, 251, 262–63; epistemological, 129, 134; intellectual, 124, 149; liberal discourse of, 127; managed, 14, 131–32; racial, 127; radical, 124 D’Souza, DiNesh, 280n6 Eagleton, Terry: on collective life, 262; on the condition of the poor, 265; on contracts, 263; on globalism, 52; on knowledge and morality, 57; on the marketplace, 10; on norms, 113, 121; on objectivity, 62, 66, 112; 272n10; on pluralism, 4; on theory, 16; on universalism, 61 Ebert, Teresa, 70 ecology, 121, 249 ecosystem, 57, 70–71, 75–76, 85, 137, 139, 223, 230, 234, 239, 249, 265 education management organization (emo), 50

Elbow, Peter, 227, 290n3 Eliot, Charles, 124–27, 145, 159, 180, 232, 238, 241 Empire (Hardt and Negri), 5, 271n10 Enlightenment, 22–23, 25–26, 56–57, 61, 146, 235, 271n10 English: A, 230, 238–41, 245–46, 248, 251; department, 32, 43, 55, 190–99, 207, 211–18, 268n8; discipline versus field of, 273n21; and labor conditions, 17; as a low paradigm field, 117–18; studies as a discipline, 12, 16, 82–87, 90, 95, 202–3, 225–61; teachers, 222 English in America (Ohmann), 43, 225, 244, 267n1, 292n18 Enron, 21 epistemology, 11, 19, 22, 26, 45, 111, 171, 176–84, 187, 223, 240, 262; and diversity, 125; and labor, 4–6, 13, 38, 42, 150; and logic, 177; performative dimension of, 115–17; and politics, 68– 69, 106, 109; and positivist knowledge, 168; social, 95; and standardization, 125–27; and standards, 36. See also disciplinarity; disciplinary; knowledge; knowledge contract Erasmus, 143 essential tension, 94, 126, 148, 176, 184, 196, 218 excellence, 36, 51, 63–64; game of, 83; university of, 4. See also Readings, Bill exemplary: figure, 230–233, 236–38, 269n10; historical moments, 11; knowledge, 54, 97, 105–8, 110–25, 138, 185, 188, 199, 203, 207, 212, 239; models, 31, 58, 63, 85, 93, 97, 194, 241. See also Kuhn, Thomas; paradigm Fanon, Franz, 59 faux local, 52–53, 65, 70, 158, 249 Feldman, Ann, 156 Felman, Shoshana, 204 feminism, 5, 63, 116, 173, 200, 214 Feyerabend, Paul, 90, 116, 271n4 Fish, Stanley, 66–68, 193, 216, 272n14, 273n20 flexible accumulation, 19, 43, 58–59, 94, 135, 168, 174, 251, 259–60, 266

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Ford, Franklin, 166–67 Foucault, Michel, 8, 41, 65–66, 80–86, 106–8, 110–12, 150, 202, 264, 272n13, 278n14; on biopower, 3, 125, 141; on disciplinary society, 13, 48, 75, 234, 239, 281n16 Fox, Tom, 243, 281n11 freedom, 72; academic, 25, 34–35, 41, 51, 54, 98, 265; of academic workers, 3, 24; domains of, 38; as a keyword, 136; to learn, 124; intellectual, 57; of the press, 67 Freire, Paulo, 173, 193, 287n6 French Revolution, 25, 208–10 Frye, Northrup, 203–4, 227 Fuller, Steve, 107, 120–21, 164, 205, 242, 273n20, 275n2; on Thomas Kuhn, 13– 14, 92, 94–96, 98, 276n4; on the word “scientist,” 102

Graff, Gerald, 34–35, 156, 235, 238, 241, 268n8, 282n19, 290nn7–8, 291n14; on academic and vernacular, 70, 153, 244, 256; on arguespeak, 67, 217; on English studies as a discipline, 225, 227, 245, 290n2; on field coverage principle, 203; on patterned isolation, 163– 64; on progressive education, 285n11; on teaching the conflicts, 229, 246; on theory, 190; on vocationalism, 173 Gramsci, Antonio, 89 Grossberg, Lawrence, 275n34 Grutter v. Bollinger, 129, 133–34 guild, 31, 244; -like, 10; in relation to professions, 98–99 Guillory, John, 16 Gummere, Francis, 231–32 Gunn, Giles, 66, 119, 152, 158, 162, 186, 285n15, 286n25

Gadamer, Hans Georg, 146, 286n17, 291n15 Gallagher, Chris, 161, 281–82n17, 284n2, 285n15 Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar, 45, 100, 134, 272n11; on alternative modernities, 9, 55, 150; on disciplinary knowledge, 3, 124; on relations between academy and state power, 96; on societal modernity, 81, 283n32 Gee, James Paul, 19, 51–53, 59, 158, 249, 271n8 Geertz, Clifford, 2 Giddens, Anthony, 115 Gilman, Ernest, 180, 232 Gilroy, Paul, 59–60, 131, 282–83n24 global: capitalism, 49, 58; community, 181; culture, 93; economy, 35, 50, 106, 122, 135, 149, 172; empire, 21; forms of exploitation, 59; in Kuhn’s formulation, 105; -ly interdependent futures, 158; politics, 53; power relations, 19, 168; social relations, 167. See also capital; capitalism; globalization; labor globalization, 5, 53, 100, 122, 135, 149– 50, 192, 195, 249, 253, 262; of English studies, 257–60. See also global Goodman, Nelson, 285n15

Halloran, Michael, 234 Hanauer, David, 130, 281n11 Harding, Sandra, 102–3, 107, 270n18, 277n10, 279n22 Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri, 5, 13, 21, 53, 56, 59–60, 63–65, 271n10, 274n30; Empire, 5, 271n10 Harken Energy Corporation, 21 Harkin, Patricia, 170, 279n27; on collaborative learning networks, 156, 281n15; on excellence, 36; on Francis James Child, 231–32, 235, 237–38, 290nn6–8; on lore, 99 Harraway, Donna, 41, 202, 279n22 Harris, Joseph, 290n3, 292n20 Harvard, 96, 124–25, 159, 179–80, 185, 230–34, 238–40, 280n1, 283n1, 286n20, 290nn5–6, 291n11 Harvey, David, 19, 43, 59, 225 Hawisher, Gail, 221 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 257 Heath Anthology of American Literature, 198 hegemony, 2, 19; cultural, 28, 63; disciplinary, 58, 149; modernist, 61 Herman, Deborah M. and Julie M. Schmidt, 42 hermeneutics: and the humanities, 85; Kuhn’s version of, 278n16; relation to

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hermeneutics (continued) culture, 27; rhetorical, 123, 188–89; secular, 29 Herrnstein, Richard J. and Charles Murray, 62 Higham, John, 77, 280n1 Hill, Adams Sherman, 230, 235, 238–43, 251 hooks, bell, 190, 205, 224 Horner, Bruce, 260, 290n4, 292n21 Hoskin, Keith W., 57, 75, 139, 241, 274n29 Hoyningen-Huene, Paul, 100, 106, 112, 278n19 humanities, 122–23, 141, 214, 217, 219, 221, 223, 249–50, 258; and academic disciplinarity, 16, 83, 229; and the arts, 260; and cultural modernity, 77; departments, 282n18; and diversity, 137; flexible boundaries of, 67; English and the, 259; and global economy, 50; in the information university, 270n19; and nondisciplinary work, 39; paradigms in the, 92–99, 117, 122; politics of the, 44; in relation to English studies, 242; in relation to sciences, 65, 83, 85–87, 141, 196, 219, 230; in relation to social sciences, 264; role in the university, 12, 28, 79, 90, 261; subordinate function of, 31– 32, 38, 43; theory in the, 195–96; and vocational training, 51; work in the, 112; workers, 120. See also science. Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 23, 26–31, 145, 148, 211, 268n6 Hurlbert, C. Mark, 39, 268n9, 271n2, 276n7 Idea of a University, The (Newman), 1 ideological, 20, 31, 146; battle, 25, 230; contradictions, 201; critique, 255; force, 233; function of literature, 213; imposters, 62; rationales for knowledge, 23, 57 ideology: escaping of, 56–57; of individuality, 239; and paradigms, 104, 107; and politics, 200 imagination, 3, 146, 208–12; critical, 44;

the ethical, 262; social, 45. See also aesthetics incommensurability: among different academic domains, 118–19; between epistemology and politics, 68; between knowledge and capital, 32, 88, 98; between paradigms, 97; between subdisciplinary matrices, 230 Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 215 information: age, 94; digital, 21; and knowledge, 163; management, 51; mode of, 2; and profit, 251; reduction of knowledge to, 36, 157; transfer, 73, 163 intellectual property, 13 International Monetary Fund, 50 Iraq, 21

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James, William, 104, 152, 163, 177–80, 184, 186, 286nn18–20 Jameson, Fredric, 52 Jay, Paul, 253, 257–58 Johns Hopkins University, 124, 180, 232 Johnson, Barbara, 196 Johnson, Benjamin, Patrick Kavanagh, and Kevin Mattson, 8, 40, 42 Johnstone, Christopher, 172

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Kamuf, Peggy, 247, 285n13, 287n7, 292n17 Kant, Immanuel, 25–27, 32, 60, 68, 104, 109, 147, 211, 267n3, 268n4, 277n13, 282n23; on autonomy, 57; on division of labor, 23; preservation of knowledge, 30. See also conflict of faculties Kaplan, Charles, 206 Kent, Thomas, 251 Kerr, Clark, 46, 83, 279n26; on contracts, 22; on the multiversity, 1, 44, 136, 157; on pluralism, 2, 267n2; The Uses of the University, 1–2 Kitteridge, George Lyman, 232 Kitzhaber, Albert, 238 Klein, Julie Thompson, 48, 134, 162, 270n23, 281n14 knowledge: archival sense of, 140; as cultural capital, 19; disciplinary, 46, 223; disinterested, 7, 41, 62, 99, 103,

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168; for its own sake, 1; and labor, 40; and markets, 37; modes of production of, 168; narrative, 132; propositional, 10, 78–79, 91, 267n4; scarcity, 31, 35; self-, 20, 52, 267n2; special privilege of, 24; stabilities of, 41; and theory, 221; and the university, 21; unpredictable forms of, 128. See also epistemology; knowledge contract knowledge contract, 134–38, 142–43, 148, 163–69, 175, 177, 184, 186, 188– 89, 191, 198, 220, 242, 253–55, 259, 262–63, 266; and affirmative action, 129; conditions of, 80; decentering of, 53; definition and history of, 4, 21–49; and departmental organization, 202–3; disciplinary terms of, 8, 38, 114, 125–26, 157–58; distribution of labor under, 122; dominance of, 4, 8–9, 14; double nature of, 66, 93, 120; early formulation of, 103; and epistemology, 13, 52, 109; ideological justification for, 103; latest version of, 46, 59; narrow terms of the, 251; procedures for fulfilling, 74; professions created out of, 78; reinforcement of, 16; in relation to labor, 12; in relation to nondisciplinary and nonmodern, 15; in relation to paradigms, 108–10; renegotiating, 17, 73, 195–96, 252; rules of the, 99; virtues of the, 243. See also epistemology; knowledge Kuhn, Thomas, 58, 71, 76, 91–123, 138, 142, 175, 178, 190, 193–96, 200–205, 216–23, 228, 237, 241, 263, 269n10, 275n38, 275n2, 276n3–6, 276n9, 277n10, 277nn12–14, 278n16–17, 279n21, 279n25, 288n11; influence of, 14; on measurement, 271n5; on social construction of knowledge, 11; The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 14, 94, 104–5, 277n12, 279n25, 288n11; on textbooks, 16. See also paradigm Kuhnification of the humanities, 92–123, 199, 201, 203, 216, 219, 222, 288n9 labor: academic, 13, 16, 30, 48, 50–51, 76, 136, 193–95, 225–26, 238, 254,

268n10, 288n13; alternative forms of, 39, 90; and capital, 60, 197; cheap forms of, 117, 231; concrete and abstract forms of, 4, 63, 98; contractual, 79, 122, 158, 171; craft, 32, 36; dehumanization of, 55; departmental distribution of, 7, 165; disciplinary organization of, 10, 38–39, 78, 141, 162, 170; division of, 25–26, 103, 166, 173 183; exploitation of, 52; flex, 3, 80, 132, 225, 249, 282n22; force, 248; immigrant, 164; inequitable conditions of, 173, 230; intellectual, 34, 243; and knowledge, 269n14; laws, 23; and management, 160, 251; modern domains of, 151; movement, 39, 41–44, 60, 116, 213, 266; nondisciplinary kinds of, 45, 49, 80, 274n26; nonmodern kinds of, 84, 88, 151, 178; organized, 89, 188; peripheral, 260; power, 152, 168; problems of, 2, 14, 17, 19; professional, 87, 150, 162; questions, 206; in relation to capital, 29, 58; in relation to knowledge contract, 12, 22, 122; relations, 18, 65, 72; rise of disciplinary, 159; shift in, 93; slave, 232; spectrum of, 83, 91; story of, 11; theory of value, 172–74; unions, 176, 223; university, 67, 114, 166; wage, 59, 175; of working terms, 74, 208. See also capital; capitalism; global; unions Lacan, Jacques, 202 Larson, Magali Sarfarti, 29, 42–43, 55, 75, 262, 268n7, 269n16, 273n22, 274n26 Latour, Bruno, 50, 81, 103, 167, 226, 263, 272nn16–18, 273n20, 284n7; on modern Constitution’s relation to the nonmodern, 68–74, 91, 100, 126; on the nonmodern, 13, 48, 53, 77, 109, 278n17, 283n29; on paradigms, 113, 277n14; on postmodernism, 63; We Have Never Been Modern, 68–74. See also nonmodern Lauter, Paul, 48, 263–64 legitimation: of alternative domains, 41, 109, 223; criteria of, 51; democratic

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legitimation (continued) powers of, 111; disciplinary, 112; of intellectual labor, 50; of the knowledge contract, 30, 129, 136, 148; market-drive forces of, 24; moral, 40; professional, 88; by state power, 25; of work, 149 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 27 Leitch, Vincent B., 162, 200, 206, 214, 220, 246, 270n23, 287n2, 287n6, 289n17; on academic disciplines, 48; on dissaggregation, 2; on paradigms, 279n22; on postmodernism, 63; on theory canon, 191–93 Lernfreiheit, 124 liberal: arts, 31, 145, 148, 231, 235, 265, 282nn20–21; education, 282n22; reformers, 24; self, 15, 146–47 Lincoln, Abraham, 29 literacy, 6, 143, 192–93, 265; acts, 4, 111; and alternative rhetoric, 13, 67; as disciplinary rhetoric, 3; electronic forms of, 251; event, 255; histories of, 252; humanistic practices of, 261; and literature, 211; multiple forms of, 90, 141–42; nondisciplinary, 41; practices, 43; projects, 224, 258; ranking of the U.S., 259; separation of literary skills from, 257; as specialized vocabulary, 4. See also rhetoric literature, 6, 53, 208; American, 247; anthologies, 196–99; classic works of, 56; and composition, 17, 213, 217, 226–60; and culture, 210, 220; discipline of, 16, 229; and language, 197, 230; and literacy, 211; paradigm for, 219; and politics, 212; professing, 219; programs, 191–93; study of, 190, 204; and writing, 187, 270n20; works of, 202. See also aesthetics; composition; English; imagination lore, 24, 47, 65, 87, 99, 109, 162, 251, 262 Loury, Glen C., 128 Lyotard, Jean Francois, 41, 64, 279n23 Mahala, Daniel and Jody Swilky, 258

Mailloux, Steven, 152, 175, 188–89, 252, 285n15, 286n24, 291n15 Marx, Karl, 61–62, 64, 69, 119, 200, 210– 11, 263–64, 271n6; on mode of production, 53; in relation to Foucault, 3, 75; on species being, 128, 182 Martin, Randy, 266, 269n13 Mathieu, Paula, 268n9, 276n7 McGowan, John, 6–7, 42, 89, 148, 264, 271n4, 272n15, 285n15 Meier, Deborah, 156 Menand, Louis, 76, 114, 293n25 meritocracy, disciplinary, 5 Messer-Davidow, Ellen, 24, 62, 274n29, 291n16 method, 57, 118, 130, 158–59, 161, 175– 89, 206, 231, 234–36, 241, 264, 271n4; canon of, 254, 293n24; in common usage, 285n17; critical, 245; empirical, 132; experimental, 181; extrinsic versus intrinsic, 202; of invention, 234; of opposition, 212; pragmatism as a, 16, 159–89; of reading; 204; in relation to diversity, 144–45; in relation to industry, 32; in relation to paradigms, 39; -s and objects, 56–58, 63–65, 68, 75, 85–87, 93, 145, 156, 177, 196, 203, 247, 250–58; -s and schools, 194, 198, 200, 213; -s and theories, 287n9; scientific, 102; teaching as a, 153; of understanding, 204 Michael, John, 26, 244 Miller, Richard E., 44 Miller, Susan, 225, 230, 241, 246, 290n8 Miller, Thomas P., 235, 290n8 Modern Language Association (mla), 92, 275n1 modernity, 9, 18, 22, 29, 66, 151, 158, 184, 223, 225, 250; alternative, 9– 10, 15, 55, 61, 72, 74, 122, 135, 142, 150, 162, 167, 185, 222, 230, 259, 263, 266; binary logic of, 60; cultural, 55–56, 77, 226, 233, 236, 238, 242, 283n32; and disciplinarity, 110; discourse of, 110; multiple, 30, 56, 68, 84; paradigm of, 277n14; in relation to Enlightenment, 22; rise of, 11, 71– 72; societal, 55–56, 74–77, 81, 90,

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184, 205, 226, 230, 233–238, 242, 283n32; transformation of, 18, 69; two faces of, 55. See also postmodern modernization, 9; of higher education, 22; in relation to professionalism and disciplinarity, 29–30, 75 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 280n4 Morrill Land Grant Act, 29, 137 Mouffe, Chantal, 285n15 Mowitt, John, 81, 100, 107–13, 274n29 multicultural, 39, 117, 126, 135, 185, 198, 215, 249, 280n4 multivalent, 15, 124, 136, 150–58, 215– 17, 229, 251, 262; institution, 171; pedagogy, 207–13, 286n19; possibilities, 129; pragmatism as, 165, 168, 173, 178 multiversity, 1–2, 6, 15, 43–44, 136, 151, 156–57, 267n2 Myerson, Gregory, 133 Napoleon Bonaparte, 27 National Council of Teachers of English (ncte), 246 nation state, 19, 23, 31, 226 Nelson, Cary, 50–51, 54, 100, 124, 134, 269n15, 289n1; on disciplinary knowledge, 3, 124; on relations between academy and state power, 96 neoliberal, 15, 19, 126, 158, 226 neopragmatism, 66, 176, 273n20. See also pragmatism networks: of academic disciplines, 71– 74, 108, 112; collaborative, 156, 244, 281n15; dialogical, 65, 267n2; electronic, 59; global, 19, 70; intertextual, 200; nonmodern, 263, 278n17, 283n29; of obligation, 47; of power, 14; of practices, 46; referral, 89; of social relations, 163; undifferentiated, 76; of value, 86. See also Latour, Bruno New Criticism, 93, 95, 119, 190, 202, 238, 247–48 Newfield, Christopher, 3, 5, 20, 32–33, 159, 168, 171, 268n7, 269n15, 271n3, 276n7, 283n31, 284n1, 285n15, 291n12 Newman, John Henry, 1–2, 267n1; The Idea of a University, 1

Newton, Sir Isaac, 71, 102–3 new work order, 19, 52, 80 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 56 Noble, David F., 19, 50, 52, 156–57, 183, 221, 267n2 No Child Left Behind (nclb), 125 Noddings, Nel, 65, 272n12 nondisciplinary, 8, 10, 15, 37–39, 42, 45, 48–49, 53–54, 67, 87, 99, 113, 117, 122, 137, 141–42, 173–74, 177, 217, 222, 227–28, 230, 265; intellectuals, 89; kinds of learning, 154–55; possibilities, 249; relation to theory, 205; tasks of writing, 213; work in English studies, 243–44, 253–62. See also disciplinarity; disciplinary; nonmodern nonmodern, 50–91, 99, 123, 131, 167– 68, 173, 176–79, 188, 195–96, 217, 222, 251, 259, 263; forms of disciplinary work, 65; forms of mediation, 189; interactions, 67; kinds of theory, 205; kinds of work, 9, 13, 41, 48, 77, 99–101, 108–9, 123, 151, 260; performances, 118; professional devaluing of the, 78; professional work, 83; in relation to diversity, 15, 133–38; in relation to textbooks, 17; university, 50, 54; and vernacular, 156. See also disciplinarity; disciplinary; nondisciplinary North, Stephen, 93, 218, 225, 227–28, 248, 258, 273n21, 289n18, 290n3, 290n5, 290n8, 291n14 Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 191, 193, 198, 200, 214–15, 288n14 Nussbaum, Martha C., 147, 282n22 objectification, 37, 62–63, 69, 93, 145, 161; and capital interests, 118; and commodification, 73–74; disciplinary forms of, 241; of grammar, 246; processes of, 10, 81, 99; and purification, 167; rapid forms of, 73; the resistance to, 228; and standardized exams, 240; of the world, 81 objectivity, 57, 62, 66–69, 133, 247; disciplinary principles of, 30, 32, 231, 240; discourse of, 10; ideal of, 50; and neutrality, 281n12; and partisanship,

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objectivity (continued) 112; and quantification, measurement, 34, 57; and reason, 58; and scientific values, 237; and standards, 128 Ohmann, Richard, 9, 20, 41, 43–44, 50, 159, 246, 267n1, 269n15, 283–84n1; English in America, 43, 225, 244, 267n1, 292n18; on English studies, 225, 292n18; on guilds, 244; on knowledge explosion, 35; on mass culture, 284n5; The Politics of Knowledge, 9, 20, 29, 37, 41, 44, 50; on professional managerial class, 29, 37; in relation to field of composition, 220 Orwell, George, 59 Owens, Derek, 225, 243, 249, 292n23 panopticon, 80, 82, 106, 114 paradigm, 50–123, 133, 137–38, 142, 150, 190–95, 200–206, 216, 218–19, 222–23, 228–30, 241–47, 252–53, 257, 261–64; centripetal, 198; disciplinary, 70, 90; discourse of, 12; and exclusion, 45; as a good word, 92; high vs. low, 281n14; interdisciplinary, 48; and method, 39; performative dimension of, 14; performed, 14, 92–123; pragmatism as a, 162–65, 172, 175–78, 181, 185–88; in relation to humanities, 16– 17, 31; shift, 13, 65, 76, 91–95, 116, 135, 164, 277n13; specialized, 63; as a synonym for ideology, 104; tested, 127; and unpredicatable forms of knowledge, 140. See also Kuhn, Thomas Parker, William Riley, 232, 249, 252 patterned isolation, 35, 64 pedagogy, 13, 18, 43, 80, 117, 146, 152– 53, 162, 218; and acculturation, 175; child-centered, 285n12; and culture of diversity, 157, 221; and curricular design, 199, 282n22; as a department, 160; and inquiry, 175; and method, 183; models, 154; and philosophy, 170; radical forms of, 258; reforms, 173; reinvigoration of, 181; scholarship, 37; uses of, 215 Peirce, Charles S., 177–83, 186–87, 286n21

Penley, Constance, 47 performance: linguistic, 46; of paradigms, 114–23; studies, 279nn23–24; theory, 204 performativity: versus performance studies, 279n23 philology, 28, 231, 235–37, 247, 290n6 philosophy, 25–28, 32, 36, 68, 140, 164, 193, 208, 268n3, 286n18; European tradition of, 184; metaphysical, 179, 182; and poetry, 212; in relation to pedagogy, 160, 183; speculative, 165; worldly, 164 Plato, 57, 147, 199–200, 209 pluralism, 2, 6–8, 95, 119, 201, 210, 267nn2–3 political correctness, 44 politics: aesthetics and, 55, 207–15, 253; and alternative projects, 260; of caring, 65; and disciplines, 168; economics and, 21, 265; epistemology and, 68–69, 106; global, 53; history and, 126; identity, 116; in literature programs, 212; micro-, 14, 112; and the organization of corporate capital, 88; paradigms and, 103, 164; pedagogy and, 169–76; power and, 100, 107; public, 136; of social change, 162; technology and, 98; -as-usual, 150; of writing specialists, 246 Politics of Knowledge, The (Ohmann), 9, 20, 29, 37, 41, 44, 50 positivist, 34, 57, 90, 95–96, 115, 165, 168, 238 postcolonialism, 5, 63, 93, 200, 214, 218 Poster, Mark, 163, 210 postmodern, 54, 59, 63, 69, 74, 121; capital, 58; -ism, 52, 61–66, 72; rhetoric, 46 postprocess, 251 poststructural, 74; -ism, 62, 109; -ist, 82 Powell, Justice Lewis, 129–30 pragmatism, 15–16, 152, 158–90; radical, 6, 15, 176. See also neopragmatism pragmatist tradition, 11, 177, 287n6 Pratt, Mary Louise, 155 Pritchett, Henry, 33 problem: cluster, 11–12, 206–20; posing,

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11; 140, 153, 171–72, 200, 206–7, 213– 14, 220; significant, 200, 206, 287n6 profession: different meanings of, 13; history of the, 258; in relation to disciplines, 48, 50–91. See also professionalism professional managerial class (pmc), 10, 15, 20, 29, 37, 49, 55–60, 75, 77, 83, 85, 144, 284n1 professionalism, 11; anti-, 49; and capitalism, 268n7; critics of, 89; culture of, 94; limits of, 279n22; pure, 274n28; in relation to disciplinarity, 12, 50–91; rise of, 23, 289n17; social trustee, 20. See also profession professionalization: and modernization, 9; 29–31 public: access, 244; accountability, 37; arena, 185, 234; concerns, 45, 161, 164; consequences of the “higher faculties,” 26; critique, 100; demand by the, 42; domain, 22, 26, 167; education, 250; forms of political rhetoric, 188; funds, 250; interests, 77; investments, 83; life, 49; and private, 4, 39, 78, 218; rationales, 49; schools, 171, 285n10; sector, 292n19; and the university, 33, 141, 256; welfare, 20 Pullman, George, 159–60 queer theory, 5 Rabaté, Jean, 287n1 Ransom, John Crowe, 202, 289n18 Raymond, James C., 290n3 Readings, Bill, 26–29, 31, 47, 229, 246, 275n34, 276n7; on disciplinarity, 142, 222; on excellence, 4, 36; on reason, 268n4; on ruined institution, 21; on teaching, 155, 283n29 Reagan, Ronald, 188 reason: and aesthetics, 268n5; discourse of, 34; ideology of, 88; and objectivity, 58; principle of, 1, 23, 26–27, 68, 80, 103; pure, 27; in pursuit of, 23; and unity, 28; universal, 63; and universality, 26

Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 129–30, 280–81nn8–10 Reid, Ronald F., 234–35 religion, 25 research: basic and applied, 94, 98, 101; corporate endorsements for, 250; disciplinary, 38, 128, 194, 242, 250; in education, 157; exemplary, 239; and liberal arts education, 148; literary, 236, 246, 248; paradigmatic, 101; projects, 224; quantifiable, 42; in relation to sciences, 29; in relation to teaching, 34, 138, 144, 232, 243, 246, 252; as search for new knowledge, 28, 30; university, 31–32, 83–84, 231, 240; writing assignments, 256. See also teaching rhetoric, 6, 13, 55, 123, 134, 142, 208, 215, 220, 226, 260, 263–66; and the abandonment of oratory, 239–40; as agency of moral growth, 285n14; alternative, 90; American, 235; as architectonic, creative art, 240; argumentative, 85; Boylston Professor of, 230, 233, 290n6; of the classical curriculum, 239; cultural, 4, 263; current traditional, 245–46; and dialectic, 254–56; different, 127, 134; disciplinary, 8, 47, 258, 272n18, 290n3; diverse, 168; and grammar, 241; history of, 192; of the labor system, 226; managerial, 251; non-Western, 79; normalizing, 264; and poetics, 193; political, 136, 167, 250; postmodern, 46; social and political contexts of, 162, 234–35; of solidarity, 261; supremicist, 126; theorists of, 218; Western, 17, 45; and writing, 211. See also composition; English; literacy; writing Rhoades, Gary, 40, 42, 265, 269n15, 270n17, 276n7 Richter, David H., 219–20, 288n10 Ritzer, G., 95 Robbins, Bruce, 79, 148, 275n36 Rorty, Richard, 64, 189, 278n16, 285n15 Roskelly, Hephzibah and Kate Ronald, 152, 157, 186–87, 283n31, 284n1, 285nn15–16, 286n23, 291n12

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Ross, Andrew, 270n22, 277n14 Ross, Edward, 164 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 22 Russell, David, 242, 272n16 Said, Edward W., 184 San Juan, Jr., E., 62 Savery, Pancho, 282n21 Schell, Eileen, 115, 266, 269n15, 289n1, 290n5 Schiller, J. C. Friedrich von, 27, 211 Scholes, Robert, 89, 246, 253–57, 290n8, 292nn23–24 Schroeder, Christopher, 63, 243 science, 117, 141, 161, 176, 179, 183, 194, 223, 227, 230–31, 234–37, 241, 246– 47, 250; of criticism, 95; and disciplinary standards, 82; and epistemology, 11; hard, 77, 83, 96, 270n22; history of, 219; and methods, 56; modern, 71, 101–3, 271n5; natural, 90; normal, 98; and paradigms, 94–97; pre-eminent role of, 28–29, 32; sociology of, 102; values of, 112. See also humanities scientific: criteria, 227; management, 33–35 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 46–47, 115, 264 Selfe, Cynthia, 221 service: community, 79, 89, 262; composition as a, 242; defining the value of, 141; learning, 37, 224; relation to teaching and scholarship, 162 Shelley, Percy Bysse, 210 Shumar, Wesley and Jonathan Church, 51 Shumway, David, 24, 30, 246, 274n29, 291n16; and Craig Dionne, 80, 82–88, 140, 270n21, 281n16; on disciplinarity, 76, 216–17; on liberal arts, 145; on the star system, 199 Sirc, Geoffrey, 243 Slaughter, Sheila, 43, 269n15, 276n7 Slevin, James F., 137–43, 146, 149, 281nn16–17, 282n18, 290n3 Smith, Adam, 211 social security, 21 Socrates, 147 Soley, Lawrence C., 51

solidarity, 185, 230, 261–66; across class lines, 9; and collective action, 109, 157, 168, 171, 175; with multiple social movements, 116; professional, 225–29, 249, 251–53; rhetoric of, 261; social, 45; of workers, 44. See also collective; unions Sosnoski, James J., 62, 120, 170, 218, 253, 263, 269n15, 274n29, 279n27; on collaborative learning networks, 156, 281n15; on “Magisters,” 106; on multivalent, 124, 151–55; on schools of theory, 205; on textbooks, 287n3; on theories and models, 278n15, 288n9; on token professionals, 64, 196, 216, 260 Space Act of 1958, 188 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 66, 209–12, 275n32; on electronification, 267n2 Standard Oil, 160 standards, 54, 135; academic, 281n12; admission, 281n10; and affirmative action, 130–31; of correctness, 240; and curricula, 171; disciplinary, 76, 82, 87, 124–28, 145, 153, 237–38; discourse of, 36, 121; of efficiency, 34; as holistic criteria, 152; of measurement, 242, 252; minimal, 250; of paradigms, 97; and past canons, 227; reductive, 30, 37–39; and testing, 132, 156; of truth, 95; verification of, 280n7 Stanford, Leyland, 164 Stanford University, 164 Stewart, Donald, 232 Stoler, Laura Ann, 274n31 Strategic Defense Initiative, 188 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The (Kuhn), 14, 94, 104–5, 277n12, 279n25, 288n11 Sullivan, Richard, 40 Summers, Lawrence H., 185 Supreme Court, 36, 129, 133 Taylor, Charles, 29–30, 56 Taylor, Frederick, 29–30, 32–33, 269n10 teaching: cheap, 229; collaborative, 151, 224; of composition and writing, 230–60; the conflicts, 34; defining the value of, 141; devaluing of, 117; of

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English A, 246; evaluation of, 87; the humanities, 217; innovation and experiments, 38–39, 43, 151–55, 285n10; and learning, 39, 41, 140, 153, 223, 228; lore, 109; and nondisciplinary work, 243; and the production of knowledge, 24; in relation to research, 34, 93, 138, 144, 265; in relation to service, 30–31, 37, 162, 273n24; and theory, 218, 289n15. See also research technoscience, 19, 21, 36, 51 textbooks, 16, 194–98, 240, 287n3, 291n13 textuality, 6, 82, 110–13, 123 theory: after, 16, 191; anthologies, 16, 190–224; cluster, 289n17; critical, 263; democratic, 166; foundational, 198; and history, 11, 215, 287n1; hope, 193; institutional construction of, 16–17; as a method, 64; movement, 12; of paradigms, 98–99; performance of, 204; post-, 16, 191, 193; and practice, 165; probability, 132; of professionalism, 45; in relation to labor, 172–74; revolution, 44; as rhetorical performance, 11; speech act, 115 Thought News, 163, 166–68 Tierney, William, 42 Toulmin, Stephen, 77, 276n5 Treichler, Paula, 278n18 Trowler, Paul R., 46, 76–77, 79 Ulmer, Gregory, 272n18 unions, 40, 42–43, 54, 120; activities of, 72, 168; and contracts, 90; efforts to break, 159; faculty, 176, 269n16; labor, 223; railroad, 160; of scientific workers, 270n18. See also collective; labor; solidarity United Nations, 259 universal, 1, 26, 52, 100, 128, 148, 182, 212, 276n9; grammar, 237, 268n6; laws or norms, 31, 71; principles of human nature, 235; social significance of, 245 universalism, 1, 26, 52, 61, 63, 100, 128, 148, 182, 212, 237, 245; Kantian, 68; and reason, 88

universalist, 57–59 universality, 1, 26, 61–62, 88 university: abusers of the, 51; accounts of the, 11; bureaucracy, 217; as conservative institution, 44; consolidation, 159; the contemporary, 143; contractual obligations of the, 93; departments in the, 96; different settings of the, 126, 206; the disciplinary forms of the, 15, 155, 157; and diversity, 133; elite, 216; essence of the, 1; expansion of the, 218, 245; founding document for the, 25; history of the, 12, 165; an imagined, 168; knowledge and the, 21–22; and labor, 67, 114– 15, 149, 259; management, 9, 34–35; mission of the, 18; the mixed modern/nonmodern, 136; the modern, 5, 11, 14, 32, 75–76, 124, 134, 144, 188, 195–96, 226, 250; the multivalent, 124; the nonmodern, 50, 54; political realities of the, 73; the posthistorical, 36; power structure of the, 167; presidents, 236; rationales for the, 6–8; and reason, 26, 80; reforming of the, 8, 69, 83, 135, 150; the research, 2, 30–31, 55, 231; rewards for working in the, 264; role of the sciences in the, 28; space of the, 72; users of the, 41, 90, 138, 141, 262, 266 University of Berlin, 27 University of California, 130 University of Chicago, 160 University of Gottingen, 231 University of Michigan, 133 Uses of the University, The (Kerr), 1–2 U.S. News and World Report, 126 Veysey, Laurence R., 30, 35, 41, 75, 137, 144–46, 268n7, 280n2 Vietnam, 190 Vitanza, Victor, 251, 283n25 vocational: -ism as viewed by John Dewey, 173; missions, 29; self-interest, 54; training, 1–2, 8, 51; versus other educational possibilities, 157 Vygotsky, Lev, 154

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Warnock, Tilly, 226–27, 290n3 Warren, Austin, 190, 202 Watkins, Evan, 5, 36, 88–89, 257, 265, 269n15, 274n27 Weber, Samuel, 32, 39, 88, 94, 269n12 Webster, Grant, 95, 104 We Have Never Been Modern (Latour), 68– 74 Wellek, René, 190, 202 Wertz, Marianna, 27 West, Cornel, 164, 170, 174–75, 181, 184–86, 284n4, 284n6, 285n15, 286n22 Westbrook, Robert B., 159–60, 164–66, 170–71, 173, 175, 283n28, 284n3, 284n6, 285n12, 285n16 Whewell, William, 102 Wiegman, Robin, 274n31, 280n5 William II, King Frederick, 24–25 Williams, Jeffrey, 16, 20, 49, 193–95, 199–200, 207, 288n9, 289n17 Williams, Raymond, 101, 169, 208, 210, 284n8 Winterowd, W. Ross, 197, 211, 234, 240– 41, 246, 290n8, 291n13 Wissenschaft, 28 Wolin, Sheldon, 21

Wood, Peter, 127–31, 134, 280n7, 280nn9–10 Woodmansee, Marth, 210 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 210 Wordsworth, William, 209–12 World Bank, 50–52, 271n2 WorldCom, 21 World War II, 44, 96, 218, 227 World Wide Web, 19 Worsham, Lynn, 272n19 writing, 217–20, 224–61, 263; ambiguity of the term, 290n4; canonical, 31; and clear thinking, 144; creative, 17, 187, 211, 217, 226; of a foundation, 191; handbooks, 196–97; imaginative, 212; of the knowledge contract, 1–18; and literary, 6, 104; as a marketable skill, 250; modes of, 80; new uses of, 75; nonacademic, 79; and reading, 17, 117, 149, 216; and rhetoric, 203; theory, 215. See also composition; English; literature; rhetoric Yarbrough, Stephen R., 82, 84, 119, 122, 152–53, 155, 268n6, 275n35, 283n27, 284n7, 286n25

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