AFTERWORD

In The University in Ruins (1996),¹ Bill Readings highlights both the fragility and the ongoing resilience of new-class fantasy within the literary academy. On the one hand, Readings’s book is one of several published in the 1990s that traces the decline of literature as a form of cultural capital and explodes the project of new-class education outlined in the previous pages.² On the other hand, in trying to imagine a new rationale for literary scholarship and pedagogy, Readings reinscribes this same project. His analysis of the postmodern university hinges on the eclipse of an older, humanistic model of education rooted in the German bildung tradition and in the British tradition of cultural critique represented by Matthew Arnold. According to this model, the university’s purpose is to inculcate the national culture into the minds of its citizenry. This conception, Readings argues, could not survive the challenges to national sovereignty brought about by the rise of the transnational corporation. Nevertheless, both leftist literary intellectuals within the academy and neoconservative challengers outside of it continue to act as though the purpose of literary pedagogy is to perpetuate or challenge this culture: “Cultural Studies attacks the cultural hegemony of the nation-state, and the question of its politics becomes troubled when global capital engages in the same attack” (102). The university has instead embraced an alternative logic of excellence—a bureaucratic paradigm that reduces all aspects of university education to quantitative performance indicators such as grades, amount of revenue generated, and numerical teaching evaluations. Intellectuals who hope to resist the excellent university cannot return to the nationalist academy of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rather, they must cultivate what Readings calls “Thought.” In the context of the contemporary university, doing so entails “finding ways to keep the criteria of evaluation open, a matter for dispute” (130, italics in original). Thinking, in other words, defers the corporatist rush to reduce education to fixed numbers. It insists that questions about measuring education are more complicated than we have assumed, that they are always occasions for further debate. Privileging thought as the basis for education entails a new task for the university: “the task of rethinking the categories that have governed intellectual life for over two hundred years” (169).

Readings derives this notion of the academy as a site of “Thought” from Jacques Derrida’s writings on the university, especially his 1983 essay “The Principle of Reason.” For Derrida, thinking is synonymous with deconstruction. It is an activity “not reducible to technique, nor to science, nor to philosophy,”³ an activity that precedes the division of intellectual labor into the various disciplines. Derrida unsurprisingly argues that the university should be reorganized to make room for more thinking; indeed, this recommendation forms the core of his report for the French government on the creation of the Collège international de philosophie. For Derrida, thinking is perpetually at risk of “being reappropriated by socio-political forces that could find it in their own interest in certain situations.” Even the most apparently useless knowledge, such as literature and the arts, can be employed for ideological purposes by “multinational military–industrial complexes or techno-economic networks.” Indeed, this risk is constitutive of thought, which at some level always becomes instrumental. Nevertheless, the intellectual’s task is to maintain a perpetual vigilance against such reappropriations; thinking must “unmask—an infinite task—all the ruses of end-orienting research.”⁴ The thinking intellectual’s ultimate goal is to cultivate an alternative economy of intellectual work at odds with the economic imperatives of the corporate university. In Readings’s terms, thinking “belongs rather to an economy of waste than to a restricted economy of calculation. Thought is non-productive labor, and hence does not show up on balance sheets except as waste” (175). For both Readings and Derrida, the intellectual attempts to open fragile spaces where nonproductive thinking can flourish within the excellent university.

On one level, it is difficult to argue with such accounts, which come close to reiterating the cliché that postsecondary education promotes critical thinking. On another level, what is remarkable about Readings and Derrida’s texts is the way they claim to embody a new way of thinking about the university, whereas in fact they are recapitulating many features of the traditional, humanistic model of education that they supposedly transcend. Readings’s claim that thinking invites members of the university community to reflect on their evaluative criteria echoes Arnold’s notion that literary education dissolves the stock notions and habits of the British bourgeoisie. It also echoes Trilling’s cold war version of this argument—that the job of criticism is to reveal the complexity and difficulty obscured by the organizational impulse of the expanding, educated middle class. Readings, in other words, imagines himself and other like-minded intellectuals as a new-class saving remnant at odds with the technocratic tendencies of the institutions they inhabit. Moreover, although both Readings and Derrida emphasize the fact that thinking precedes disciplinarity, they recapitulate the basic conflict between humanistic reason and social scientific rationality that, I have argued, was characteristic of many post–World War II literary intellectuals’ version of new-class fantasy. Hitherto, Derrida argues, most reflection on the university has come from the perspective of “the sociology of knowledge, from sociology or politology.” The problem with these disciplines is that they “never touch upon that which, in themselves, continues to be based on the principle of reason and thus on the essential foundation of the modern university. They never question scientific normativity, beginning with the value of objectivity or of objectification, which governs and authorizes their discourse.”⁵ Both the sciences and the social sciences are too close to the economistic logic of excellence that governs the modern university.

With Readings and Derrida’s deconstructive articulation of new-class fantasy, however, the saving remnant’s imagined social agency becomes more and more tenuous. Readings, for instance, delineates everything that an intellectual vocation based on thinking cannot do. Thinking intellectuals must abandon all of the transcendental justifications for their work that once flourished in the national university. They cannot “make redemptive claims for the role of the University of Culture, be that culture humanistic, scientific, or sociological.” For them, the university no longer has a mission; intellectuals cannot offer “new pious dreams of salvation, a new unifying idea, or a new meaning for the University” (129). At the same time, thinking intellectuals cannot move beyond the tradition within which these transcendental justifications once made sense. Rather, they inhabit the “ruins” of the university, and the work of thinking entails the endless meditation on those ruins. Readings calls for an institutional “pragmatism,” based on “an awareness of the complexity and historically marked status of the spaces in which we are situated” and “a refusal to believe that some new rationale will allow us to reduce that complexity, to forget present complexity in the name of future simplicity” (129). This pragmatism, however, is literally useless; in remaining faithful to thought’s “economy of waste,” it cannot formulate any alternative educational purpose that transcends the logic of the marketplace. Readings, of course, offers some concrete suggestions for reforming the university, many of them admirable. He argues, for instance, that students should write “evaluative essays that can themselves be read and that require further interpretation, instead of ticking boxes and adding up point-scores” (133). The point of such exercises is not to provide another, more circuitous method for quantifying the institution. Rather, it is to involve students and administrators in the endless, “necessary and impossible” (133) task of thinking. Once again, the literary intellectual disseminates an aesthetic awareness of complexity at odds with the instrumental rationality of the institution.

Once the question of resisting the “technocratic” university is put in these terms—as an opposition between instrumental rationality and endless anti-instrumental critique—narrow instrumentalism inevitably wins out. New-class fantasy becomes the perverse double of expert professionalism: the compensatory justification for humanistic work in a society wholly given over to technique. Hence, the counterpart to Readings and Derrida’s work on the university is Mark C. Taylor’s The Moment of Complexity, primarily an application of contemporary systems theory to postmodern culture and aesthetics. In its final chapter, Taylor turns to questions of digital education and offers a critique of Readings and Derrida. Their work, he argues, exemplifies literary intellectuals’ deluded belief that they should remain autonomous of the market forces that shape the corporate university. “Protests to the contrary notwithstanding,” Taylor writes, “the university is not autonomous but is a thoroughly parasitic institution, which continuously depends on the generosity of the host so many academics claim to reject.”⁶ Taylor’s alternative to Derrida and Readings’s purely negativistic thinking is to accommodate literary study to the corporate market. Contemporary network culture, he argues, is beset by an unprecedented level of turbulence that forces institutions to adapt or die: “Those who are too rigid to fit into rapidly changing worlds become obsolete or are driven beyond the edge of chaos to destruction.”⁷ The humanities are no exception to this rule, and Taylor offers a model for turning literary studies into a for-profit business: corporate-sponsored online education. Taylor’s account thus turns Derrida and Readings’ anti-instrumentalism on its head. Deconstruction, Taylor argues, is typical of the politics of literary studies insofar as it articulates an empty critique that is capable only of saying “no” to all manifestations of corporate culture, but without offering constructive alternatives. “Instead of showing how totalizing structures can actually be changed, deconstruction demonstrates that the tendency to totalize can never be overcome and, thus, that repressive structures are inescapable. For Derrida and his followers, all we can do is to join in the Sisyphean struggle to undo what cannot be undone.”⁸ Taylor instead argues that literary critics should embrace instrumental thinking, turning their work into marketable wares. The irony here is that Derrida, Readings, and Taylor offer identical alternatives. Either the intellectual becomes an expert professional who subordinates everything she does to the logic of the marketplace, or she engages in a quixotic, doomed conflict with the corporate university.⁹

A more complicated articulation of this imagined conflict between a triumphant instrumentalism and imperiled anti-instrumentalism can be found in Alan Liu’s The Laws of Cool. Liu’s book is, without question, the most ambitious and compelling study ever attempted of the connections between literary scholarship and contemporary knowledge work. Its premise is that the “vital task for both literature and literary study in the age of advanced creative destruction… is to inquire into the aesthetic value—let us simply call it the literary—once managed by ‘creative’ literature but now busily seeking new management amid the ceaseless creation and recreation of the forms, styles, media, and institutions of postindustrial knowledge work.”¹⁰ The dominant aesthetic of our age is itself the product of the technical intelligentsia—software designers and computer artists. Liu provides a detailed, quasi-anthropological account of this subclass’s culture and identifies the basic principles of its aesthetic: what he calls the “laws of cool.” He thus seems to presage the complete absorption of humanistic intellectuals into the technical intelligentsia; as in the case of Taylor’s scenario, literary intellectuals must adapt to this situation or become obsolete. However, in envisaging what this adaptation might look like, Liu develops a strange synthesis of Taylor and Readings: “Many intellectuals and artists will become so like the icy ‘New Class’ of knowledge workers that there will be no difference; they will be subsumed wholly within their New Economy roles as symbolic analysts, consultants, and designers. But some, in league with everyday hackers in the technical, managerial, professional, and clerical mainstream of knowledge work itself, may break through the ice to launch the future literary.”¹¹ Humanistic intellectuals will infiltrate the technical intelligentsia only to inject it with the anti-instrumental logic of the humanities—the historical consciousness effaced by the perpetual presentism of corporate knowledge work. Liu’s metaphor for this process is the “Kuang” computer virus from William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which “transforms its own substance into that of the database, draws nearer and nearer until there seems to be no difference, and then at last injects the one powerful difference it has treasured at its core.”¹² In spite of the imagined destruction of literary cultural capital, Liu, like Readings and Derrida, still sees literary critics as a saving remnant charged with humanizing the technical segments of the new class.

This politics, which casts intellectuals as caretakers of noninstrumental attitudes under assault by a rationalistic society, is a losing proposition for the humanistic Left. In the United States, it is chiefly a legacy of the post–New Deal era, when the welfare state’s complexity and bureaucratic structure seemed to cut off the possibility of principled intellectual engagement in liberal reform. Today, when the welfare state remains the only bulwark against unchecked corporatism, continuing to attack instrumental rationality as the primary evil of contemporary society is a fruitless endeavor. The task for left-wing intellectuals from all disciplines should instead be to create a new version of social trustee professionalism, one that conceives of new-class expertise as a resource to be used for the benefit of an informed public and one that eschews the simplistic antistatism of the 1960s counterculture and the later New Left. Among literary researchers, this project has already reaped dividends in the work of scholars such as Michael Szalay, Sean McCann, and Bruce Robbins, who have reevaluated the relationship between U.S. literature and welfare-state reformism.¹³ The project also informs the work of scholars who self-reflexively study critics’ relationship to the academy, following the example of John Guillory’s path-breaking Cultural Capital.¹⁴ In C. Wright Mills’s terms, it is harder to sustain fantasies about either the exaggerated power or total impotence of humanistic learning when one pays attention to the specific “sphere of strategy” within which one acts.¹⁵ In particular, one of the most salutary contributions to recent critical discourse has been the work carried out by scholars such as Mark Bousquet who have drawn attention to the politics surrounding the exploitation of part-time and student workers within the university.¹⁶ This scholarship has drawn attention to institutional inequalities that academics of all disciplines can meaningfully address but have generally ignored. It also highlights the broader political coalition within which literary critics and other humanists might find a place: the movement to unionize white-collar workplaces.

These projects raise the question of what it might mean for literary critics and other university-based humanists to think of themselves as social trustees, as professionals who combine specialized expertise with a commitment to public service. One of the problems facing literary critics is that their scholarship fits so poorly with expert professionalism—an ideology that conceives of professional work as a saleable resource. The high theoretical version of new-class fantasy—perpetuated by Derrida, Readings, and others in the 1980s and 1990s—was a reaction against this ideology. This version offered critics the compensatory privilege of viewing their work as an anti-instrumental antidote to the triumph of instrumentalism. Social trustee professionalism, in my view, provides a better rationale for literary pedagogy and scholarship. Among other things, it allows the critic to distinguish between instrumentalism in the service of private-sector profit and instrumentalism in the service of broader social goals. Possibly the best example of a twentieth-century theorist who tried to construct a model of literary scholarship along these lines was Kenneth Burke, who famously conceived of literature as “equipment for living.”¹⁷ Burke coined this phrase in the 1930s in a series of essays in which he constructed a sociology of literature, one that would disregard traditional distinctions between humanistic and social scientific inquiry. Engaging with and attempting to complicate the emerging New Critical consensus, Burke conceived of literary works as ritualistic strategies for naming and readying oneself for situations that recur in human societies. The aim of literary criticism is to codify these strategies, to draw connections between “strategies for selecting enemies and allies, for socializing losses, for warding off evil eye, for purification, propitiation, and desanctification, consolation and vengeance, admonition and exhortation, implicit commands or instructions of one sort or another” as they exist within literary and other texts.¹⁸ Literature is above all else a warehouse of both useful and debilitating cultural attitudes that the critic organizes, evaluates, and applies to new situations. This conception of criticism guided the preceding pages, which tried to evaluate and compare the strategies that post–World War II writers and sociologists developed in response to the expanding new class.

The task of reconstructing social trustee professionalism seems especially necessary now, when the federal government, under the administration of former Harvard law professor Barack Obama, is tentatively reenlivening practices of expert governance and smart diplomacy to deal with the complex problems that face the United States and the world during a major recession and impending environmental crisis. After the disastrous right-wing populism of George W. Bush, the neoconservative critique of liberal elitism seems less persuasive than at any time since the Great Society. It remains to be seen whether the United States will produce a corresponding literary and intellectual culture eager to push the government toward more comprehensive economic and institutional reforms, such as existed during the Progressive and New Deal eras.