The State of Criticism, Part One (Part Two)

We're doing this again, so it would seem

I had every intention of turning my jaundiced eye towards the resurgence of the little magazine for the next installment of this series, but the target turned out to be too amorphous and broad for me to get a handle on it. Increasingly I felt like I needed the intellectual equivalent of a shotgun but all I had at my disposal was a Red Ryder. Unwilling to risk shooting my eye out—for the time being, at least—I instead go back to the well: academic criticism.

Somewhat against my will I find myself thinking of Romanticism, that cultural ferment that emerged in France and Great Britain as a response to the failure of the French Revolution. Being an aesthetic response, a range of political valences adhered to it: for instance, reactionaries like Edmund Burke or the later work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but also radicals such as Percy Bysshe Shelley. One could argue that the early Marx and all that bad poetry was Romantic. And I say “emerges” because Romanticism is not merely bounded by the late 18th and early 19th century. While there is a historical formation we can identify as Romanticism, there is also something durable, if not entirely transcendental, about Romantic attitudes that causes them to emerge in surprising places. Not for nothing did Vivian Gornick call her 1977 book profiling members of the CPUSA The Romance of American Communism. Wherever a cultural inflection point leads to feelings of magnificent sublimity, Romanticism is not far away.

But Romanticism has a darker cast. Even a radical such as Shelley was more interested in articulating a position of liberty for himself and his circle than society at large. Thus the stultifying limitations of the Romantic imagination: relentlessly, almost idiosyncratically individualist because of its insistence on inner experience, it fails to scale up to mass political action. If a Romantic thinker articulates a form of mass politics, it stands to reason that they’re not drawing from Romanticism, but some other tradition. Libertarianism is perhaps the most Romantic political ideology in the US today; the notion that an anarcho-capitalist utopia could emerge simply by engaging in a non-aggression pact with your fellow human beings is the sine qua non of Romantic feeling.

I take up the question of Romanticism and freedom in part because I think it possesses remarkable explanatory power for our current moment, which feels neither Romantic nor freeing. (Bear with me—this does relate to criticism and higher ed.) Fredric Jameson, in his chapter on Herbert Marcuse and Friedrich Schiller in Marxism and Form, observes that “freedom…is perhaps itself best understood as an interpretive device rather than a philosophical essence or idea.” Freedom does not describe a state of being, but rather a response to a state of repression; it emerges from

a sudden perception of an intolerable present which as at the same time, but implicitly and however dimly articulated, the glimpse of another state in the name of which the first is judged. Thus the idea of freedom involves a kind of perceptual superposition; it is a way of reading the present, but it is a reading that looks more like the reconstruction of an extinct language.

These circumlocutions are Jameson’s way of working through Schiller’s thought, which he sees as pivotal for much of twentieth century criticism, especially when its practitioners ignore or refute what they owe Schiller. Later, taking up Marcuse, Jameson claims that the “paradoxical context in which [he] prepares to rethink Freud and Marx” is “[a]bundance and total control,” here meant to describe the condition of post-World War Two modernity. The connection might be hard to grasp, even if easy to describe: never before has such material abundance been on offer for humanity; never before have we been so surveilled, manipulated, and controlled. This cultural formation naturally lends itself to a kind of subterranean Romanticism.

Some are quick to fault Jameson for this totalizing criticism, as though that were not the bailiwick of the Western Marxists among whom he stands as their finest living and perhaps last great interpreter. But nevermind the naysayers; I find this willingness to think big refreshing at a time when the stakes feel small only because we treat them so. What this approach risks in imprecision it makes up for in its sheer scope and sweep. We live in historically significant times, but we shortchange ourselves by not taking the risk to go for the big, messy claims thereby demanded.

And so I come back to academic criticism, about which I’ll make this big, messy claim: academic critics are, almost to a person, Romantics. Perhaps this was not always so, but the soup they swim in is deeply Romantic, tied to notions of individual achievement and meritocracy that can only be understood hermeneutically (in the sense that Jameson intends; that is, as “a political discipline”). This is not manifest, however. We have to interpret the response of academics to the gutting of higher ed in order to see their basic Romanticism.

Lorna Finlayson, Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Essex, writing recently in NLR’s excellent Sidecar blog, describes the situation from her perspective in the UK:

With departments closing all around us, and for reasons that often have nothing to do with their ‘performance’ or with anything their members have or haven’t done, the idea that we might save ourselves by keeping our heads down is, at best, a hope that they’ll come for someone else first. In reality, even this is so uncertain a strategy as to border on magical thinking.

This magical thinking, which Finlayson correctly identifies as emerging from the individualistic nature of academics (“the collective is not their concern”), puts paid to the notion of academia being radical. Although she doesn’t use this framing, she here describes a Romantic orientation. A truly left politics cannot be individualistic, and academics, caught between the Scylla of professional formation and the Charybdis of ostensible radicalism, find themselves mewling for some kind of sensible negotiation with administration. Finlayson again:

Yet if resistance is often futile and sometimes counterproductive, that still leaves a question ordinarily beloved by political ‘sensibles’: what is the alternative? The answer of many academics, implicit or explicit, seems to be as follows: we cultivate good relations with management so that they see us as reasonable and trustworthy; we will then be in a better position to press our claims through reason and argument. What this approach presupposes is a basic commonality, or at least compatibility, of interests and objectives between the parties involved.

Finlayson goes on to analogize the relationship between academics and administration to the relationship between labor and capital; not a perfect comparison, she admits, but one that offers a lens upon the current situation: “Control is to the manager as profit is to the capitalist,” she writes, taking us right back to Jameson’s “abundance and total control.” That abundance is a little harder to see these days, but of course the material rewards of being employed by a university are unevenly distributed; to wit, the biggest demonstrators during the 2018 pension strikes in the UK were “[g]raduate students and casualised academics, who can only dream of having retirement incomes to defend”; meanwhile, union turnout failed in many places to reach the required 50%. So much for radical solidarity.

This is not to ignore the quite impressive efforts made by academic unions in the US in the last decade or so, but even then you’ll find their most radical ranks made up of precarious lecturers, support staff, and (always—mark it!) librarians. The cosseted tenureds, for the most part, prevaricate despite the obvious fact that their jobs are not much longer for this world, as though West Virginia University didn’t exist and some manner of realism could save them. But it isn’t realism, not really; it’s Romanticism, tied to a notion of vocation and individualistic achievement that serves as a veritable brake on the effort to create solidarity across job class, across the student/faculty divide, across campuses.

No, these types act as though the material abundance of their security can buck the obvious trends and instead ensure their junior participation in the total control enjoyed by the administration. But this is merely a simulacra of the condition of mass employment in the post-COVID age, although its roots are much deeper. This is why unions in the US, despite continuing to shrink, make ever more radical claims during negotiations. They know we’re not going to get another bite of the apple, that we’re at the last exit before barbarism. By comparison, tenured academics simply aren’t interested in that sort of thing. Their head-burying could not but have an effect on their intellectual output. It stands to reason why their criticism largely sucks.

Partly for this reason there has been an explosion in little magazines in the last couple decades. (A gesture towards my original idea for the second part of this series seems in order here.) Basically, a whole bunch of very smart critics, finding themselves lacking the security that could get them in Critical Inquiry, or just bored with the state of academic criticism, reasonably decided to start their own outlets. Who can blame them? That the pieces issuing forth from those journals are often intellectually stultifying is not a function of the academic Romanticism I have attempted to limn here; that reason is different, albeit related. Perhaps in time I will find that shotgun and take aim at that target.