We humanists love to rail against the corporatization of higher ed. When faced with assaults on the humanities in particular, my instinct is to point to broad, malevolent, global trends — heroically resisted by beleaguered, shivering, victimized English professors like me. And this isn’t entirely wrong. The neoliberal assaults are real — the discipline is beleaguered — the walls erected to shelter the study of art have been breached by adjunctification, metrification, hypocritical accusations of “elitism.” But this is only half the story. The crumbling of disciplinary boundaries wasn’t simply visited on literature departments from above. The rot began within. Progressive humanists like myself have largely ignored this history, for fear of giving more ammo to the corporatizing goons. But unless we get honest about our past, our impassioned defense of our disciplines will conceal a hollow core. If our case rests on the suppression of the evidence against us, it will shatter with each new blow.
The latest threat to humanities disciplines lies in the uncritical enthusiasm for putatively “interdisciplinary” work that has swept academia — what the historian Harvey Graff has analyzed as “faux interdisciplinarity.” Many of the recent attacks on the mania for interdisciplinary work — including my own writing on the undermining of general education — have described it as part of the neoliberal assault on the liberal arts. In his new book, Paper Minds (University of Chicago Press, 2018), the literary critic Jonathan Kramnick mounts a cogent critique of “anti-disciplinary thinking,” which, he says, gets assimilated in the contemporary corporate university to a “managerial” ethos that regards disciplinary “silos” as antithetical to the aims of problem-solving, work-force development, the free circulation of knowledge, “cluster hiring,” and the rest of the jargon in which our bureaucrats like to cloak their contempt for liberal education.
Literary study was a bizarro world, in which every aspect of human culture and thought could be confidently explained.
But there’s another side to the story. The sorry history of literature departments’ partial responsibility for their own marginalization can be told in two celebrated scandals. The first is the Sokal affair — the 1996 publication in Social Text of a hoax article by a physicist arguing, among other things, that gravity is a social construction. Social Text is an interdisciplinary journal, but the prize dupes in the affair — Andrew Ross and Bruce Robbins — are literature professors, and the kind of interdisciplinary work the journal specializes in — and which the affair exposed to the incredulity of the world — was the nearly exclusive practice of scholars housed in literature departments.
The second scandal — the Ronell affair — broke in 2018. Avital Ronell, a professor in New York University’s German department, was accused of sexual harassment by a former graduate student. Judith Butler co-wrote a letter dismissing the accusations, which was then signed by various luminaries who later said they were unaware of the substance of the case against Ronell. Numerous emails addressed by Ronell to the graduate student became public. Their contents, which demonstrated an extraordinary campaign of harassment by Ronell, again focused the world’s incredulity on humanities practices.
These scandals are quite different. The Sokal affair concerned an epistemological breakdown; the Ronell affair concerned an ethical collapse. But Social Text and the Butler letter are both products of the anti-disciplinary thinking that infected American literature departments in the 80s and 90s. The logic of that thinking goes a long way toward explaining both disasters.
Kramnick has brilliantly dissected the “scientific reductionism” by which recent “literary Darwinists” (who purport to interpret literary works in light of evolutionary theory) have attempted to replace the core methods of humanities disciplines with imported scientific models. But this tendency is in many ways a reaction to the humanistic reductionism that preceded it — whereby literature scholars largely ignored the knowledge and methods of social and natural scientific disciplines in an ill-fated attempt to colonize them. In the 80s, avant garde scholars came to see the existing discipline of literary studies — rooted in the practices of close reading developed by I.A. Richards, William Empson, and the New Critics in the first half of the 20th century — as an antiquated silo, preventing critics from engaging the most urgent questions of their time. We understand language, literature professors told themselves, we understand representation — we can go beyond literature! Language and representation became the wrecking balls which tore down the discipline’s confining boundaries, and made all language, all representation — which is to say, all human life, knowledge, and thought — the proper domain of the liberated critic.
The Sokal affair brought extradisciplinary scrutiny of this generation of critics. It wasn’t difficult to show how the literature professors’ ignorance of disciplines like biology, economics, physics, linguistics, or history produced work that any student of these disciplines would be ashamed of. So the brief heyday of humanities-based reductionism came to an ignominious close. The aftermath of the Sokal affair left the world with the caricature of the literature professor as the exponent of the kind of economic, biological, and historical knowledge derided by economists, biologists, and historians. And while the decline of English majors doesn’t track the spread of faux-interdisciplinarity in English departments in the late 80s and early to mid-90s, it does align fairly well with the gradual exposure of that project’s bankruptcy. While other factors undoubtably played a larger role in this decline — such as the post-recession focus on vocational training and the creeping corporatization of higher-ed administration — there’s good reason to think the cratering of the field’s intellectual prestige contributed. The failure of humanistic reductionism invited the scientific and managerial reductionisms that swiftly followed.
But while the intellectual prestige of the exploded discipline headed for its nadir after Sokal, another, intact disciplinary logic ensured that scholars like Ross and Robbins continued to enjoy successful careers within their field. Humanities reductionism may have been banished from the university at large, but it thrived within the tenure-protected confines of the literature department. The literature program — especially at the most prestigious universities — became a kind of twilight zone. No longer a discipline, it was an entire bizarro world, in which every aspect of human culture and thought could be confidently explained with the theoretical tools wielded by star professors. But when the students left the seminar room, the faculty office, the literary journal, that world ended, those stars winked out.
I vividly remember my own rude awakening. Each year Johns Hopkins held a competition in which graduate students would submit ideas for a course. The courses would be evaluated by a board of professors from different fields, and the winner would get to teach it. I walked into the interview with my syllabus for a course that purported to explain urban decay, novels, the nature of free-market economics, and the political history of the 1970s in one brilliant synthesis. My interviewers — professors in political science and history — greeted my ideas with withering skepticism. I cited illustrious figures in my field. To my horror, my interlocutors were unimpressed. They actually asked difficult questions about the reasoning behind the stars’ dicta. All I could do was repeat the hallowed formulas about representation and language with decreasing confidence as I realized the heroes of literature-department economic, political, and historical thought had no currency here. Later one of my English professors advised me to forget the incident. “They don’t understand our discipline,” he said.
The vampiric Avital Ronell flourished in this disciplinary twilight zone. A widely read essay by the former chair of the German department who hired her shows her eviscerating the discipline’s norms, skills, and even objects of study. Supported by the dean as a rising star of interdisciplinary theory, Ronell became chair. As a student said of the world she created, “We study in a German department where French theory is taught in English.” Books like her own Crack Wars (University of Nebraska Press, 1992) — in which the obscurity of the prose occasionally parts to reveal an astonishing ignorance of the most basic facts about addiction — were presented as the new models. The eradication of disciplinary limits opened the way to unlimited tyranny. Kramnick defines a discipline as “a body of skills, methods, and norms able to sustain internal discussions and do explanatory work.” But in Ronell’s department, the star theorist’s words became the sole standard. Students were expected to cite Ronell or her master Derrida in every essay. And as the famous emails starkly reveal, the boundary separating the life of the student from the total domination of the totally liberated professor dissolved.
Literary studies has yet to truly confront the practices exposed by Sokal.
Many have interpreted the Butler letter denouncing Ronell’s accuser’s “malicious campaign” as an example of how an elite closes ranks to ward off threats to its power. It is certainly true that the case presents features that can be found in academic cultures of harassment that long predate the Sokal/Ronell era. And the #MeToo movement has starkly exposed the ubiquity of sexual harassment and abuse across all institutions and social spaces. But, in the specific ways it enables and denies such abuse, each institution presents special features. And I think the Butler letter expresses features peculiar to the Sokal/Ronell era in literary studies.
Disciplinary norms, skills, and objects represent for many humanists trained in this era the face of the oppressor. The influence of Foucault — whose most famous book conjoins the words “discipline” and “punish” — shaped an emphasis on systems of oppression, on how power weaves its way into disciplinary structures. Figures like Ronell serve as avatars of anti-disciplinary energies. While few of the signatories of Butler’s letter have written a book as extreme as Crack Wars, their reflexive identification with Ronell as a laudable source of resistance to power adheres to a broader, anti-disciplinary logic. Everything she represents — from her expertise-ignoring books to her administrative disregard of rules and boundaries — is an assault on the very idea of a discipline. How can someone opposed to every form of discipline be guilty of oppression? Anti-disciplinary thinking helped to create the conditions for Ronell’s abuses, and, once those abuses were exposed, it provided the vocabulary for defending and denying them.
We have seen enough to know that the eradication of disciplinary norms doesn’t create powerful new forms of knowledge by destroying old forms of oppression. Literary studies’ anti-disciplinary thought led to an empty, despised professional discourse while covering an entirely unprofessional intellectual and personal tyranny over a dwindling body of students.
Ronell’s NYU department represents an extreme case. Even in elite departments, anti-disciplinary thinking rarely gained complete ascendency. My own early-2000s English department at Johns Hopkins sustained a number of critics highly skeptical of the boundary-devouring energies represented by figures like Ronell. The influence of such faux-interdisciplinary “stars” on the wider intellectual culture of the university largely evaporated in the wake of the Sokal affair. Yet because the anti-disciplinary revolutionaries were careful to leave tenure and the traditional circuits of academic cronyism untouched, they continue to wield power and influence within the field. Because of this, literary studies has yet to truly confront the practices exposed by Sokal. Senior figures in the field routinely respond with denial or defensiveness when the topic is raised.
But this denial invites a return of the repressed. Since we’ve never processed the affair, the scandal remains present tense, proliferating in strange new forms, some of which confuse rather than clarify the core issues. For example, a recent series of hoaxes targeting “grievance studies,” dubbed “Sokal squared,” purports to carry on Sokal’s critique. It’s true that some of the defenses of the hoaxed journals — for instance, that the sample size of accepted hoax articles was too small for a meaningful critique — recall Sokal denialism. The sample size is small, but the fact that it can be pretty hard to distinguish hoax articles from non-hoax articles (like this one, on “The Perilous Whiteness of Pumpkins”) can’t be a good thing. Yet these new hoaxes are framed in such a way as to distract us from reckoning with the legacies of the Sokal/Ronell era. The hoaxers seek to show that certain political commitments correlate with poor intellectual practices. But their hoaxes show nothing of the kind. There are plenty of studies advancing feminist or anti-racist ideas that are grounded in solid disciplinary practice — in my own field, such work is routinely featured in journals like ELH, Representations, and Critical Inquiry. I’ve also read plenty of bad interdisciplinary work that doesn’t express any political commitment.
The new hoaxers seem to have bought the big lie of the Sokal/Ronell era: that scholars have abandoned solid disciplinary practices for political reasons. When pressed, the luminaries of the Sokal/Ronell era go to a political defense. We serve the cause of feminism and anti-racism! Any attack on our practices is an attack on our political ideals! Ronell’s defenders, for example, were quick to point to her status as a “feminist” scholar — though her colleagues described the absence of anything resembling feminist commitments in her publications. Similarly, the “grievance studies” hoaxes confusingly equate strong politics and weak interdisciplinary work. The hoaxers are chasing a phantom, and in the process reinforcing a malign and false equation between commitment to disciplines and hostility to justice. The implication many take from the “grievance” hoax is that our politics have led us away from scholarly neutrality, and we need to discipline our ideals. But the Sokal affair should teach us the opposite lesson: The viability of scholars’ ideals depends on the intellectual integrity of our work.
To turn the page on the era of Sokal and Ronell, we need to return to basics. Literary studies should be a discipline, not a bizarro world of universal knowledge. Our object of study is literature; our method is close reading. Responsible interdisciplinary work doesn’t begin by ignoring disciplinary boundaries, but by respecting them. As scholars like Frances Ferguson have argued, close reading is distinguished by a peculiar fusion of explanation and aesthetic judgment that sets us apart from the knowledge production of other fields. But the careful excavation of the complex formal objects that compose our material yields insights, the special quality of which can be ascertained by comparing them with the findings of other fields on shared topics. By making the case for the integrity of disciplinary boundaries, a new generation of scholars is doing the ethical and political work of bringing literary studies out of the twilight zone.
Michael Clune is professor of English at Case Western Reserve University.
