The Problem Is Bad Interdisciplinarity

Dave Plunkert for The Chronicle

When I read the responses by Sarah E. Chinn and Mark Garrett Cooper and John Marx to my recent Chronicle Review essay, I was reminded of a remark the poet Li-Young Lee made after a reading at my department several years ago. Lee described close reading as a device for defeating the human tendency to project imaginary ideas onto writing. To their credit, Chinn, Cooper, and Marx seem to grasp that I like close reading, though they seem somewhat puzzled as to why. Their responses — which target imaginary ideas they’ve projected onto my article — provide evidence for the value of close reading.

Chinn claims that in analyzing English’s travails, I dismiss such factors as the increasing emphasis on vocational training. She says that I describe interdisciplinary work as “the real enemy.” In fact, I say the opposite. I argue that structural factors play “a larger role” in the discipline’s troubles than the kind of bad work I describe. Marx and Cooper have in mind a different set of structural issues, but they perform the same projection.

The responders’ second projection — that I am critical of interdisciplinary work and collaboration — is perhaps easier to excuse, because my expression of the opposite view is confined to the last paragraph of my essay. Nevertheless, that last paragraph exists. In it I say that, after having used close reading to determine a literary work’s ideas, we should ascertain their meaning and value by “comparing them with the findings of other fields on shared topics.”

My object of study, literature, doesn’t respect disciplinary boundaries. An understanding of other fields is crucial to many of the things one might want to do with literature. Every piece of academic literary criticism I have ever published has been interdisciplinary. I have collaborated and participated in exchanges with neuroscientists, philosophers, economists, historians of science, and others. What compelled Chinn, Cooper, and Marx to imagine I’m hostile to interdisciplinary work?

I think the answer is that a distinction basic to my argument — the difference between good interdisciplinary work and bad — isn’t as widely recognized in literary studies as it should be. It is as if some members of the profession believe that, once one steps outside of one’s discipline, one also abandons the standards by which one’s work might be judged. Some English professors appear to feel about interdisciplinary work the way I feel about chocolate. I am among those who are skeptical that the category of bad chocolate exists. When I offer someone a bite of my Hershey’s bar, and they say they don’t like bad chocolate, I suspect they don’t really like chocolate at all.

All kinds of chocolate are good to me. But I think there are good and bad ways to do interdisciplinary work. Some years ago, I set out to write about how literature represents addiction. First, I did a close reading of such works as De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Then I researched how scientists describe addiction. I compared the literary depictions with scientific descriptions. I thought the writers saw something the scientists missed. To test my intuition, I collaborated with two cognitive scientists on a brief piece that we published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Other scientists responded to our piece, agreeing with parts of it, and disagreeing with others. I assimilated this response, and published a chapter on literature and addiction in my book, Writing Against Time.

I think this is a good way to do interdisciplinary work. It respects the things that English professors do well — like close reading — and the things that scientists do well — like investigating the ways addiction corrupts the brain’s reward system. I don’t imagine that literature has nothing to learn from science, nor do I imagine that science has nothing to learn from literature.

When I was researching what literature professors have written about addiction, I found a number of examples of what I think of as bad interdisciplinary work. One comes from Marc Redfield, one of the literary-studies luminaries who signed the letter describing Avital Ronell’s accuser as waging a “malicious campaign.” His edited volume High Anxieties: Cultural Studies in Addiction (University of California Press, 2002) notices that the way (Karl) Marx described “commodity fetishism” resembles the way some writers describe addiction. Redfield suggests that addiction is a form of commodity fetishism.

Redfield’s book is interdisciplinary in the sense that he is a literature professor making claims about things he appears to know little or nothing about. Even cursory research into addiction swiftly shows that there’s much more to the problem than Redfield’s facile homology can explain. There is certainly much to be said about the relation between economic dynamics and drugs — I’ve learned a great deal, for example, from my colleague Lee Hoffer’s studies of drug markets. But I didn’t learn anything from Redfield’s work on the subject. The weak grasp of economics or psychology demonstrated by literary studies of addiction by critics like Redfield and Ronell isn’t matched by a strong grasp of literature. Much of what I believe to be the most interesting and distinctive features of literary writing on addiction remains invisible in this work. The literature is obscured by the projection onto it of vague ideas about other fields.

My responders might argue either that work like Redfield’s writing on addiction actually isn’t bad, or that most of the current interdisciplinary work has left such models in the dust. I’d be interested to hear them make either of those arguments. There’s some powerful interdisciplinary work being done by literature professors. But the malign practices of the Sokal/Ronell era remain strong.

I want to end by briefly addressing Chinn’s third complaint about my article. Unlike the first two claims she targets, this is an argument I do make. Chinn is appalled that I could place Ronell’s behavior in the context of the bad interdisciplinary work in literary studies — and the puerile, auto-parodic “star system” that accompanies it. Chinn thinks that pointing to that context “trivializes” Ronell’s abuse. She incredulously asks whether I’d think of drawing a similar connection between Bill Cosby’s abuses and the world of stand-up comedy. Actually, I might. I’m not an expert on the world of comedy. But I’ve read enough to think that maybe the kinds of gender relations that characterized that world — and the kind of veneration in which its stars were held — might have something to do with why Cosby’s accusers were ignored for so long.

Bad interdisciplinary work doesn’t take place in a vacuum. It exists in an institutional context characterized by a theatrical disregard of norms and boundaries, and the elevation of the star theorist as the sole standard. As I wrote in my original article, I don’t think this context caused Ronell’s abuse. Harassers can be found in every institution. But I do think the bizarro world of literary studies aided and abetted that harassment. The nature of this world goes a long way toward explaining the attacks on Ronell’s accuser launched by that world’s stars. Similarly, I don’t think bad interdisciplinary work is primarily responsible for English’s funding and enrollment woes. But it contributes to those woes. English professors should stop doing it.