The State of Criticism, Part One

The Critic and the University

Eyes that normally fail to notice the slow hollowing out of higher education have turned their attention to the catastrophe unfolding at West Virginia University. The bow-tie clad university president has proposed a draconian budget cut that will result in the firing of hundreds of faculty, the shuttering or effective disembowelment of dozens of programs, and a shift to online-based education that relies on instructional outsourcing, among other calamities. This will effectively end a humanistic, liberal-arts education at WVU, and likely signals the end of the land-grant public university model itself, at least—for now—in West Virginia.

Readers interested in the specifics are urged to read Dennis M. Hogan’s excellent article in The Baffler, “Capture the Flagship.” Despite the protestations of avoiding current discourse in the Credo/Manifesto that I wrote for this Substack’s “About” page, I am nevertheless going to use the WVU debacle to set the terms of the question of how criticism is to function in light of the intellectual conditions in which would-be critics are forced to ply their trade.

Two realities predominate: the practice of criticism has, effectively, been the bailiwick of the university at least since the New Critics professionalized the English department damn near a century ago; and, the university has assiduously embarked on the task of destroying the academic humanities for the last 50 years—if not directly, than as a byproduct of their efforts to retool the university into something more technocratic, for lack of a better term.

Two-thousand and twenty-three, Anno Domini, seems to be the year where those two facts have become the unavoidable prolegomena to any discussion of criticism as an ongoing concern. I am thinking of the emergence, late last year, of  John Guillory’s Professing Criticism, and the recent podcast Criticism LTD by Matt Seybold of the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College. About these two works I have little to say at present, save for two things: 1) Guillory’s book can be (and has been) critiqued, but it takes into account the actual conditions that undergird the production of critical knowledge right now in a way that cannot be ignored, which is striking considering his deeply disputed role in the 2005 graduate student strike at New York University, and 2) that few soundtracks for podcasts are as pleasant as the one that Criticism LTD boasts. Nice work, Joe Locke. Check out his album Makram.

The emergence of this stock-taking amidst the accelerated destruction of WVU has made plain a problem acutely felt at smaller institutions for quite a while. Ironically, academic critics are the victims of their own success. Or, as Laura Heffernan and Rachel Sagner Buurma, in their Critical Inquiry review of Professing Criticism, write: “The hint of oxymoron in the book’s title reminds us that even as scholars today wish to speak critically about society to a broad public, as Victorian critics once did, we have been carried further and further away from that older media landscape by the wild success of our own professionalization.”

Heffernan and Buurma know of whence they speak: their book The Teaching Archive argues that the pedagogical innovations emergent from community colleges, HBCUs, and state schools have had more impact on literary studies than those that emanate from prestigious private universities, with ample archival documentation to support their thesis. Quality, field-changing work can come from anywhere, true, but what are we to make of this fact in light of recent developments?

The conversation about the future of criticism, particularly in its regurgitated form as discourse, tends to play the decline of the university against the rise of little magazines. That phenomenon is real, though far more complex than the discourse suggests. But, of course, the truth is easy to see: as a recent and hotly-discussed piece in Business Insider profiling the prolific critic Merve Emre demonstrated, while Emre wants to reinvigorate the project of criticism and sees the little magazine as a key component of that process, she does so within the structure of the university as the new director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University. It’s good to hedge your bets, and after all ya gotta eat.

Good luck to her, and may a thousand flowers bloom. But this ain’t it. If the future of criticism at an institutional level lies in the foundation of privately-endowed programs and private universities, it does nothing to stem the tide of public university decline. It does nothing to reach students across the barriers of class and race that so often keep bright potential scholars from gravitating to their preferred areas of study, to say nothing of even reaching the doors of the university. Furthermore, it can do nothing to effectively establish a new critical regime, because at this moment in time the very survival of the critic depends upon their affiliation with an institution, and even taking into account the stark decline of university positions, higher ed remains the primary legitimating force in the critical world. True, a handful of non-academic critics are able to carry on their work because they hold full-time positions at magazines, but without a university affiliation, most doors to critical work are closed.

In part this is a function of gatekeeping, but it’s also a simple reality: as Josef Pieper observed in his 1948 book, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, time and space to think and create is not merely crucial but necessary for the development of cultural artifacts of all types. Furthermore, in a neat bit of etymological prestidigitation, he demonstrates that the words scola, Scule, and school all derive from the Greek word for leisure: “The name of the institutions of education and learning mean ‘leisure.’” Were our universities doing their jobs as they have been historically understood, they would be the natural site for the production of criticism. And, in a deracinated way, they still are. But this etymological lesson runs smack up against reality, most saliently through the rise of precarious employment in higher education: the vast majority of instruction at the collegiate level is done by those without job security.

One need not share Pieper’s Thomistic bent to agree that a critic with a day job lacks the time and space to be the best critic they can. A critic at a university will have a better shot, but only if they have the security and teaching load and research time that comes from a tenure-track position. It simply takes time to read and think and discuss and write and publish, and the intellectual energies (such as they are) of our current age do not reward such activities. In part, this is a function of the particularities of literary study, as Guillory observes: “All disciplines…depend upon the textual transmission of knowledge and the ability to decipher texts in complex and self-reflective ways, but literary study deploys reading as its constitutive disciplinary practice…”

This fusion of essence and particulars makes criticism a unique disciplinary formation. Perhaps, on the grand historical scale, the intellectual energies of most ages have not rewarded such labor. But it is undeniable that the U.S. enjoyed an imperfectly but marvelously democratic university system at mid-century that has subsequently been thwarted at every turn in its efforts to expand upon that promise. There is a reason that right-wing state legislatures make enemies of Gender and Women’s Studies departments, Black Studies departments, and so forth. Such efforts are pernicious, but not uniquely so; they are, in fact, the darker inverse of those Democratic legislatures pushing expanded STEM instruction and ignoring the needs of the humanities.

Both are indebted to the neoliberal logic of late capital; the consultant class has learned that there is a great deal of money to be made in universities, and the recent efforts at “restructuring” undertaken by so many schools are just a bad copy of the deregulation and outsourcing that have marked the corporate world for the last half-century. Above all of this lies the financialization of the U.S. economy, which created a housing crisis fifteen years ago, even as it now turns universities into real estate portfolio-management companies with little schools attached.

What fucking chance does criticism have amidst all this?