Professional Convention
I have some more comments I want to make and others I want to quote. Comment boards on blogs are not always the best place to do research on attitudes, naturally, because the people commenting can be anybody and everybody – people who’ve misplaced their meds, people who haven’t been prescribed any meds yet, people who are just that little bit too interested in aluminum foil. So keep that in mind. But the comments at Invisible Adjunct do seem to represent some real attitudes in that sector of the academy that’s under discussion. So let’s dissect one or two of them on that assumption – the attitudes are worth a look even if these particular exponents of them are bogus.
For instance this from comment 25:
I repeat: the MLA is a professional convention. Its audience is _not_ the general public. We don’t ask particle physicists to defend big words and opaque paper titles. Why literary and language scholars? Because while we recognize the expertise inherent in a field like particle physics we _all_ feel we have some intuitive claim on language and literature? Because language and literature are about our opinions and emotions? Not. Get thee to Literary Research Methods 101.
Particle physicists – there it is. I love it when literary theorists compare themselves to physicists, particle or otherwise. It’s so funny, for one thing, and such a giveaway, for another. One feels an overwhelming urge to start exclaiming like a Valley girl, ‘You wish! In your dreams; as if; yeah, right; etc.’ Apparently the assumption is that if a discipline is to be found at universities, it therefore follows that they are all of exactly comparable difficulty and rigor. But it doesn’t follow, does it. No.
And then – and here we move from funny and pathetic to rather disgusting – there is the business about ‘professional’ and the repudiation of the general public, and then the brisk removal of literature from the public domain. And yet literary theory on the whole considers itself a left-wing, liberatory, progressive enterprise – doesn’t it? Am I wrong about that? I don’t think so. But one of the first defensive moves in the face of criticism is to proclaim how professional and expert the whole subject is, and none of the public’s damn business. But that’s nonsense. Certainly there is much to learn about theory and criticism, but that does not alter the fact that literature in fact is a public subject in a way that physics (obviously) is not. People don’t generally do amateur physics for fun and pleasure, but people do read novels and poetry and essays and plays for those reasons. All the time! This is a common practice! Why, non-experts are even permitted to read Shakespeare and Wordsworth if they feel like it – and they get a lot out of it, too, without ever asking permission of literary theorists. That’s simply a fact. So, yes, that is one reason the MLA gets more attention than other conventions do – and a good thing too. Universities aren’t some sort of sacred mystery, after all. Academics are not medieval priests, their subject matter is not the Ark of the Covenant. So this indignant relish for the professionalization of the academic study of literature is deeply repellent.
Any physicist would agree that literary phenomena are much more complex than what they study. Physicists have made remarkable progress due to the tractability of their subject matter; literary theorists have not, again due to the intractability of theirs.
But it is wrong to infer from this that all inquiry into literary phenomena should automatically be easily understood by the general public. In fact, one would expect the failures in literary theory to be enormously complex and difficult. If you want to read book-chat, you have no shortage of outlets for it, so I really don’t understand why you have a rational expectation that people in the discipline should write to the level of a Guardian book review, or that the fact that they do not suggests some type of anti-democratic impulse.
Dang, you sure read carelessly for an expert. But maybe it’s deliberate, maybe you’re performing the fallibility of reading.
I didn’t in the least say that all inquiry into literary phenomena should automatically be easily understood by the general public. On the contrary – I said ‘Certainly there is much to learn about theory and criticism,’ and I meant it. My point was (as I said) that it’s also true that non-academics can and do read literature, so yes that is why we are more interested in the MLA than in physics conferences.
I didn’t say that people in the discipline should write to the level of a Guardian book review, either, nor that the fact that they do not suggests some type of anti-democratic impulse. I was (as I said) talking about the comment I quoted from, and its indignant relish for the professionalization of the academic study of literature.
I do hope you can see that those are two different things. If not, I will begin to doubt your ability to read with care and attention.
Who wrote the paragraph that begins “Particle physicists…”?
Literature is a public subject. The analysis of literature is not. Recreational reading is analogous to the immense physical computations required to catch a baseball; in neither case do we understand what we’re doing. Our intuitions about the former have emotional resonances, however, which I think begins to explain the indignation that people feel about what literature professors do. It violates their personal experience, just as an artist often feels violated by criticism of his work.
Right. That’s pretty much what I meant.
Well said, too.
I do not, as you seem to, accept that this sense of violation is a valid ground for criticism of the professional discourse of the humanities, however.
Ah well – that’s where we differ then. I think anything, including a hangnail, is a valid ground for criticism of the professional discourse of the humanities.
Whattayamean people don’t do amateur physics for fun and pleasure? I recall many a pleasant hour spent with hydraulic presses, trebuchets, compressed air, and objects dropped from high places…
And if the hangnail wasn’t caused by presssional humanities discoursers, then it seems to me you shouldn’t blame them for it, but otherwise…have at it.
Oh, and about that Meera Nanda story…”Sacred Cows Make The Best Hamburger.”
Oh dear, caught out again. I did think of that kind of thing before making the physics comparison, but was unsure about it. Very well, I take it back. And it’s well known that amateur astronomy is highly popular, and also useful.
The fact is, the whole damn professional-amateur distinction is fraught with difficulties here.
Ah yes, I meant to say that every physicist I know would certainly disagree with that bit about literature being more complex. Would laugh a good deal while doing it, too.
And so with the bit about physicists always trying to write clearly. That’s definitely my understanding.
And, again – that is the inescapable impression all these comparisons with physicists give (I found yet another such comparison today): that literary PhDs envy physics’ reputation for difficulty. In fact, it’s so transparent that someone really ought to persuade them to stop making the comparison – it does make them look so silly.
Yes, half-parody is very suave, not to mention footnotes in a comment! That’s a first for us; very impressive indeed. Irony quotes flawless.
Avoidable people are so much nicer, aren’t we?
I’d expect a physicist to know what “complex” means. This is so inarguably trivial that it’s demeaning to even point it out, but what’s more complex: the interactions of sub-atomic particles or the neurological processes behind the creation of a cultural artifact?
I did not say that the practice of physics was more or less complex than the practice of literary theory; I said that the phenomena literary theorists study are more complex.
Oh, dear. By this comment am I meant to understand that the level of detail in which ‘literary phenomena’ are studied extends even to the individual synaptic discharges of the reader?
If the cargo-cult strategy fails, well, we’ll just say that what we study is a SUPERSET of what the physicists study. Standard Move B!
Never mind that things like subatomic particles are things one can actually measure precisely with numbers, that ‘cultural artifacts’ are, well, *not exactly amenable to quantitative measurement*, and that the connection between measurable neurological processes and an appreciation of Pynchon’s “For de Mille, young fur-henchmen can’t be rowing!” pun or qualia in general is nothing that presents testable statements.
In short, statement about physics can be demonstrated to be wrong by reality in a way that a statement about ‘literary phenomenon’ and ‘cultural artifacts’ can’t be.[0] [1]
And actually, what you said was “Any physicist would agree that literary phenomena are much more complex than what they study.” Well, even if it “is so inarguably trivial that it’s demeaning to even point it out” here’s one that doesn’t agree. It’s an ill posed comparison.
[0] Notwithstanding that one’s trying pretty hard here…
[1] Not that there’s anything wrong with that. One makes one’s insights and one moves forward. Physical reality provides a wonderfully complex but static set of rules — reflected in reality — that physicists study; culture/literature/society is a moving target, a different category, not inherently constrained… unless we want to contend that it’s merely a product of deterministic neurological processes, which is tremendously reductive and rather 18th century, wouldn’t you say?
For my two cents I’d say that while physics is bloody complicated at a high level, mathematical abstractions and all, other sciences, notably the biological, can actually be explained to the novice fairly easily if you and they have the patience. To compare literary theory, post-structuralist anthropology or whatever to physics to defend obscure language and obfuscatory games is pathetic.
Chun, re:
“Literature is a public subject. The analysis of literature is not. Recreational reading is analogous to the immense physical computations required to catch a baseball; in neither case do we understand what we’re doing.”
I refer you to a recent paper in Nature by McLeod et al for a fairly easily understood study on the subject of catching balls:
“Psychophysics: How fielders arrive in time to catch the ball
Tracking an object moving in three dimensions, whether as an insect pursuing a mate on the wing or as a batsman aiming to hit an approaching ball, provides the spatial and temporal information needed to intercept it. Here we show how fielders use such tracking signals to arrive at the right place in time to catch a ball — they run so that their angle of gaze elevation to the ball increases at a decreasing rate while their horizontal gaze angle to the ball increases at a constant rate (unless the distance to be run is small). Allowing the horizontal angle to increase minimizes the acceleration that the fielder must achieve to reach the interception point at the same time as the ball.”
For my money, though, biology – especially in the biochemical subspecialty – is amazingly complicated. The diagrams molecular biologists deal with in sketching metabolic pathways are jawdroppingly daunting – the Krebs cycle is as a pea to a watermelon. A propos evolutionary and behavioral stuff, yes, I can see the point.
Most everything when it tries to get down to quantitatively predictable detail gets extremely complex – while qualitative descriptions of what’s ‘really going on’ are often a good deal more accessible. Roughly speaking, I would say that real complexity comes from requiring quantitative results.
Penetrating insight often — even predominantly! — lies in the qualitative regime, though, and there’s no dishonor in working in a field where all one can do is to speak qualitatively. So why it is that literary theory wants the trappings of physics is bemusing…