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MODERN ENGLISH AND THE
IDEA OF LANGUAGE: A
POTENTIAL POSTMODERN
PRACTICE

By

Bernard E. Alford

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1995

ABSTRACT
MODERN ENGLISH AND THE IDEA OF
LANGUAGE: A POTENTIAL
POSTMODERN PRACTICE
By

Bernard E. Alford

Postmodernism presents a challenge to English Studies both in practice and
theory. In practice, the postmodern rejection of modernist institutions and formations,
a rejection brought on by changing material conditions, exploits the vulnerability of
English studies. Theoretically, postmodernism threatens the underdeveloped critique
of language that currently serves as a disciplinary foundation. Through the
revitalization of pragmatism, the adoption of new models and metaphors from
emerging sciences of complex and chaotic order, and a biologically driven critique of
language, English studies can be reformulated as a postmodern and post-intellectual
cultural site. This dissertation reconstructs a pragmatics based on the work of
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to address the issues of language theory that

inhibit the construction of a postmodern practice of English.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to begin by thanking my Dissertation Director, A. C. Goodson, for
both his insight and his support, both of which were critical to the formation and
completion of this project. I would also like to thank my other Guidance Committee
members, Diane Brunner, R. K. Meiners, and Marcellette Williams for their support
and inspiration in this project.

I owe a debt of gratitude to a group of friends and colleagues who read and
responded to this more times than they probably care to remember: Ron Primeau, Jim
VanderMey, Mike Jankoviak, Chuck Bowden, and Dan Frazier.

Finally, I would like to thank my family, Pat, Casey, and Megan, for keeping

me focused and reasonably sane.

iii

II.

III.

IV.

VI.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter One - Versions of Postmodernism
Introduction
The Characteristics of Postmodernism
Antifunctionalism
Pluralism
Pragmatism
The Condition of Postmodernism

Chapter Two - English Departments and Their Critics

Chapter Three - Language and the Social
Coleridge and the Romantic Critique
New Models
Pomo in the Classroom
Machine Language

Chapter Four - Multiple Objectivities:
Autopoiesis, Aesthetics, and Culture

Conclusion

Chapter Five - Post-Intellectuals
Conclusion

List of References

iv

33

71
74
83
100
111

114

143

146
172

177

Chapter One

VERSIONS OF POSTMODERN ISM

INTRODUCTION

In his forward to a recent text, appropriately enough entitled After
Poststructuralism, Frederick Crews challenges what he calls the "methodological
dubieties of poststructuralism" (vii). Crews praises the text in question for restoring a
"set of impartial ground rules for critical inquiry” (x), and bringing a sense of sanity
back to the profession. His polemic was echoed in a recent edition of The Chronicle
of Higher Education, hardly the place might expect to find such concern about critical
theory, which trumpeted the "death of deconstruction." While neither
poststructuralism nor deconstruction adequately encompasses all that postmodernism
implies, the message is nonetheless clear. After becoming what Crews calls the "new
academic establishment” (vii), the poststructural, and by implication the postmodern,
radical critique has overstayed its welcome, used up its radical and methodological
credibility, and is ripe for replacement.

From a slightly different perspective, Steven Best and Douglas Kellner have
argued that "postmodernism lacks the dialectical and critical social theory necessary to
conceptualize the complex and often contradictory features of contemporary societies"
(299). Similar attacks on the political failures of postmodernism have also been a
constant feature of British Marxism. Perhaps first articulated by Terry Eagleton, this
line of critique can be found in numerous Marxist and materialist tracts, but it has

been most evident in the recent works of Christopher Norris. In both What's Wrong

2

With Postmodernism and The Truth About Postmodernism Norris goes to great lengths
to detail the political shortcomings of postmodernism. He finally characterizes it as a
"wholesale collapse of moral and intellectual nerve (TPM 1),” that results in the
capitulation of radical critique to the lowest common denominator of liberal
capitalism. Critics of the political formations of postmodernism invariably prefer the
political and moral constructions of Marxism.

These dual charges, one of excess and methodological intolerance, the other of
political naivete and cultural relativism, reflect the disarray of critical thought and
practice. Postmodernism is a term without concrete significance, perhaps best
represented, as Susan Bordo suggests, by the confusion over its own origins and
definition. As such, it becomes a convenient stalking horse for critics in search of a
golden return to an earlier sense of practice, albeit inflicted with the self-conscious tic
of all postmodern discourse, a condition Gilles Deleuze refers to "auto-critique."
Truthfully, it would be difficult to define or defend everything done or published
under the banner of postmodernism. It does seem, however, that this loose affiliation
of discourses and practices should count for more than a brief interruption of what
Crews might call serious inquiry, or as a potentially insightful side bar that requires
the taming and politically self-conscious hand of Marxist critique to have value. In
the constellation of diverse and often contradictory discourses and practices that
comprises the postmodern there are intellectual concerns worth a further analysis, not
on the basis of their abrogated relationship to modernist practices and principles, but
in their own right.

Without trying to define the postmodern or to construct yet another genealogy

3

of its roots and affiliations, to try once again to fix the relationship in time and
method between the modern and the postmodern, we can still adumbrate a sense of
what the postmodern represents in a broader context. That is, we can examine what
the postmodern represents as a habit of thought and reflect on how this type of
thought impacts our ideas of language, culture, and intellectual practice. Although
there is no consensus about what, exactly, postmodernism stands for or, even more
fundamentally, what modernism is or when it started, there do seem to be agreed upon
symptoms of the postmodern, characteristics of postmodern thought. These
characteristics, often with their own conflicted and contradictory narratives, represent a
shift in intellectual practice that can be traced and connected with changes in other
cultural dimensions. In short, while it may be necessary to jettison the more
hyperbolic claims of the postmodern, the basic shift in thought and practice they
represent is critical to a cultural critique not willing to succumb to either nostalgia or
despair.

More to the point, the question I want to raise is what a better understanding of
the key characteristics of postmodernism would mean to English studies. Although
Crews and a host of other commentators see postmodern discourses as a new
orthodoxy dominating the profession, there is good reason to be skeptical of those
claims. A case in point is Gerald Graff’s exploration of the Alice Walker for
Shakespeare "scandal" that grew out of the canon wars. Graff’s analysis in Beyond
the Culture Wars clearly proves that while the rhetoric of wholesale change is
everywhere, things may look very different on the ground. He shows, through an

examination of book orders, that 76% of departments still require "historical

4

coverage," and that while 124 students might, in spite of William Bennett’s objections,
have to read The Color Purple, there were 1,555 students reading Shakespeare. My
point is simply that while editorial control over a few key journals and the celebrity
status of a few of what Pierre Bourdieu in the context of the French Academy refers
to as "sanctioned heretics" may look like the postmodern tide overwhelming the
profession, that does not mean that the rank and file of the profession or the student in
the typical English class, literature or composition, has been much impacted by
postmodern practice.

I think it makes sense to resist the claims of both those who see
postmodernism as a nominalist freefall from material and historical responsibility and
those who would exaggerate the importance of postmodernism in current practice. My
goal is to examine what a practice of English or language studies, recast in a
postmodern light, might eventually look like. It is my contention that if we
understood the broad implications of postmodern thought we would be better prepared
to ask ourselves what, if any, future English studies can expect to occupy in the
university. To do that, however, requires a more thorough and thoughtful reflection on
what a postmodern habit of thought might include.

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF POSTMODERNISM

In trying to identify characteristics of postmodernism, I am not trying to define
or to classify all that currently passes as postmodern. Instead, I intend to concern
myself only with three characteristics that are generally recognized as critical in the
clash between modern and postmodern perspectives. My goal is not to create an

inclusive set of principles but to try and uncover the elements of postmodern thought

5

that I believe are essential to understanding how English studies, cultural studies, or
even a broad concern with the issues of language and culture are shaped by these
habits of thought. Finally, a habit of thought can only claim to be postmodern if it is
rooted in a local and specific sense of practice and resistance.

One of the problems of discussing the characteristics of postmodern thought is
that such a project has to begin with no hope of "getting it right," or in Steven
Toulmin’s terms "starting from scratch." That is, every term and characteristic is
already part of an ongoing conflict. Postmodern thought does not create a new
terminology or a new historical vantage point. It is always already deeply implicated
in the language and practices of modernism, and it seeks no systematic or purely
theoretical clarification. Instead, this project will argue for alternative perspectives,
not exclusionary or dominant perspectives, for the characteristics examined. Perhaps
the best we can hope for, again in Toulmin’s terms, is to avoid "backing into the
millennium." That is, we can use our own conflicted and tarnished practices to
struggle for alternatives.

ANTIFOUNDATIONALISM

Antifoundationalism is one of the most characteristic and contradictory
elements of postmodernism. From Jean-Francois Lyotard’s condemnation of
metanarratives in The Post-Modem Condition to the "rhizomes" and "nomads" of
Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, postmodern discourses,
particularly those connected to New French Theory, have made much out of the
abandonment of the Enlightenment project. A corresponding discourse of historical

eclipse has resulted in boastful claims about the end of the Enlightenment, the end of

6

history, and the reification of post-movements. We are now post-Marxist, post-
feminist, and post-colonial in addition to the more traditional post-industrial and
postmodern. I would argue that much of the criticism, often well-deserved, of
postmodern critique has the confused and confusing claims of antifoundationalism at
its core. For that reason, trying to unravel the issue of antifoundationalism is an
essential first step toward exploring a postmodern habit of thought.

The first issue is whether or not antifoundationalism is defining characteristic
of postmodernism, that is are postmodemists intentionally antifoundational and only
then whatever else they may be, or is postmodernism a response to the lack or
destruction of foundations. If the point seems pedantic, I think it is important to fix
this question in relation to the political and economic limits of postmodern thought. If
postmodernism is busy, as for example the Futurists were, in merely prophesying and
propagandizing a hopeful and hyperbolic outcome, then the seriousness of their
political, if not their artistic, claims should be viewed with some skepticism. If, on the
other hand, the lack of foundations already exists and postmodernism is more a
pragmatic and reflective response to an already existing condition, antifoundationalism
is less an avant—garde manifesto and more a specific and historical political reaction.
My contention is that postmodernism is associated with the latter, and that it involves
not only the rational and scientific but the religious and social aspects of culture.

The first step toward a sensible understanding of antifoundationalism is to
debunk the notion of local or antifoundational standpoints as being somehow unstable
or utterly choatic. Although he is not much interested in the antifoundational aspects

of postmodernism, in Postmodernism and Its Critics, John McGowan situates the issue

7

of antifoundationalism as a function of community norms.
Phrased positively, postmodernism is the attempt to legitimate knowledge
claims and the moral/political basis for action, not on the basis of indubitable
truths, but on the basis of human practices within established communities.
The recognition of such communities’ stability means that the worry of such a
foundation is not strong enough is absurd; our constant worry should be that
this communal foundation is too strong.(24)
McGowan’s analysis is worth pursuing on two points. First, he offers a view of
"local" or antifoundational norms which is in opposition to the nihilistic and
nominalist sense of philosophical antifoundationalism. The antifoundational impulse
that is rooted in a renewed sense community, practice, and aesthetics is not the same
as surrendering all matters of judgment and measurement. It merely refuses to make
the means of judgment or measurement wholly external and universal instead of local
and negotiable. Second, McGowan makes it clear that the practices and habits of
communities are not only "strong enough" as foundations for action and belief but
potentially "too strong." Orthodoxies are not all logocentric products of Enlightenment
thought. Communities, as the Balkans continually remind us, can produce their own
peculiar brand of hegemony and mayhem. Antifoundationalism, as it feeds what
McGowan defines as "positive freedom," is a skepticism that must be trained as much
on the irrational as the rational. It is, in ways McGowan does not utilize, a move
toward a more complex set of criteria for cultural critique, one that is unwilling to
simply trade modernist foundations for pre-modem ones.

McGowan’s treatment of postmodernism is a serious and acute analysis of

8

some of the inherent contradictions and complications of postmodern thought, and I
will return to his pragmatic critique of liberal individualism, but the issue of
antifoundationalism bears further scrutiny. By recognizing the way that
postmodernism reflects, and not arbitrarily creates, the lack or abandonment of
universal foundations in favor of localized practices, McGowan validates
antifoundationalism as a response to social realities. He says that antifoundationalism
creates neither "chaos" nor "liberation" because of the strength of what Bourdieu calls
the "habitus," the shared and lived perception of the social. What I want to argue is
that postmodernism recognizes the inherent chaos of our shared reality as a means of
liberation. That is, only by constructing more subtle, complex, and choatic notions of
the social sphere, including cultural reproduction and intellectual practice, can the
hegemony of what Jameson, pace Mandel, refers to as "late capitalism" be challenged.
McGowan does a salutary job of distinguishing the way that a positive sense of
freedom turns away from the liberal humanist notion of individualism and individual
freedom, which is essentially only freedom from social control, and toward freedom to
belong to, define and shape local conditions. What is less evident in his analysis is
the need to avoid creating the monolithic structures that much social theory depends
on, in favor of more complex models of social interaction and resistance. It is, finally,
the ability of antifoundational thought to bring the individual and the social or the
local and the global together, not as bipolar opposites but as coexistent phases of the
same experience, that makes it different in a positive, and not a nihilistic sense, from
the reasoned foundations of the Enlightenment project.

It is also important to realize that undercutting the universals of Enlightenment

9

thought is not just a matter of challenging reason and the discourses that create and
support it. Toulmin argues that the Peace of Westphalia was not so much the end as
the displacement and sublimation of theological first principles. Western thought has
maintained a gnostic component to this day, with the research scientist replacing the
gnostic vision flight in the search for one truth. My point is that the foundational
nature of western thought, obviously reflected in the constructs of social theory, is
more than coincidental or methodological. David Hall suggests at the end of The
Uncertain Phoenix that the only to change the way we order experience and society is
to eventually reconfigure our religious sensibilities from monotheism to polytheism.
In his telling of it, an antifoundational impulse is essential to any experience of the
other that is not eventually reduced to domination.

From a slightly different perspective, we can see this alternative version of
antifoundationalism as a struggle over cultural authority. In A World Made by Men,
Charles Radding explores the evolution of thought and its linkage to cultural authority
through the Middle Ages. What Radding’s analysis illuminates is how the myths and
narratives of cultural, and in that period spiritual, authority are weakened by exposure
to practice and thought. That is, that each successive set of laws or rules crumbles
when it no longer serves as an adequate definition of social and divine reality. From
his perspective, the evolution of individual agency is the eventual outcome of a move
away from divine and toward rational explanations of reality. Foucault, of course,
dramatized the same impulse in his earlier works contrasting the classical and modern
"epistemes." Although Foucault’s sense of power and authority are more complex

than Radding’s, they share a sense of how the exposure of social authority is the first

10

phase of its mutation. As it relates to antifoundationalism, the issue of social authority
cuts to the heart of the difference between nominalistic and nihilistic versions of
antifoundationalism and the potential for a postmodernism not limited to those
constructions.

It makes a difference whether anitfoundationalism is the result of nihilistic or
nominalistic theories or the emergence of a more complex and inclusive social
authority. In the first case, the rejection of existing order is in the name of a
privileged few and decidedly antidemocratic in its formation. Nietzsche’s view was
not that the social contract was too limited but that it was already too inclusive and
intrusive, and in the process too inhibiting to the fortunate few entitled to live beyond
its bounds. His thought is, of course, deeply implicated in the class warfare between
intellectuals and the "masses." That construction, as John Carey points out, is also
fundamental to the construction of modern English studies. On the other hand,
antifoundationalism can also be the result of the search for a more inclusive and
complex form of social authority and enfranchisement. In this form it eschews the
elitist formations of Nietzsche’s thought and the more benign, but no less premodem
and individualist, versions such as Richard Rorty’s privileging of “strong poets” and
their private "final vocabularies." Ultimately, we must learn to see divisions of high
and low culture, the private and the public, and the elite and the masses as the self-
created barriers of modern intellectual privilege and as a hinderance to postmodern
versions of knowledge, thought, and action.

It depends on what kind of antifoundationalism one refers to before it is

possible to agree with McGowan’s assertion that it is nothing more than a red herring.

11

Although it is difficult to distinguish between various forms of antifoundationalism
(the problem of the postmodern refusal of clean, systematic breaks in operation again)
it is essential that a constructive sense of postmodernism begin with a strong sense of
antifoundationalism, a sense that implies and embraces the reconstruction of social
authority on new grounds and creates what Mary Louise Pratt calls a "contact zone"
between the modernist divisions of science and the humanities. That kind of
antifoundationalism is necessary to frame and explore the other characteristics of a
constructive postmodernism.

One final perspective that can shed light on the conflicted notions of
antifoundationalism is to examine the contact zone between science and critical theory.
In Chaos Bound, N. Catherine Hayles addresses the issues of local and global systems
and their similarities in both critical and scientific circles.

The representations that many scientists now find interesting are self-similar

with the contemporary episteme, in the sense that they are themselves models

of the aleatory and ambiguous connection between representation and reality.

Focusing on complex systems that are inherently unpredictable, chaos theorists

recognize that chance variations are intrinsic to these systems and consequently

that their representation will never coincide with the systems’ actual behavior.

(227)

What Hayles offers is a means of thinking through the vexing contradictions of local
and global models or the tension between theory and practice without reducing the
outcomes to an oversimplified conflict between science and poetry. Antifoundational

thought does not preclude, in an absolute sense, universalist representation any more

12

than chaos theory precludes accurate measurement. On the contrary, as McGowan
notes, postmodern thought relies on holistic thought, even though it never trusts its
reliance. There are better ways to qualify and interrupt the harmful consequences of
universalization without resorting to an all out retreat to individual and premodem
versions of the poetic or the irreconcilable factions of "language games."
Representations, such as the constructions of histories, are negotiable on a scale- or
context-dependant basis. The nominalist and relativist ploy of raising the local to the
status of the global is a clever but bloodless means to avoid the real complexity that
faces us.

In short, antifoundational thought can be a means of rethinking and
restructuring what I would argue are the disastrous results of over a century of
humanist thought based on the faulty distinctions of aesthetic and scientific thought
and consciousness. The sense of antifoundationalism I am arguing for allows
resistance without surrendering all hope of a public sphere or an inclusive sense of
community.

PLURALISM

The postmodern commitment to pluralism is no less conflicted and
controversial than its affiliations with antifoundationalism. Broadly understood,
pluralism in the postmodern fashion has been constructed around the principles and
politics of difference. It takes as its target the supposed hegemony of Eurocentric
principles and patriarchy, seeking the fracturing and displacement of that hegemony
through discursive and non-discursive practices. Beyond these broad parameters, the

postmodern celebration of pluralism and difference become problematic, prone to the

13

same excessive claims that complicate antifoundationalism, and bearing the additional
burden of intellectual involvement in cultural reproduction. That is, pluralism is a site
of cultural and not natural conflict. It is in the definition and creation of social
space(s) that pluralism takes shape, and intellectuals play an ever enlarging role in the
definition and maintenance of these spaces.

In this sense, pluralism is both a political and an intellectual laesthetic problem,
and though I will attempt to separate these characteristics, they so infuse and inform
each other that their separation can only be a matter of convenience. My argument for
trying to treat them separately is to help articulate the role that humanist intellectuals,
in particular, have played in holding "cultur " concerns hostage to their privileges
within the system of social reproduction. That is, I will attempt to show why
intellectuals have become dubious curators of plurality, whether it be political or
cultural.

On the political side, pluralism is often intertwined with a "politics of
difference," which is problematic on several levels, as McGowan notes.

Even if we accept that a "politics of difference" names a possible and desirable
political hope, the delegitimation of collective identities provides us with no
way to get from here to there. How are the social groups who will work for
the politics of difference to be formed? How will they formulate their goals,
legitimize theory, and shape strategies appropriate to achieving them without
employing any of the tyrannical means of group formation that the advocates
of difference see as universally prevalent? A reliance on individual action

hardly offers an effective alternative. (172)

14

McGowan juxtaposes his version of "positive freedom" to the prospect of a facile and
empty politics of difference undermined by its own theoretical confusion. He makes a
strong case against reifying difference or diversity as a solution in and of itself. In a
world where diversity can translate into Sarajevo or Mogadishu and not some United
Nations promo of smiling, harmonious people, McGowan’s skepticism toward
difference as a defining political principle is well founded. Even the notion of
communities is not without the problems of mingling exclusive and inclusive political
energies. The truth may be, as David Kolb has commented, that the world is a good
deal more "fractured" and "fragmented" than even the most ardent proponent of
difference and diversity is prepared to acknowledge. Our task, if the earlier discussion
of antifoundationalism is at all on target, is less the creation of more diversity than it
is the construction of democratic practices and values to maintain and support it.
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have linked postmodernism and democracy
in their work, attempting to create a politics that is diverse yet strong enough to resist
the oppressive forces of consumer capitalism.
Our central problem is to identify the discursive conditions of the collective
action, directed towards struggling against inequalities and changing relations
of subordination. (153)
As in McGowan’s project the emphasis here is on the reconstruction of a democratic
space, and as in McGowan’s project, though not so pointedly, a heavy burden falls on
the reconstruction of intellectual practices. I think it is worth exploring the criticisms
of Best and Kellner to help frame the dilemma posed by intellectuals and the value of

pluralism.

15

Best and Kellner criticize Laclau and Mouffe for, in this order, misreading
Marx, their reliance on discourse theory, and their theories of "democracy, socialism,
and alliance politics" (200). My intent here is not to quibble with the accuracy of
their judgments or to reify the work of Laclau and Mouffe. I think some of their
points are acute and well taken. Rather, I want to focus on the tone of the criticism,
which they repeat in their concluding chapters on the failings of postmodern theory in
general. Perhaps the tell-tale remarks center on the misreading of Marx. For Best and
Kellner, the sanctity of what they call "Marxian principles" is an essential element in
reclaiming postmodernism from its own excesses. They "reject the postmodern
renunciation of macrotheory," pointing to the discursive and fragmentary emphasis of
postmodern critique.

Postmodern theorists do not do social theory per se, but rather eclectically

combine fragments of sociological analysis, literary and cultural readings,

historical theorizations, and philosophical critiques. They tend to privilege

cultural and philosophical analysis over social theory and thereby fail to

confront the most decisive determinants of our social world. (259)
Best and Kellner share a vision of society and social theory not only akin to Marx but
to Weber’s view of society driven by a "formal process," creating a social world as
deterministic as it is mechanistic.

In the conflict between 19th and early 20th century social theory and what
Constance Penely and others refer to as "ludic" postmodernism the problematic nature
of pluralism is exposed. If society is viewed from an empirical, if not positivist,

perspective, Newtonian and Darwinian concepts of a mechanistic world governed by

I6

laws and determined by rational principles make sense. Even if, as I would readily
grant, such an interpretation does not do justice to Marx, Weber, or Hegel, its legacy,
in practice, has been the creation of disciplines using, by today’s standards, the crude
tools of universalized rationality that create a hegemony of intellectuals, their political
affiliations notwithstanding, attempting to dominate cultural production. In this sense,
difference is less what Raymond Williams kept referring to a "lived experience," and
more a means to catalogue mass behavior. Meaningful pluralism is lost in the
prescriptive rationality and social distinction created within the modern university.
These categories then extend and continue intellectual hegemony based on the
reduction of people to masses and the need to control their behavior.

On the other hand, postmodemists who offer diversity as the answer to
Weber’s "iron cage," or who think that discourse analysis alone is a sufficient point of
social resistance miss the mark in the other direction. Romanticisng the Other,
community, or difference, as McGowan notes, offers nothing but a negative individual
freedom. It does nothing to problematize or realize democratic practice. Following
Rorty into a series of "conversations" may make it easier to see how language "goes
all the way down," in Rorty’s famous phrase, destabilizing the logocentric foundations
of the Enlightenment, but it makes it easier to succumb to what Michael Bemard-
Donals suggests is the mistake of confusing changing the way one reads with changing
the way one lives. Further, as both McGowan and Iris Marion Young point out, there
are conflicts between and within the idealized terms of diverse, pluralistic societies.
Young examines the value of communities in progressive political struggles.

Community is an understandable dream, expressing a desire for selves that are

17

transparent to one another, relationships of mutual identification, social

closeness and comfort. The dream is understandable, but politically

problematic, I argue, because those motivated by it will tend to suppress
differences among themselves or implicitly to exclude from their political
groups persons with whom they do not identify. The vision of small face-to-
face, decentralized units that this ideal promotes, moreover, is an unrealistic

vision for transformative politics in mass urban society. (300)

My point here is that even the most obvious and attractive aspects of pluralism are
problematic and complex. Neither a traditional return to social theory nor the
celebration of diversity will prove adequate in promoting or defining a productive
sense of how to make the postmodernist commitment to pluralism work.

The polernics of both camps add to the confusion, of course, making it difficult
to tell what is at stake. As open as Best and Kellner are to postmodern discourse,
they are unwilling to relinquish the commanding viewpoint that classical social theory
provides. That is, they underestimate the increasing importance of cultural
reproduction as a fundamental characteristic of a postmodern society. From the other
side, the willingness to abandon materialist critique creates a discourse rooted only in
discourse. The problem here is the same problem of global/local emphasis current in
postmodern antifoundationalism. Each approach privileges one side of the equation.
If our understanding of issues such as pluralism is to advance, this modernist stalemate
must be broken. Clearly, we have to be able to think both globally and locally to
fully appreciate the challenges of a democracy ever more pluralistic and participative.

The indictment of intellectual practice growing out of specialized, modernist discourse

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is that it privileges control, the hegemony of intellectual formations, and
professionalism over any truly democratic initiative. For that reason, intellectual
practice becomes an issue in the attempt to promote pluralism.

In Intellectuals in Power, Paul Bové addresses the antidemocratic and
hegemonic configurations of critical discourse. By examining the role of humanist
intellectuals in society, Bové exposes the limitations of even those practices intended
to be oppositional.

As I argue throughout, the present configuration of critical practiceis politically

and socially unsatisfactory; indeed, it is often irresponsible and reactionary: it

supports the worst elements of an imperialistic and repressive society while
justifying itself under the sign of "liberal humanism," of "litterae humaniores."

Not until the profession begins to see through the discourse of humanism and

to understand some of the material functions of the institutions it embodies as

these relate to the hegemony can criticism begin to wrest the knowledge-

producing apparatus away from the interests it now serves. (xiii)

For Bové the "power" of intellectuals, regardless of their political agenda, is directly
related to institutional and discursive practice that suppress the nonprofessional voices
on the margin to control the social confusion that modernist intellectuals have found
constantly at their door.

John Carey focuses on the way that humanist intellectuals have written and
rewritten their fear and loathing of the mass into some of the practices Bové describes.

As an element in the reaction against mass values the intellectuals brought into

being the theory of the avant-garde, according to which the mass is, in art and

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literature, always wrong. What is truly meritorious in art is seen as the

prerogative of a minority, the intellectuals, and the significance of this minority

is reckoned to be directly proportionate to its ability to outrage and puzzle the
mass. Though it usually proports to be progressive, the avant-garde is
consequently always reactionary. That is, it seeks to take literacy and culture
away from the masses, and so to counteract the progressive intentions of

democratic reform. (18)

Like Bové, Carey makes a point of not confusing the professed political agenda of an
intellectual faction with the results of their practice. Thus, he considers leftist
intellectuals as culpable as any other faction. “Their rewriting of mankind as mass
inevitably separated them, as intellectuals, from the non-intellectual majority- though it
was intended to have quite the opposite effect” (39). The issues of social control and
hegemony raised by Bové, and the intellectual habit of using their position to construct
and limit democratic reform by presenting the mass as the equivalent of social
disintegration, as described by Carey, cut to the heart of the problematic relationship
between pluralism and intellectual practice.

If a postmodern sense of pluralism is to emerge, it must chart a course away
from what Sande Cohen calls the "redemptive" function of intellectual practice and
toward a more complex and inclusive notion of culture. Such a notion emerges, to
give three quick examples, in the histories that Jacques Ranciére has constructed of
French intellectual culture, in Michel de Certeau’s use of "poachings" and "guerilla
raids" to explain popular culture, and in John Fiske’s attempt to use those concepts to

explain popular culture in a manner that proves that Marx need not be unimportant or

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uninteresting to postmodern critique.

To return to the criticism leveled against postmodernism by Best and Kellner,
the problem they confront, and (re)create, resonates in the polemic between modernist
critical practice and postmodern critique. For them, the choice is either a stable and
intellectually responsible cultural theory, with a dash of postmodern discourse theory
for creative energy, or the anarchy and politically irresponsible position they see
reflected in much postmodern critique. The problem is that the categories they reify
in their practice have the same view of nature and culture that drove nineteenth
century science and social theory. Why must we choose between discursive and
materialist theories? A postmodern humanist practice, true to both the
antifoundational and pluralistic affiliations it claims, should be able to draw on both,
in exactly the same way that scientists shift focus, Kuhnian revolutions
notwithstanding, between models that prove the inadequacy of Newtonian physics and
their use of those very same models to actually produce parts of their work.

Pluralism demands that we see postmodernism as an evolutionary, but by no
means guaranteed, phase in democratic culture. It demands that our view of culture
and the tools of the discourses we use to critique it become more organic, interactive,
and complex, and less mechanistic. To date, both sides have failed to produce a
vision of pluralism that is compelling enough to help put aside the facile notions of
difference or the other and strong enough to provide the ethical and methodological
compass of postmodern practice.

PRAGMATISM

Pragmatism is a central part of postmodern thought in thinkers as diverse as

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Deleuze and Guattari and McGowan. What is much more difficult is adequately
describing what each of these thinkers means by their appeal to pragmatism. On one
hand, Norris simply dismisses pragmatism as going along to get along, as lacking any
critical or ethical standards. On the other hand, Rorty has posited a neopragmatism
that ultimately dissolves into personal vocabularies, a socially constructed view of
reality that would dismiss Norris’ objections as the unfortunate delusions of someone
who thought grounds for certainty still existed. In between are a loose affiliation of
approaches that promote "constructive postmodernism" or "speculative pragmatism"
and often share little but the umbrella term of pragmatism. In spite of the variety of
applications and the disputes over its merits, pragmatism has a central role in
postmodern discourse. Just as pluralism and antifoundationalism have weaker
versions, so, too, does pragmatism. My intent is to trace the affiliations that result in
a stronger, more viable pragmatism, one capable of providing a framework for new
methods and metaphors.

Without rehearsing a complete genealogy of pragmatism, it is important to note
the number of critical approaches, ranging from the more traditional pragmatic
concerns of Elgin and Goodman to the theologically grounded inquires of some
"constructive" postmodernism, that return to Peirce and Dewey to find fruitful entry
into social and critical theory. In the process, many of the foundational concepts of
Western philosophy have been overturned, reconfigured, or in Comel West’s term,
avoided. Pragmatism has been a staging ground for assaults on traditional problems of
ethics and philosophy. From its borders, consciousness, the mind/body split,

objectivity, subjectivity, the referential nature of language, and epistemology have all

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come under fire. While other critiques of these issues have come from other sources,
Saussure’s linguistic science for instance, I believe that pragmatic approaches to these
problems are most productive because they provide the only means of overcoming
nominalist and realist views of nature and culture, and because they offer the prospect
of reconnecting the human and natural sciences.

I am not arguing for a simple return to the pragmatism of Peirce and Dewey,
which I will try and demonstrate is based on a problematic version of science. In fact,
I think it could be argued that Lyell’s Doctrine of Uniformity, the notion that change
occurs in incremental and mechanistically predictable stages, is as important to Peirce
and Dewey as it was to Newton and Darwin. Even Dewey’s most radical and
progressive constructs are built on a notion of and belief in scientific inquiry rooted,
understandably, in the nineteenth century. I am also not promoting the
neopragmatism of Rorty, which provides a great freedom for skeptical inquiry and
social critique, based on a linguistic or nominalistic view of reality. As I have argued
earlier, I do not think a postmodernism that turns everything into texts has or deserves
much hope for survival. Instead, I will argue for a pragmatic moment grounded in
post unified field theory science, the science of Chaos Theory, Complex Systems, and
Fractal Geometry. In doing so, I am arguing that humanist and scientific discourses
alike have to form a new set of concepts, metaphors, and complexities to describe
nature and culture.

Of course, not everyone would agree that pragmatism and postmodernism are
compatible. Robert Cummings Neville in The Highroad Around Modernism argues

that "modernism," by which he means the nominalist strain of European thought

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emanating from Heidegger and Neitzsche, is only an aberrant form of "modernity,"
and as such is avoidable. He defines postmodernism as the latest form of modernism,
and he argues that pragmatism and process philosophy are a viable alternative, and as
such offer a path around the pitfalls of modernism. In a similar vein, Eugene
Rochberg-Halton argues in Meaning and Modernity that this nominalist strain, which
he labels "abstractionism," can be counteracted by an appeal to Peircean formulas of
nature, community, and meaning. Finally, David Ray Griffin argues in his
introduction to a series on what he labels "constructive postmodern philosophy," that
we must delineate between "constructive" and "deconstructive" forms of
postmodernism. In his view, pragmatism and process philosophy are constructive
while the theories vilified by Neville and Halton are deconstructive. Their objections
are worth engaging.

As I have argued throughout this chapter, much depends on how we ground
our notions of the postmodern. Neville, Rochberg-Halton, and Griffin ground theirs in
the pragmatic refusal of nominalist theories of meaning and language. As I have
already argued, such a definition runs the risk of minimalizing, perhaps even
trivializing, the profound social, economic, and political issues that are part of the
totality of postmodernism. While their criticism of nominalist approaches is often
acute, limiting postmodernism to those approaches is an ironic contradiction of their
own methodology. While expanding upon the way that pragmatism grounds language
and other signs (semiotics) in nature and community, that is, while arguing that any
expression is relational, the attempt of a community to bring to awareness and

intelligibility the conditions of their existence, these theorists dismiss nominalist

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theories as just language, or in Lyotard’s famous phrase, "just gaming." Their own
methods of analysis would seem to argue that, as flawed as they may be, theories and
methodologies that deconstruct reality through language are a community attempt to
articulate a deeply sensed dissonance in the relationship of utterance and reality. That
is, even if Rochberg-Halton, for instance, is right in criticizing the way that
"abstractionism" frames the issues and solutions, he cannot, without invalidating his
own theory of language and cultural production, argue that these utterances or signs
come from nowhere and amount to nothing. In short, if pragmatism is an accurate
description of how semiotics works it must be an accurate description of all utterances
and not just those self-consciously produced in its image.

Pragmatism, then, is not a means to merely repudiate nominalist theories but to
investigate and interrogate them, not only on the level of rival methodologies and
practices but as signs of deeper social meaning. Superficial as are Rorty’s conclusions
and his retreat to liberal and individualist final vocabularies, his attempt to articulate
the slippage in cultural authority and disciplinary practice must be understood as a
valuable, if flawed, inquiry. Rochberg-Halton, Neville, and Griffin confirm the insight
that nominalism is an inadequate method to achieve that inquiry, or that nominalism
succeeds in placing its practice in dialogue with other methods of inquiry, but it
should not be dismissed tout court on those grounds. The critical question for a
pragmatic approach is not how it can dismiss oppositional theories but how it can add
them to the inquiry. From this perspective, pragmatism becomes an integral part of
investigating the problems a radical pluralism poses to the whole issue of communities

and inquiry.

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McGowan focuses on the political aspect of this problem by arguing for a
pragmatism that problematizes and overcomes liberal notions of freedom.

[P]ostmodern theory aims to discover some alternative principle of action to

offered by contemporary Western society, but this aim is vitiated by the

habitual association opposition with distance and exteriority... On the whole
these writers remain wedded to modernist notions of distance and
disengagement as enabling radical critique, notions that their own attack on
autonomous models of selfhood render inoperable.

What we need instead is an account of the self’ 5 inevitable immersion
in the social that also explains how selves can experience themselves as
integral agents capable of dissenting from or choosing alternative paths among
the options social situations present. The fundamental point is that a holistic
view of society does not eliminate the possibilities of difference...(211)

McGowan has his own ideas about how this might be accomplished, of course, but he
doesn’t attempt a methodological or theoretical closure. In fact, his analysis opens
instead of closes a line of inquiry, which is, in Peirce’s term, "fallibalistic," meaning it
is open to continuing critique.

This example is but one of the struggles or inquiries that a postmodern
pragmatism must engage. Even as McGowan attempts to define a "positive freedom,"
he relies on terms such as community,self, and the social that become ever more
complex and problematic. "The engagement of that complexity is what separates a
postmodern pragmatism from earlier versions. Even though Peirce’s view of the

cosmos includes chance (tychastic evolution) and love (agapistic evolution) his sense

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of realism and nature regulates these influences. To move beyond the instrumentalist
limitations of American Pragmatism requires a more active interrogation of science
and sincere effort to mediate the humanistic and scientific views of turbulence,
disorder, and chaos. The troubling history of biological determinism, represented by
Stephen Jay Gould in The Mismeasure of Man, notwithstanding, a postmodern
pragmatism must examine the relationship between physical, biological, linguistic, and
social formations. In doing so, the opportunity exists to reconstruct the border
between the humanities and the sciences in ways that avoid premodem, romantic
appeals on one side and reductive and asocial methodologies on the other.

Two examples of specific areas of inquiry are the mind/body split and the
resultant views of objectivity/subjectivity. Griffin argues for "panexperientialism" as a
means to overcome "the inadequacies and apparently insolvable mysteries that seem
otherwise inevitable(IO)” in sensationalist and empirical methods. Griffin’s
suggestion, central to constructive postmodern philosophy, is aimed at the limited way
that science collects data and assigns value to experience. These methods have led, in
Sandra Harding’s view, to a both a separation of science from the life world and the
reification of social distinctions in scientific methodology.

Objects of knowledge then become, once again, dissimilar from the subjects of

knowledge. Subjects of real knowledge, unlike subjects of mere opinion, are

disembodied and socially invisible while their natural and social objects of

knowledge are firmly located in history. (463)

Harding argues for an objectivity based on standpoint epistemologies that reflect not

just the outcomes or methods of scientific inquiry but the questions that drive it. She

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argues that the effect of social distinction is already visible in scientific methodology.

In these respects, nature-as-an-object-of-knowledge simulates social life, and

the processes of science themselves are a significant contributor to this

phenomenon. Thus the subject and object of knowledge for the natural
sciences, too, are not significantly different in kind. Whatever kinds of social
forces shape the subjects are also thereby shaping their objects of knowledge.

(454)

Harding’s critique of objectivity in the scientific method denies the possibility of
bracketing the scientific from the social and linguistic, thereby denying any special
privilege of objectivity outside that social authority to constitute it. This is a properly
pragmatic question because it both problematizes the methods of inquiry that we rely
on and integrates methods of inquiry which modernist discourses, both humanist and
scientific, have sought to separate. Her analysis helps expose one of the many fault
lines that run through these contact zones and helps define an area of future inquiry
and reconstruction.

As Brazilian biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Verela have argued,
the integration of formerly disparate discourses extends to the contentious relationship
between biological and cultural studies.

What biology shows us is that the uniqueness of being human lies exclusively

in a social coupling that occurs through languaging, generating (a) the

regularities proper to the human social dynamics, for example, individual
identity and self-consciousness, and (b) the recursive social dynamics that

entails a reflection enabling us to see that as human beings we have only the

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world we create with others- whether we like them or not. (246)
Maturana and Varela reinforce the pragmatic view that social and contextual forces
govern the way we think and communicate. They also help make it clear that even
pragmatic thought must find more complex models and metaphors, whether in Ilya
Prigogine’s dissapative systems or David Bohm’s "implicate order," for the way we
think about order and systems, especially those systems reified by the human sciences.

Hayles puts it of her vision of the interrelationship of humanities and science
that she saw them as "two mingled voices within the cacophonography that we call
postmodern culture" (208). Much of the work it will take to blend those voices even
further will be done by a pragmatism revitalized by the complex, local forms of
knowledge produced in both the sciences and the humanities. All disciplines, but
especially one so entrenched in traditional forms of social discourse as English studies
will be challenged to find ways to adapt, in practice and not just in theory, to new
models and metaphors, new ways of thinking about language, knowledge, and culture.
THE CONDITION OF POSTMODERNISM

Obviously, there is much more that postmodernism can be said to represent and
contain, but I am not trying to paint a picture of a unified postmodernism. Instead, I
want to use antifoundationalism, pluralism, and pragmatism to demonstrate that
postmodernism is not just a nominalist freefall, and at the same time, remember the
historical importance of critiques of language before simply dismissing new theories of
language. My point is that postmodernism can be seen as producing what Henry
Giroux calls a "politics of possibility." That is, that postmodernism can provide the

grounds for critiquing the direction and potential of English studies, both as a

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historically specific discourse and as an emancipatory pedagogy. The characteristics
listed here could be expanded. Parody, democracy, technology and media, and what
McGowan calls "holistic theory" could be examined, but the key point is that these
characteristics can serve as the basis for a politically and culturally responsible
critique.

In this telling of it, postmodernism is more than a brief domination of radical
linguistic critique. Instead, as Giroux notes, "postmodernism constitutes a general
attempt to transgress the borders sealed by modernism, to proclaim the arbitrariness of
all boundaries, and to call attention to the sphere of culture as a shifting social and
historical construction" (18). It is this larger cultural sense of postmodernism, and
not the specialized linguistic discourses within the discipline, that make a postmodern
critique of English studies viable. A large part of that critique should center on the
realization that the critique includes a review of science and the very means by which
knowledge is recognized and sanctioned in this society. Such a critique must start
from the realization that the unity of the modernist position was more a function of
discursive hegemony than an accurate description of reality. As Kolb says:

[T]here can be no liberating hope for a brand new world. There can be no

change of the world as a whole, since there is no world as a whole constituted

by a unitary granting of presence or a single basic shape of spirit. There are

too many different rhythms and fields and possibilities for all to come to a

climax or completion at once, nor are they totally unified within themselves.

(261)

Postmodernism is not so much the creation of diversity and multiplicity as the honest

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recognition of them. As such, the conservative analyses of the current situation which
calls for a return to the old boundaries and formations are ineffective because they
miss the point in the first place. The prior unity was an illusion held together by
repressive practices, including language practices, and returning to any unity, political,
economic, or canonical,

cannot be accomplished without a ruthless reinstatement of those practices overthrown
in the name of equality.

On the other hand, the leftist response to postmodernism has missed the mark
in several critical ways. First, it has invested too much energy in the creation of
nominalist freedoms divorced from the pragmatic and material conditions which could
sustain them. Second, much leftist criticism has included what Evan Watkins once
called "the leftist version of ’My God, they’ve gotten dumb out there’"(TP 40). From
that point of departure it is all too easy to produce what Ben Agger refers to as "leftist
scholasticism," and miss the resistance already under way in much pOpular culture.
Finally, the privilege of academic discourse is no less coveted by leftist intellectuals.
As a result, leftist postmodern critique runs the risk of being marginalized as effete or
irresponsible, in either case failing to grasp the opportunity at hand.

In my view that opportunity has much to do with the democratic potential of a
new way of understanding order and complexity. In Eros and Irony, Hall develops
what he calls "philosophical anarchy," another way of rejecting first principles, a state
"both more conservative and more radical(5)" than what it replaces. For Hall the key
is to move away from "either or" and toward "both and" means of creating order. In

the same vein, Bohm attacks the fragmentation of thought and language that prevents

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us from realizing what he calls the implicate order. Both of these views share Hayles’
observations about cultural critique and science coming to totally different conclusions
when faced with chaos. The key points here are that the shift from one view of unity
to the other requires a radical change in the way we construct differences and that that
change can only be captured in a broader cultural context.

My argument is that postmodernism allows those concerned with the critique
and analysis of language and culture an opportunity to reshape their practice around
this broad cultural shift. That opportunity will be squandered if the analysis is too
narrowly or discursively constructed, leaving intellectual practices that increase
fragmentation in place. The only way to take advantage of that opportunity is to
discard some of the current notions driving the teaching and analysis of language and
culture, including the myths and narratives that define literacy and competency, and to
use more complex models to rethink and reinscribe what a radical pedagogy might
entail. Foremost among those concerns should be, as Giroux notes, the relationship
between language, schooling, and democracy.

Education must be understood as producing not only knowledge but also

political subjects. Rather than rejecting the language of politics. critical

pedagogy must link public education to the imperatives of a critical democracy.

Critical pedagogy needs to be informed by a public phiIOSOphy dedicated to

returning schools to their primary task: furnishing places of critical education

that serve to create a public sphere of citizens who are able to exercise power
over their own lives and especially over the conditions of knowledge

production and acquisition. (37)

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English is what Watkins calls an "intraeducational" discourse (93). It plays a
commanding role in providing and maintaining the distinctions that a modernist and
capitalist cultural economy demanded. To construct a postmodern critique of its future
positionality is to challenge almost everything it has been designed to produce.

1 plan to examine four key elements in my critique. In Chapter Two, I will
analyze current critiques of the discipline to match their analysis with the opportunity
of a postmodern revision. In Chapter Three, I will look at the issue of language
practices as they have been historically grounded, and of how they might be
reconfigured. In Chapter Four, I will both critique the modernist assumptions and
definitions of aesthetics and offer a postmodern alternative. Finally, in Chapter Five, I
will look at the way intellectual practice is implicated in these changes. I realize that
it may be futile to even talk about changing English studies in the current political and
economic crisis in American colleges and universities. But cultural moments that
require or invite monumental change do not come along that often, and missing them

may result in even more repressive and destructive consequences.

Chapter Two

ENGLISH DEPARTMENTS AND THEIR CRITICS

Critiquing English studies has become a growth industry in the last two
decades. Institutional histories and critiques of the discipline have flourished,
representing almost every view and vested interest imaginable. I think any attempt to
apply the postmodern characteristics discussed in the first chapter must first sort
through and sort out the work already available on the future of English studies. Only
by examining the ground already covered and the correctives already offered can we
get a clear sense of how a postmodern revision that extends beyond nominalism and
identity politics differs from the radical and progressive critique already in place. Key
among these differences is the realization that both the means of cultural transmission
and the legitimate sites of that transmission have shifted away from literary notions of
literacy and culture. That is, English studies can not be revived or reconstructed
without exposing it to the dynamic and popular forces it was designed to resist.
Obviously, this view denies any hope of reconstructing the social and political
consensus that made literary studies a visible part of the modern university, but it also
denies the possibility of simply using that cultural site against itself in a Gramscian
"war of position."

The critiques of the discipline that are sympathetic to a more inclusive and
democratic version of the academy, that is those critiques not encumbered by a
nostalgic view of the literary, share two somewhat contradictory themes. The first

theme, represented by Edward Said in the World the Text and the Critic, is that

33

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English studies, and the humanities in general, have traded professional competency,
status, and privilege for any meaningful role in a broader cultural dialogue.
[W]e have reached the stage at which specialization and professionalism, allied
with cultural dogma, barely sublimated ethnocentricism and nationalism, as
well as a surprisingly insistent quasi-religious quietism, have transported the
professional and academic critic of literature -- the most focused and intensely
trained interpreter of texts produced by the culture -— into another world
altogether. In that relatively untroubled and secluded world there seems to be
no contact with the world of events and societies, which modern history,
intellectuals, and critics have in fact built. (25)
Said’s call for an "oppositional" criticism that attempts to reverse the condition he
describes is based on a belief common to many critiques, namely that the institutional
position of English studies is open to radical reversal, to a take-over as it were, by
radical intellectuals. Said represents the view that the power and tools to do
meaningful cultural and political work are already at our disposal if we could only
seize them.
The second theme, which both contests and supports the first, is represented by
Peter Widdowson in his essay W(h)ither English?
The last two decades have seen an unprecedented meltdown at the core of an
academic discipline which by the mid-twentieth century had achieved a status
and a popularity in secondary and tertiary education second to none.(16)
Widdowson is much less sure than Said that the tools and power to reshape the

discipline are still in the bag of tricks that English studies has at its disposal. As his

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title suggests, his analysis reflects the postmodern realization that the site of power, in
this case of cultural transmission, has shifted.

Both Said and Widdowson can be read as demanding a new, more politically
acute, role for English studies. Both can be read as attempting to inscribe a new
direction to critical discourse, although Widdowson is much less certain of how,
exactly, that might be done. Both defend the positionality of the discipline in both its
professional and institutional forms, although Widdowson admits this is more in the
self-interest of the practitioners than for any compelling social or political reasons.
The sense of "meltdown" Widdowson describes cuts against Said’s assumptions about
a transferable practice, but neither extends their criticism to the extent that Bové and
Carey do in calling into question the whole notion of intellectual practice. Finally,
both Said and Widdowson suggest a larger cultural dimension, though both seem
unsure about how to engage it.

Indeed, only by recognizing the limits of the political critique both Said and
Widdowson propose can we begin to construct a different sense of practice. This
practice must contest the notion of politics being driven by an intellectual class which
has lost touch with its cultural roots and functions. We need to rethink the
foundational assumptions that support the kinds of literacy narratives and aesthetic
judgements which are reinforced even by critics who promise a radical new version of
English studies. Even if we accomplished what Said or Widdowson suggests, it is
doubtful that the discipline would meet the challenge that postmodernism poses for it.
Instead, we should examine the way critics of the discipline position themselves on the

issues of culture and language, and how those positions translate into practice. In a

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postmodern landscape, many of the traditional critiques of English studies and the
intellectual practices they support must be examined anew. My goal is to adumbrate a
practice that is true to the anti-foundational and democratic impulses of postmodernism
and avoids the pitfalls of radical critique. Critics of English studies have traded too
heavily on subjectivities and intellectual privileges rooted in Kantian metaphysics, and
they have pursued a cultural synthesis that suppresses the dynamic play of popular
forces. An intellectual practice that seeks to pick its way through the ruins of negative
play and difference without reducing the cultural to the merely textual and without
losing the potential for democratic action must be willing to part company with many
of the assumptions of radical critique.

The meltdown in English studies, the uneasy sense that what English means,
does, or stands for is poorly defined or focused, even oppressive and reactionary,
begins with attempts to address the forward nature of the "crisis" in English studies.
These attempts, while exhibiting a stunning variety of pet theories and terminologies,
can be sorted into two categories: the first acknowledges that something is indeed
amiss, but it offers a moderate, usually pluralistic, solution. The second attempts to
challenge the ideological construction of the discipline, to direct the resources of
English departments toward social and political goals. It is worth looking at examples
of these critiques before examining their limitations.

An example of the first category of critiques which has enjoyed some notoriety
is Gerald Graffs Professing Literature. Graff’s criticism is directed at the department
and the field coverage model of education which has prevented the issues and disputes

dividing the profession from being addressed, much less resolved.

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By organizing itself on a principle of systematic non-relationship in which all
parties tacitly agree not to ask how they might be connected or opposed, the
department prevented potentially edifying conflicts from becoming part of what
literary studies was about. (8-9)
This lack of direction and focus is central to Graff’s diagnosis of and cure for literary
studies. Having developed as a weakly formulated oppositional discourse to the
sciences, literary studies, at times carrying the banner of the humanities and at times
trying to emulate the opposition, lurched through its early history as a discipline. The
central point of Graff’s argument is that whatever loose affiliations used to bind the
humanities together have unraveled, and the time has come to rethink their purpose.
There are those who argue that the humanities have become disablingly
incoherent seem to me right, but many of them fail to see that coherence can
no longer be grounded on restored consensus, whether it be traditional "basics,"
revolutionary or something else. (15)
What Graff finally suggests is a pedagogy that reflects how one "situates" oneself to
the cultural text in order to bring the disputes out into the open where they can be an
informing rather than a disruptive influence. In short, we should "teach the conflicts."
Borrowing heavily from Robert Scholes, Graft‘s critique is based on better
reading, reading with a cultural edge to it. As is typical in this type of critique, Graff
embraces a tolerant and pluralistic vision of English. His department has room under
the big tent for all forms and varieties of practioners, with the exception of
composition teachers whom he entirely ignores. His assumption is that the old

covenant has been shattered but that a new one can be constructed out of the contested

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fragments. He would like to see literary studies as a more public discourse, which

reveals his belief that there is still a cultural and, more specifically, a literary vision to

share.

At issue in the teaching of literature, then, and in the formation of a literature
curriculum, are how much of the ’cultural text’ students must presuppose in
order to make sense of the works of literature, and how this cultural text can
become the context of teaching. That there is no agreement over how the
cultural text should be understood, or whether it should come into play at all in
the teaching of literature, seems to me an arguement for rather than against a
more explicitly historicized and cultural kind of literary study that would make

such distinctions part of what is studied. (258)

Thus, Graff moves toward what Said would call "engagement" by presenting an

agonistic discourse that is still contained within the department.

In Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts can Revitalize

American Education, Graff expands his focus to the institutional and political issues

surrounding departmental conflicts.

For contrary to the assumption that has dominated the recent debate, politics
need not be a corrupting intrusion into the parity of principled intellectual
thought. Political conflict at its best is fought out as a battle of ideas,
arguments, and principles. It is when the principles underlying institutional
politics are buried from public view that those politics tend to become
unedifying, since departments then express themselves in rancour, calumny, and

insult rather than a principled argument. (143)

39

Here Graff is willing to extend his definition of the proper site of cultural conflict, and
he works throughout the text to include a broader perspective of the issues than the
one presented in Professing Literature. But the site and the nature of the conflict is
still very much a university matter, and as such does not connect with the shift in
cultural production and transmission that postmodern culture demands.

Although Graff does not address this issue, it is worth noting that this type of
critique operates in composition theory also: the continual revision of the "process"
model and the move toward "collaborative" and "socially constructed" schemes
exemplified in the work of Kenneth Bruffee are an example. What Bruffee advocates
and what others, such as Marilyn Cooper and Michael Holtzman, have argued for is
an expanded "social" definition of writing, one that places the student in a
"community" and conceptualizes language as more flexible and less positivistic.
Finding fault, correctly, with the overly individualized and atomistic versions of
language instruction, Bruffee, like Graff, wants a new game in an old ballpark. When
Graff and Bruffee are through and the dust of renovation settles, English departments
will still occupy roughly the same space in the educational system. Literature and
composition, sporting a collaborative, social, or even "postmodern" agenda, will still
be taught.

One of the most thorough and well received progressive critiques of
composition is Stephen North’s The Making of Knowledge in Composition. North’s
analysis of the power differential between "scholars," "researchers," and "practioners,"
and the role "lore" plays in the practice of composition has become a fixture in the

current critiques of the field. Like James Berlin’s Rhetoric and Reality, North’s

4o

analysis has gone a long way toward making composition a field of its own, with a
history and methodological evolution that naturalizes teaching writing in the
university. Both Berlin and North offer a progressive and positive historiography of
composition, a path for reformers to follow in search of increased respect and
influence. Both claim an expanded role for composition in the way meaning is
constructed in the university and the way writing is viewed in society. Neither of
these critiques, however, challenges what John Mayer calls "common sense" language
education, by which he means our time-honored assumptions about how we use
language, learn to read, and participate in the construction and production of our own
knowledge.

It is this element that makes these critiques progressive without making them
threatening. The social and cultural status of English, a status that is seldom even
examined, is left intact. The power relationships, the issues of race, gender, and class
may be admitted to the discussion, but they are never brought to bear on the social
and material practices of English. This pluralistic vision owes much to the
pragmatism of Richard Rorty, and like his " grand conversation," it is "full of high
sentence but a bit obtuse." As Stanley Fish observed in Is There A Text In This Class,
the power stays where it always was.

It has been my strategy in these lectures to demonstrate how little we lose by

acknowledging that it is persuasion and not demonstration we practice. We

have everything we always had tests, standards, norms, criteria of judgement,

critical histories, and so forth. (367)

One need only add grades, graduate school admissions, editorial control of journals,

41

and control over curricula to complete the picture. The cultural scene that Fish
oversees is an arena cultural practice inscribed by differential values of power, and
already naturalized by disciplinary history and practice.

Another example of the "big tent" approach common to progressive critiques is
Patrick Brantlinger’s Crusoe ’s Footprints, which does for cultural studies what Graff
did for literary studies. Brantlinger lays out an impressive assortment of material,
referencing all the major theoretical movements of the last few decades. He concludes
on an even more inclusive note than Graff, calling for the masses to be included in the
"common culture." Like Graff, however, Brantlinger lacks a "situated" position of his
own. His work bears mentioning because he proves that even the most radical and
contested positions can eventually be safely appropriated by a pluralistic metanarrative.
In just this way, deconstruction has come and gone from the critical radar. In
America it often amounted to little more than New Criticism writ large anyway, but its
appropriation to literary studies is an example of what can happen to theories once
they encounter the black hole of literary formalism. In the hands of Jonathan Culler
and J. Hillis Miller, to cite two well known examples, deconstruction is limited to a
literary technique or category. The philosophical implications are limited by literary
concerns, and the perhaps more radical promise Gregory Ulmer argues for in Applied
Grammatology, is lost.

Deconstruction is just one of a whole series of approaches growing out of New
French Theory neutralized by literary progressives. These theories, ranging from
Derrida and Foucault to Baudrillard and de Certeau are informants of poststructural

and postmodern critiques that promise much, raise the tenor of the argument, and

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vanish into the forest of literary texts that absorb these mediations but retain the text’s
significance. Simply restructuring or rethinking the literary applications of theory
stops far short of any attempt to unmask or critique the interests behind the theory.
When confined to literary texts, all theories still produce readings that reproduce the
material conditions of the reader, that is, readings that enforce the power of the canon.
Here, too, the privileges of texts and intellectuals are confined to a practice naturalized
by institutional concerns and isolated from authentic cultural production. Any attempt
to construct a social practice compatible with the goals I have outlined is going to
have to go beyond theory and change the educational practices and assumptions which
subsume them.

The failure of these theories, setting aside the usual arguments over what
actually constitutes a better reading, is that the educational and cultural role of English
remains largely unchanged and unchallenged. Even Fish admits that his proposal is
made for the glory that comes from formulating a new, if essentially inert, idea. The
assumption is that if we just did what we do better, more in line with new theory or
pedagogy, the problem would be solved. There is still a rock-ribbed belief in the
value of English and the humanities in progressive approaches that does little to
explain the historical formation of the humanities or their conflict with science. What
progressive critiques lack is how to problematize the whole idea of English.

Richard Ohmann may have been the first American scholar in the field to say
bluntly that English is not neutral. In English in America, (1976) Ohmann delivered
what has become the staple of radical and ideological critiques of English.

I used to wonder why it is that society pays English teachers so much money

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to do what by and large is fun: teaching fine literature. I now think that our
function is extremely valuable: namely to ensure the harmlessness of all
culture; to make it serve and preserve the status quo. (63)
Ohmann makes the connection between English and cultural hegemony that drives
radical criticism of the discipline. Far from merely rescuing the old value from its
recently debased state, radical critics challenge the whole notion of inherent value. In
place of the inherent value of the humanities, radical critics envision a situated and
limited sense of value, as Widdowson urges.
All literary studies courses, in other words, should present their students some
defarniliarizing account of the activity they are commonly engaged in, some
representation of how artificially constructed ’the subject’ is, how problematical
is its identity, and what its aims and objectives might be: what it is for. If it is
to be involved with the ’method of critique,’ it must be scrupulously self-
critical from the start. (51)
For Widdowson, the problem is how to reclaim the pedagogic space occupied by
English, and then how to construct a "materialist" politics in its place. The key here is
that the critic occupies a position determined not by the method she employs but the
critical standpoint she inhabits. As Said says, "critical systems - even the most
sophisticated kind - can succumb to the inherently reproductive relationship between a
dominant culture and the domain it rules" (24). The critic must stand outside that
domain, outside the literary, at least, to supply the element that separates radical from
progressive criticism. The critic/intellectual is engaged in the remaking and

redefinition of cultural relationships and production.

44

Jim Merod tries to sketch a critical practice of this nature in The Political
Responsibility of the Critic. For Merod the critic is obligated to "speak more boldly
about justice and its obstacles’ (174). As teachers they must help their students to
"read so that they see their own relation to social power and intellectual authority"
(129). Merod argues for an engaged or committed intellectual practice that utilizes the
role of critical and teaching intellectual in the university. Merod is concerned with
how to convert intellectual privilege into social change, elaborating on a connection
between literature, subjectivity, and capitalist oppression that Eagleton mined and
developed in the 80’s. Like Eagleton, Merod undermines the Leavisite belief in the
beneficial role of the humanist agenda. Like Said, Merod turns to Antonio Gramsci
and his description of the role intellectuals play in creating and challenging cultural
hegemony.

Grarnsci’s great insight was to recognize intellectuals not by their faculties (or
their Zarathustrian souls) but through their functions. It is the role played by
intellectuals, as a class, in cultural production, particularly in education and religion,
that Gramsci taps as a resource of political resistance, and it is this role that Said and
Merod claim for their oppositional practices. The differences and disagreements about
how such a practice could be constructed are part of another story. What is important
in this analysis is that the role of intellectuals defined by Gramsci is foundational to so
many radical critiques. Whether some variation of Grarnsci’s "organic" intellectual,
Foucault’s "specific" intellectual, or something akin to Giroux’s "transformative"
intellectual, the main actor in these critiques is the critic/intellectual who politicizes

English by exposing sexist, racist, or classist elements in the culture. Graff’s

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"conflicts" have been replaced by situated intellectuals, dug in for a "war of position."

It may appear that this analysis collapses important distinctions between, for
example, Feminist and Marxist perspectives. While there is some truth to that, what is
at stake here is not which of these mediations is "correct" but whether any mediation
situated in English can do what its practioners claim. To put it simply, are intellectual
practices that leave the disciplines and institutions that create them intact
"oppositional?" One need not go as far as Peter Washington does in denouncing
English department radicals as "middle-aged people with glasses, dogs, and
mortgages," to question whether English provides the platform that radical critique
claims it does.

There are three problems associated with radical claims. The first is the
position of English in society. The second is the transcendent intellectual privilege of
radical critique, and the third is an inadequate and limiting notion of cultural
reproduction, particularly through language. In the first instance, much radical critique
suffers from the same assumptions that progressive critiques do, namely the assumed
cultural importance of English. In the second instance, radical dependance on
Gramscian intellectual formations created a power/knowledge formation with its own
limited practice. But it is the inability of radical critque to theorize what the linguistic
turn in philosophy and the postmodern assault on authority mean to our idea of culture
that most seriosly handicaps radical critique.

One of the most aggressive examples of radical critiques is supplied by Mas’ud
Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton in Theory, (Post)Modernity, Opposition. In sketching

what they refer to as a radical "critique-a1" theory, Zavarzadeh and Morton expose

46

what they think are the weaknesses of progressive and apolitical theories. Lumping
together theorists as different as Derrida and Foucault as "decontructionists," they
launch an attack against "ludic" postmodernism and its reinforcement of late capitalist
"political economy." They manage to show the limits of the "literary" constructions of
Graff and Scholes, and they do a thorough job of analyzing the flaws in a textual
approach to politics and ethics. What becomes problematic is how their sense of
practice would historicize cultural analysis. They defer making any comments about
an "affirmative" theory, but even if they had, they would still be faced with the
problem of situating their readings in a cultural and institutional context.

History itself is a problematic construction. As Sande Cohen has pointed out,
the potential for abuse from historical narratives is immense. In the same way that
early American pragmatists failed to problematize science, Marxist intellectuals place
too much faith in the historical. The ludic practices they critique may indeed be as
flawed as the authors suggest, but they have made it impossible for anyone to accept
at face value another historical narrative. In other words, Zavarzadeh and Morton fail
to problematize their own systematic dependance, much as Best and Kellner did in
their analysis of postmodern theory. Another nagging question is just what hope
cultural studies have of influencing the power relationships they want to change. Is
the way we think about knowledge likely to be affected by a discourse so far removed
from the power of cultural formation? Discourses challenging the power/knowledge
relationships in late capitalist societies are nothing new, yet they have failed to alter
those relationships much, if at all. The material relationships of the work Zavarzadeh

and Morton perform are with students, and the whole texture of their argument

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suggests those relationships will remain unchanged.

More to the point, however, is the lack of an adequate theory of culture and
language that emerges in so much radical critique. Because this form of critique
depends on Marxist ideas of cultural reproduction, it ends up reifying economic and
historical narratives of deterimancy that are problematic at best when applied to a
postmodern culture. As Fiske, de Certeau, and Ranciére, among others, have
observed, this narrow, ideologically determined vein of Marxist social critique is
simply inadequate. It fails to examine the real differences in cultural expression
encompassing both the means and sites of that expression which characterize the
dynamic cultural activity that Marxist theory denigrates as "mass culture" and "false
consciousness." Zavarzadeh and Morton end up in the same position that Said,
Eagleton, and Merod do, advocating the enlightened perspective of "engaged"
intellectuals as a corrective to mass culture. It is difficult to see how the democratic
and dynamic promise of a postmodern practice is well served by such advocacy.

Perhaps the only radical critiques with real cultural punch are those based on
gender and race. The reason for their influence helps define the problems that radicals
in English departments face in trying to find a means to circulate their ideas. I would
argue that feminist critique is influential not for what it means to English, although it
attempts to challenge much that is foundational to the discipline, but because of what
it means to a whole emerging economy of gender politics in our society. There is
little evidence to suggest that feminist theory will fundamentally change the practice of
English. Feminists construct literary categories for their work and produce different

but authorized readings of sanctioned texts. The difference is that their critique

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engages issues of cultural identity in a way that has little to do with English and the
literary. The historical situation is in the society, not in the discipline. The problem
is that English studies, as a discourse and a practice, fails to engage vital social forces.

Radical critiques have done much to advance serious reform in the discipline.
By challenging the progressive assumptions of cultural value, Giroux, Michael Apple,
and Stanley Aronowitz, for example, have made it clear that teaching is always done
in the interest of some social order. In composition, Ira Shor and James Berlin have
mounted concrete and viable challenges to the composition industry, and J. Elspeth
Stuckey in The Violence of Literacy, has exposed the way literacy is used as a weapon
in this society. But reform of the discipline does not necessarily translate into social
change, change in the way that knowledge is produced and valued. Susan Miller
makes just this point in Textual Carnivals, documenting the way that composition
isolates the "low" texts produced by students from the "high" texts of literary studies.
Not only does composition naturalize the exclusion of student voices from meaningful
textual production, Miller argues that it reinforces the subjectivities that define
authorship, the right of expert expression. What all of these critiques have in common
is that they share, even when they wish to change or discredit it, an exaggerated sense
of the importance of English. Indeed, as Widdowson remarked, the discipline has
grown to undreamed of proportions at precisely the moment it finds itself in crisis.
What is missing from these critiques of disciplinary practice is a way of explaining
and exploiting the contrary realities of English.

Ultimately, radical critique preserves more of what Toulmin calls the "timbers

of modernism" than it changes. Radical critique preserves a sense of intellectual

49

privilege and practice that all too conveniently substitutes for the hegemonic practices
it calls into question. This form of critique does not move any closer to a new
definition of language and aesthetics, one that honors the lived experience of the vast
majority of people, and thus preserves a broader sense of culture. It does not
construct a new way of understanding how we read, including the way that radical
critique creates and privileges a whole new set of subjectivities. In short, radical
critique has not built a new practice. It has changed the terms and focus of the
theoretical component, but it has left the institutional practices that support it (and give
this new clerisy tenure) in place.

In Work Time Evan Watkins develops a critique that evaluates the cultural
role of English. While it is true that Watkins’ own proscriptions are clearly radical
and Gramscian in their scope, his analysis of English suggests a situation at once more
troubling and potentially more exploitable. To exploit it fully requires more than
Watkins is willing to offer, but his analysis opens a new line of critique, a new way of
thinking about the crisis in English. Watkins is concerned with English as a site of
cultural work. Criticism, theory, and publication are only the most obvious, and the
most glorified, examples of what work in English is all about. Committee meetings,
memos, comments on student papers, and letters of recommendation also find their
way into Watkins’ analysis. What emerges is a critique that focuses on "circulation,"
both in the sense of what circulates to and within English departments and the
evaluations that circulate out of the department.

The multiple activities of work in English are all in one or another involved

with ’value:’ aesthetic, moral, political, social, critical, or whatever, work in

50

English, in this broad sense again, is ideological work. What is circulated
directly as a result of work in English, however, are not values but evaluations.
. . . What the workplace of education requires from the English instructor,
however, is the evaluation of the student. The ’concrete labor’ of instruction
may - or it may not - reflect dominant cultural values, may or may not attempt
a massive critical ’deconstruction’ of the ’very notion’ of value, but it will be
passed on as an evaluation. (90)
What Watkins makes clear in passages such as these is that the "wor " required of
English is not so much concerned with education as it is with evaluation. At least, the
educational role it fulfills is more engaged with the circulation of evaluation than
value. Ohmann noted in English in America that English lacked a coherent core, a
unifying method and theory that organized and condensed the knowledge of the
discipline. One way to read this is to simply imply, as Graff does, that the discipline
needs a new center, a clearer idea of what it is and does, or that the problem can be
solved. Another way to read this situation is that it is not a problem at all, that
English is an exact fit for the contradictory roles assigned to it. From this perspective
the crisis in English has less to do with factors within the discipline than it does with
the larger cultural definitions of education it serves. Watkins makes it clear that what
is expected of practitioners is not necessarily what they value or consider to be
important. He also makes it clear that even radical and oppositional practices are
tolerated, outside of an editorial jab from columnists and politicians, as acceptable
definitions of "work," as long as it can be evaluated.

It would be difficult to imagine an emerging discipline tolerating the

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methodological disparity found in English departments. This situation could be an
example of what needs to be fixed, or it could be a sign that more is at stake than the
internal consistency of the discipline. Watkins refers to English an "intraeducational
discourse," by which he means that our evaluations are not part of the production of
cultural value or what Adomo called the "culture industry," they are not in any
significant way public. Watkins wryly notes that no one asks prospective accountants
about Shakespeare. No one cares if a job applicant thinks the plot of Romeo and
Juliet is too improbable. In this sense, whether a student receives a B for a New
Critical explication of "Frost at Midnight" or for a Marxist critique of Coleridge’s
theory of language is of no consequence. All that matters is the B.
[I]n current circumstances, "public critic" names a no longer available potential
of work to produce general, cultural values. Whether or not, historically,
literary work ever engaged in such production with authority is less important
than the fact it is now conceptually incapacitated from doing so. For rather
than step into the cultural "vacuum" left by the fragmentation of knowledges
across the educational structure of the university, criticism instead condemned
itself to a voluntary suicide by collapsing attention to larger social and cultural
ends back into an relentless proliferation ofspecialized techniques and
methodologies of work. The result was supposed to look like other disciplines:
instead, and quite rightly from its perspective, educational management treats
literary study like a pseudo discipline, and students treat it as an easy grade on
their way to more consequential things. (207)

Remarking that education is "a place where, with still very few exceptions, you learn

52

your place" (258), Watkins goes on to show how English plays into the hands of the
dominant culture. From this perspective, his work bears less resemblance to Gramsci
than to the French ethnographer Pierre Bourdieu. As an "intraeducational" discourse,
English creates a certain kind of academic and cultural capital. What English provides
is a site for creating, sanctioning, and circulating distinctions between students. The
distinctions only have exchange value because the "pseudo discipline" that creates
them is not connected to the creation of cultural value. In other words, English plays
more of a role in the creation and maintenance of social distinction than in the
production of knowledge.

As Ohmann observed almost twenty years ago, and as Watkins continually
reminds us, the progressive nature of knowledge in English is an illusion. There is no
use value to either the New Critical explication of "Frost at Midnight" or the Marxist
critique of Coleridge’s idea of language. Each can be taught and performed well or
poorly, but neither can make a real claim to cultural significance. Indeed, the fact that
the same department would tolerate or value both approaches is a sign that what is at
stake here has more to do with social control than cultural value. The significant act
is the act of evaluation, the grade given the student, and not the performance or its
content. As Bourdieu points out, capitalistic societies depend on distinctions to
function. The more invisible class distinctions are, the more important institutional
evaluations become in creating apparently neutral and meritorious distinctions.

What this part of Watkins’ critique does is to raise serious doubts about
English as a site of any meaningful resistance to hegemonic constructs. Although I

take his point to be that it is precisely this social sorting we can use our work to

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resist and challenge, his own analysis makes that view problematic. If English is a
site of cultural evaluation, even radical and resistant pedagogies eventually legitimize
and reinforce that system with their evaluations. In fact, the more esoteric and radical
theories, beside the glarnor and recruitment potential Watkins recognizes in them, may
harm exactly those students the theory seeks to advantage. Work Time extends two
existing critiques of the limitations of literature. One of those critiques is the radical
dismissal of the "literary" as a category of inherent value, as Terry Eagleton suggests
in Literary Theory: An Introduction. The other is Peter Burger’s critique of the avant-
garde. In both instances, the social dimensions usually attributed to literature are
challenged and diminished. Watkins’ critique opens the possibility that any work in
English, and not just certain types of work in English, suffers from the same
restrictions.

Zavarzadeh and Morton have made a case very similar to Watkins’ by
suggesting that the literary represents a category of containment. Part of this analysis
is based on the identification of the "literary" with bourgeois subjectivity. In that
form the argument is well known. What they suggest that might extend this analysis
is that it also makes a political reading of other texts "non-knowledge," an
inadmissible discourse. Combining this perspective with Watkins’ raises the
possibility that only discourses that produce differences, and not discourses or readings
that promote equality, can produce knowledge. A version of this argument is made by
Sandra Harding in her attack on the strong sense of objectivity (439).

Burger’s critique of the avant- garde reinforces Watkins’ analysis from another

perspective. Burger argues that the "institution" of art has severed its ties, through the

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self-critical avant-garde, to social production. While individual works may challenge
dominant values, art as an institution is unable to do so. The individual works can be
accepted or ignored, but because modern art is self-referencing, that acceptance or
rejection has no impact on cultural values. Work in English, following Watkins’
analysis, is similar to Burger’s view of art. It marks a cultural space of tension and
subjectivity, but not a site that can be used to challenge the hegemony of the dominant
culture. This need not be read, as Fredric Jameson does in Postmodernism or, The
Logic of Late Capitalism, to mean that all culture is determined by late capitalistic
mass culture. It may simply mean that a whole area of abstract and excess labor is no
longer connected in the way it once was to the emergent production of meaning.
Instead, English and modernist art mark areas of production that produce only
exchange value because they no longer engage the lived experience of most of those
in society. They are no longer vital sites of cultural transmission.

From these perspectives, the crisis in English looks much different. The
meltdown is not so much a product of the discipline as it is a material change in the
location of production. More specifically, education has, as Watkins notes, passed by
English in the search for more reliable and scientific forms of knowledge. By setting
itself up as an oppositional discourse, English, and the human sciences in general,
conceded the ground from which a meaningful resistance could be staged. It cannot
now regain that ground without changing its own site and definition of work. At best,
it represents a liberal relativism, and at worst an anachronism. If there was a parallel
moment in the history of English studies, it might well have been the shift in power

from the philologists to the literary critics, when literary studies displaced the

55
traditions of language study privileged by philology with literary formalism.

In a last chapter that never delivers the promised sense of resistance, Watkins
tries to forge a sense of purpose for work in English. When he says, talking about the
value of abstract labor in English, that "I can’t think it worthwhile to give up that
advantage (264),” his search is over. Watkins makes too strong a case against just the
sort of resistance he suggests, denying his own analysis of the cultural space English
inhabits. Instead of running from this conclusion, as Watkins does in his last chapter,
there is much to gain by embracing it. What elevates Work Time above other
critiques is the clear institutional position of English that emerges. English, as
Watkins amply demonstrates, is no longer the site of cultural production it assumes
itself to be. English is allowed to be such an unkempt discipline precisely because
what we teach is not very significant: all that really matters is that we pass on
reasonably discriminate evaluations that help "educational managers" sort students.
That, in the end, is probably the best explanation of why we are allowed to teach such
diverse and contradictory versions of our knowledge.

The same analysis applies to composition. Indeed, as Wallace Douglas and
others have pointed out, composition was the foundation of English departments, and
it is still what most of our colleagues and the public believe our primary responsibility
to be. Stuckey and Brian Street, to name two recent and pointed attacks on
assumptions about the value of literacy, have demonstrated that literacy still lags far
behind race, gender, and class as predictors of social success. And Susan Miller and
Lynette Hunter have argued that composition protects the academy by managing the

number of students admitted to advanced education. Learning how to write is still, in

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most places, a matter of learning language etiquette, not a matter of challenging what
Dennis Baron calls the "linguistic equilibrium." Composition may be the most
blatantly oppressive means in English of sorting students. This is particularly true in
community colleges, where the death sentence of developmental writing is still a key
element in what Brint and Karabel refer to as "managing ambition." Composition,
according to Shor, helps impose a "culture of silence." Finally, while other disciplines
are more than willing to pawn off the responsibility for teaching students how to write,
they are unwilling, except in the most limited and prescriptive sense, to transfer
authority for evaluating what constitutes an acceptable discourse to the English
department.

Work Time provides a view of English that makes progressive and radical
critiques, including much of Watkins’ own, seem myopic in scope. Functionally,
English is not part of the knowledge and meaning making formations of this culture:
it is only part of the educational function. If that seems nonsensical, it is only because
we fail to realize that the hegemony so many theorists speak of is no longer centered
in the same institutions that ensured its dominance in earlier capitalistic formations.
This is not to say that schooling is no longer a powerful form of socialization; it is,
for it is still true that individuals will be influenced and perhaps even transformed
through their contact with English studies, but that influence will not transfer as a
disciplinary entity, as a discourse, to the larger social conflicts over what counts as
knowledge. Even the boundaries of humanistic discourse, the dichotomies that focus
on the human/animal, nature/culture, man/machine relationships are, as Donna

Haraway points out, more of a detriment than an asset in understanding our current

57

situation. Being part of the educational project is only meaningful, in the way that
both progressive and radical critics see their work as meaningful, if that work is
situated in the culture industry, in the discourses that determine what is and what is
not articulated, valued, and held as true. English is not so situated.

If English is to be more than an agency of social stratification it must accept its
current condition, rather than wistfully pursuing the lost forms of culture influence
from its past. It makes no sense at all, from the walled off corridors of English
departments, to mount any "oppositional" discourse. English must first reorient itself
around principles that change or at least challenge assumptions about education, the
way schools teach and conceptualize knowledge and language. It must take stock of
skills and practices that promise to be useful for an attack on educational (and social)
structures now in place, and be willing to part with those practices and privileges that
are no longer useful. Contrary to what Watkins assumes, only by changing the
definition of "work" in English can the discipline play any role at all in cultural
critique and production.

The English cultural critic Raymond Williams represents one way of
supplementing Watkins’ diminished view of culture. Williams was instrumental in the
formation of Culture Studies and with it the intellectual framework for looking at the
way language and literature function in society. Although his work is now cited only
on occasion, even by those who owe their academic standing to his groundbreaking
work, it is difficult to focus the present crisis in English without Williams’
contributions. Because he never developed a theory, specifically one compatible with

the current emphasis on late capitalism, and because his work included material

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accessible to lay audiences, Williams is difficult for academics to appropriate. More
to the point, perhaps, he does not require the quasi-religious referencing that Marx, for
instance, still enjoys. Williams is so much a part of this debate that mentioning him is
only occasionally necessary.

What is necessary, however, is to understand how Williams changed the nature
and scope of the discussion about culture. He has been called, most notably by his
prize student Terry Eagleton, a "left Leavisite”(C I 22). Just as F.R. Leavis waged a
campaign for a "national culture," Williams situates his sense of politics and resistance
in the role that a received and selective tradition plays in society. In Culture and
Society, Williams explores how this tradition was constructed. His approach differs
from Marxist critics in two ways. Unlike Georg Lukacs, for example, for Williams it
was never just art (in Lukacs’ case the novel) but the institutional uses of art that was
important. Unlike more doctrinaire approaches, particularly those following an
Althusserian bent, Williams never reduced art to ideology. He began teaching in the
Adult Education programs following WWII and always made education central to his
project. In his work, art and ideology are never free or universal abstracts, but are
always socially engaged, part of a living culture.

By questioning and then challenging the way that literature functioned in a
minority culture, Williams made it possible to ask the question at the heart of this
debate: Who benefits by having English taught this way? Williams points out that one
of his "keywords," Literature, is a creation of late origin. More to the point, he
describes the advantage that Literature has over the older concept of literature

(meaning all published work) in the formation of a hegemony intended to intimidate

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and suppress open participation in society. In raising the question of whose culture,
for what purpose, Williams helps frame many of the current debates in the discipline.

Key among those debates is the evolving difference between, in Williams’
words, "indoctrination" and "education." His challenge to the more doctrinaire
applications of the "base" and "super-structure" model of Marxist critique opened a
window of inquiry that is concerned with the present and not just the past or a
predictable future. One alternative that Williams creates is what he calls a "structure
of feeling."

If the social is always past, in the sense that it is always formed, we have

indeed to find other terms for the undeniable experience of the present, not

only the temporal present, the realization of this and this instant, but the
specificity of recent being, the inalienable physical, within which we may
indeed discern and acknowledge institutions, formations, positions, but not

always as fixed products. (ML 128)

By concentrating on the "lived experience" of culture and not just a "selective
tradition," Williams helps create a sense of practice that respects the students’ "more
basic right to define the questions"(PM 157).

It is that sense that should drive any attempt to rethink or restructure English
studies. The goal is not to simply construct more specialized and esoteric positions,
but to direct the consequences of theory, particularly theories of language, into the
creation of a new intellectual practice. In Williams’ view, an "emergent" field of
practice clearly defined new responsibilities.

[T]aking the best we can in intellectual work and going with it in a very open

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way to confront people for whom it is not a way of life, for whom it is not in

any probability a job, but for whom it is a matter of their own intellectual

interest, their own understanding of the pressures on them, pressures of every

kind, from the most personal to the most broadly political. (PM 162)
Williams brings a clear sense of the need for an intellectual practice and not merely a
new theory of language and culture. From this perspective, any attempt to critique
and reformulate English must address the way textual practice, including shifting and
contested definitions of literacy, education, and reading, matter in the lived experience
of all the people in the culture and not just in the professional experiences of an
interpretive elite or clerisy.

While a much more elaborate narrative of Williams’ importance and
contributions is possible, his inclusion here is meant to position the questions he
considered important at the heart of the current debate. When Said calls for an
"oppositional" criticism or Widdowson promotes a "materialist" use of English they
are occupying a space Williams opened to critique. When Richard Ohmann or Jim
Merod accuse English of being complicit in the racist and imperialist workings of the
state, they are drawing on Williams’ analysis. Even a call for a new consensus, such
as the one made by Gerald Graff, echoes Williams’ condemnation of Cambridge
English as an institution "with only the past to win."

The issue here is not really the importance or impact of any theory or school.
While the effects of Marxist, Feminist, and New French Theory are significant,
concentrating on the theory obscures the question of what role English plays, as a

discipline and as a discourse, in the social production of knowledge. A theory may

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well produce dramatic changes, bold new readings, or even innovative pedagogies, but
all of those intellectual productions are still normalized by the institutional position of
English. By the foregrounding Raymond Williams’ concerns about the role English
plays in cultural formations, the state of English is easier to analyze. It is, finally, what
a society makes of the critical readings and the theories that produce them that
matters.

It is instructive to note that Williams failed to revitalize Cambridge English.
Even Culture Studies, which might be considered a significant break with traditional
practice, failed to live up to Williams’ expectations, if the essays published
posthumously in The Politics of Modernism are any indication. It is unlikey that any
critique of the discipline that leaves foundational assumptions about language and
culture in place will have any greater success. Williams’ work traces the limits of
Marxist approaches that substitute one idea of minority culture for another, and it
problematizes the relationship between theory and practice. Working from Williams’
view of culture, it is more important to uncover and describe the interactions,
interpretations, conditions, and resistances already in existence than to abstract and
totalize those relationships in social theory. In short, the limits of Williams’ success
in promoting his own agenda underscore the necessity of making new definitions of
language and culture fundamental to a new practice.

Watkins is right when he says in the introduction to Work Time that we cannot
change the work of English by "simply rethinking the discipline." No amount of
theoretical gymnastics can breach the barrier between English and the cultural

production of knowledge. What has to change is the "work" itself. To clearly

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understand the implications of that change, the role of language, intellectual privilege,
and aesthetics have to be examined. One of the main contact points between
Gramscian intellectual practice and Amoldian humanism is the belief in intellectual
privilege and transcendence. The traditional position is, in some variety or another,
similar to the one Murray Krieger traces in Theory of Criticism. Krieger makes the
case, which will be interrogated at length in a later chapter, that today’s critic is the
rightful heir to Coleridge and Arnold. The critics’ role is to function as elite readers;
they make up a priest class to provide the "control" that I.A. Richards was so
concerned about. On the other side of the coin is the image of the modern intellectual
vanguard, standing against the mindless corruption of mass society. Both positions
assume a social function for art that can be appropriated by the critic/intellectual. This
assumption, as we have seen, is problematic.

First, as Burger has argued, the autonomy granted to art in the modern period
severed its ties to the larger community or society. Aestheticism, far from
representing art as religion as Arnold might have hoped, marks the end of the social
function of art. As art became a "portrayal of bourgeois self-understanding,”(48) and
as the avant—garde pushed the self-critical and self-reflexive projects of modernism, art
lost the cultural forum that literary studies still presumes on. Individual works may
still exhibit social tension, but the "institution of art" has lost the ability to refer to
anything other than art. In the consumer driven societies of "late capitalism" two
options emerge in the treatment of art. Either it becomes ideologically determinate,
following the path of Lukacs and, in a more sophisticated vein, Jameson, or it it

becomes fragmented and individualized. In the first case, the critic/intellectual must

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assume some "untranscendable horizon"(PU 10), to quote Jameson, against which the
array of works, methods, and styles makes sense. Non-transcendable horizons are hard
to come by in the postmodern era, and they are all exclusionary, at least in the sense
that some readings have to be suppressed for the sake of the historical narrative. If
the fragmented and individualized route is taken, all claims of cultural coherence are
negated. In either case, art and literature lack the solidarity that humanist agendas
such as the Newbolt Report in Britain and the Great Books initiative in American
schools assumed. The point here is that by formulating itself as an oppositional
discourse to science, literature, and the human sciences in general, lost touch with
knowledge production in the culture. Progressive and radical critiques can only
circumvent this situation by making the broader cultural test, and not individualistic
and self-referential works of art, as the object of their work. In the same way,
criticism that seeks to base Marxist or feminist theories in literature is eventually
thwarted, not necessarily by the inadequacy of the theory, but by the cultural poverty
of the site of the work.

A second reason to be skeptical of the intellectual formations found in radical
and progressive critiques has to do with the transcendence and privilege of their
positions. Watkins’ work, for example, is Open to the same line of criticism that
Jacques Ranciére levels against Bourdieu. Bourdieu proved, quite convincingly, that
the French system of exams was heavily biased in favor of the upper classes. While
that hardly comes as a surprise, what Ranciére objected to was that it was Bourdieu
and not the oppressed students who benefited, just as it is Watkins, and not the

working stiffs he patronizes in his last chapter, who reaps the rewards, such as they

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may be, from his analysis in Work Time. In the same way that Mary Louise Pratt
demonstrates that language gives the male gynecologist domain over his patient’s
bodies, over their own experiences, Bourdieu and Watkins own the experiences of the
people they profess to help by illuminating their plight. Knowledge in this system is
only a marker of exchange. No matter how sympathetically they situate themselves,
radical and progressive critiques that foreground the critic/intellectual, produce
"academic capital" but no real change. In English this situation includes the
suppression of the experiences of the other(s) by censoring their voices and language.
The message that emerges from Work Time is that English must address the
distance between its rhetoric and its practice. As an intraeducational discourse,
English is most effective not by challenging social structures to which it is only
weakly and tangentially connected, but by challenging the gap between itself and the
sanctioning and production of knowledge. The obvious line of attack is language. In
the theories of language that have emerged in this century, English has the tools to
challenge rather than run from the hegemony of science. It has the tools to reclaim
from positivist and supposedly objective discourses the right to critique and define
what it means to know something. By reclaiming a project that once united scientists
and poets, English can challenge the stranglehold of empirical and cognitivist systems.
Any attempt to address the crisis in English studies must begin by recognizing
that the crisis is not internal, not limited to the methodology of the discipline: the very
site and nature of intellectual work has to be changed. This means that appeals to
methods that worked before are doomed to failure. The problem is not how to

construct a new version of literary scholarship, the problem is how to construct an

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entirely different sort of intellectual work, one that is not only viable but social and
political. While some may shrink from that assessment, the critiques examined earlier
warrant that conclusion. It is political to challenge the existing definitions of
knowledge. At the same time, we need a new definition of political criticism. The
intellectual privileges and historical determinism of Marxism are too confining and
Hegalian for a postmodern landscape. What the theories of language developed in this
century reveal is that with any knowledge based in language there is no authority that
can deliver unambiguous meaning. Nor can knowledge and social practice simply be
collapsed into the "text." There are material and historical relationships of power and
privilege that any new method must interrogate and contest. In short, there should be
a place for both political and ludic practice. The problem with both forms of critique
is their insistence that they are the only form of critique.

The anathema of Enlightenment thought is relativity. We have been locked in
a struggle to determine what system or authority should be transcendent. To avoid the
social consequences of language, we have promoted a science devoid of all but the
most functional language. Even that language, however, is too much. Science has to
be held accountable for its own rhetorical moves, as Harding and Haraway have
attempted. In the past, English and the humanities have tried to oppose science with
an alternate, aesthetic, truth. That truth has been discredited, and it no longer marks
anything of significance in our social landscape. A new opposition, one similar to
feminist standpoint epistemologies and efforts to create a successor science, is needed.
That effort will depend on very different intellectual practices.

English and the humanities can no longer try to match one set of truths against

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another in some fragmented social consciousness. Instead, we have to engage the
changes that Hayles details as the tools for a new model of thought, models based on
complementary and complex systems. The way to do that is through the educational
system, but the cost will be high. A postmodern practice grounded in these changes
would contest rather than preserve literary distinctions, and it ought to abandon time-
honored assumptions about aesthetic value. Finally, the intellectual privilege Watkins
could not find it worthwhile to change must be surrendered. If the progressive and
radical critiques of English prove anything, they prove the failure of clinging to old
categories of knowledge in the face of new realities. Raymond Williams is worth
remembering here, because in The Long Revolution he sketched the gradual changes
that material and intellectual conditions made in education and democracy. By his
telling, the story has been slow but positive so far. We are not guaranteed the next
phase. Like monks in the eleventh century, the authorities we recognize have
collapsed around us. Our choices are to continue doing what is familiar but
unsuccessful or to forge, as the monasteries in the eleventh and twelfth century did, a
new intellectual vision.

Examples of a new vision can be found in critiques that make language,
cultural critique, education, and literacy narratives their focus. As such, while none of
these critiques becomes what Widdowson calls the "hit man" of discipline, they all
move the site and means of cultural transmission out of literature and composition and
into a broader cultural context. In making this move, they identify one way that a
postmodern practice can emerge by shifting the emphasis of study away from

"selective" linguistic and textual practices which reinforce one form of social order

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and toward the study of how language and culture are shaped by linguistic and textual
practices. This move opens up the entire cultural arena rather than focusing on a rear
guard action to defend one particular, problematic, and oppressive definition of culture.
It also helps define ways to use and historicize the work already done in the field as
part of this process.
Richard Ohmann’s return to the issues that troubled him in English in America
gives his second take on the subject in Politics of Letters a decidedly public focus.
In an epoch when so much of the language students hear or read comes from
distant sources, via the media, and when so much of it is shaped by advertisers
and other corporate experts to channel their thoughts and feelings and needs, I
think it a special pity that in English teachers turn students away from critical
scrutiny of the words in their heads, especially from those that are most heavily
laden with ideology. When in the course of clarity or liveliness we urge them
toward detail, surfaces, the sensory, as mere expansion of ideas or even as a
substitute for abstraction, we encourage them to accept the empirical
fragmentation of consciousness that passes for common sense in our society,
and hence to accept the society itself as just what it most superficially seems to
be. (250)
Ohmann opens up a sense of cultural and social conflict that is more productive than
Graff manages. Ohmann includes literacy myths, popular culture, composition, and
critiques of mass culture that go beyond the bounds of literature or the "cultural text."
He warns of the way that "in the cause of improving their skills we may end up

increasing their powerlessness" (251). It is an argument anyone willing to teach the

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traditional language arts should consider.

Henry Giroux develops many of these themes in Border Crossings: Cultural
Workers and the Politics of Education. Giroux sees the educational project as
transformative, a place to directly contest the means and outcomes of teaching and
knowledge production.

Pedagogy is about the intellectual, emotional, and ethical investments we make

as part of our attempt to negotiate, accommodate, and transform the world in

which we find ourselves. The purpose and vision that drive such a pedagogy
must be based on a politics and view of authority that link teaching and
learning to forms of self-expression and social empowerment, that argue for
forms of community life that extend the principles of liberty, equality, and

justice to the widest possible set of institutional and lived relations. (81)
While there is sometimes a sense that Giroux believes that these changes can simply
be called forth, his formations clearly outline what the struggle is about. From his
perspective, it is obvious that better literature or composition courses will not address
the way that language functions in the cultural and political struggles over more open
access and definition of power. Giroux makes the political focus of postmodern
practice, its debt to feminism, and the goals of a democratic pedagogy clearer.

In Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics, Michael
Bérubé argues that the political dimension of cultural work is already badly neglected.
In his telling of it, the consequence of seeing the struggle as one involving traditional
sites of cultural production, and only those sites, is a gap between the claims and the

reality of radical politics. As Bérubé puts it, "it’s one thing to realize that intellectual

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work is political, or can serve various political ends; it’s another thing to think you’ve
conquered hegemony just by talking about it" (154). Instead, Bérubé analyzes the way
the extreme right has dominated the discussion and definition of political positions,
making it crucial for leftist intellectuals to help maintain and redefine the center. This
work preserves the distinctions between legitimate positions and give them room to
struggle against and contest conservative rhetoric that collapses all distinctions into the
"liberal left." For Bérubé, this accentuates the need for popularizing academic work.
The popularization of theory, in other words, goes to the heart of contemporary
academe’s claims to intelligibility; and if our academic criticism cannot be
popularized, then we who champion ’cultural studies’ and ’interdisciplinarity’
should give up the self-congratulatory claim to have broken with narrow
specializations and arbitrary exclusions of academic disciplines. I’m making a
Bakhtinian claim here: unless theory-speak gets translated into demotic
vulgarisms it don’t, as another Duke once said, mean a thing. It just doesn’t
signify at all. (164)
Bérubé makes Watkins definition of work in English even more problematic, pushing
it closer to the public uncertainty Watkins describes in advertising. The key here is to
see ways that shifting both the focus and site of critical practice creates a new space,
one very different from the closed discourses of a selective tradition.
Postmodern societies not only create different, more confused and confusing,
subjectivities, they create them in different ways and different cultural formations.
Too many of the radical critiques of English studies simply ignore that fact or believe

that talking about it changes it. Instead, a postmodern revision of the discipline must

 

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engage the real and dynamic social forces that define public and political life. It must
challenge the way that literacy, reading, and writing are part of the way education
controls, or attempts to control, often for hidden interests, subjectivity and expression.
What follows is an argument for a practice informed but not limited by theory.
In a postmodern era, the emphasis must be placed on the continual creation of
meaning, an eternal return to the moment of empowered expression, and not on the
systematic certainty of closure. English should evolve toward a textual practice that
emphasizes the democratic urge for inclusion that Williams highlights in The Long
Revolution. Just as writing and reading literary texts in the vernacular displaced an
elite and more limited tradition of recitation in Latin and Greek, a postmodern practice
would replace the bourgeois reading of the canon, the master’s texts, with a broader
cultural text and the promise of new textual production. To fulfill this promise,
radical critiques of English must create a new genealogy, one more in line with
Miller’s camivalized retelling of the roots of composition. A new practice requires a
new legitimizing narrative, one willing to risk the assumed privileges of English and

engage the issues of language, aesthetics, and intellectual practice in new ways.

Chapter Three

LANGUAGE AND THE SOCIAL

The question of language has always been at the heart of English studies,
although practitioners of both Composition and Literary Studies have obscured the
importance of the Enlightenment struggle with and critique of language in the
formation of the discipline. Indeed, one of the ironies of the recent success of what
Crews derisively refers to as the “new orthodoxy” of poststructuralism is that it
reinforces the primacy of language critique over the inherently limited categories of
composition and literature. The only way around the free fall of poststructuralism is
the creation of an alternative theory of language that accounts for the conflicting
strains of the Enlightenment view of language. This is a point all too often lost on
those who would oppose the admitted excesses of poststructuralism by reinstating
traditional or selective traditions that have their own problematic relationships with
alternate branches of existing critiques of language.

In a century obsessed with failed systematic attempts to bring language to heel,
there is no hope of addressing every theory or approach. The focus here will be on
trying to tease out a new critique of language based on the primary areas of dispute,
areas that reflect the deeply conflicted ways we envision not only language but
subjectivity and culture. This genealogy will begin by trying to sort out the
affiliations and lines of descent underlying the current tradition, particularly those from
within the tradition of English and literary studies. But postmodern theories of

language must also concern themselves with the radical changes in the material

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conditions of communication, in the way languaging is extended through technology.
A new critique of language must, finally, bring humanist intellectual practices in
balance with the physical and biological sciences or risk becoming the latest version of
a discredited scholasticism.

Trying to come to some clear understanding about the issue of language is
essential for a number of reasons. Most obvious, perhaps, is the role language plays
in the specialized functions of literature and composition, even though most
practitioners in both fields have expressed no recognizable theory of language. One of
the intriguing problems in trying to address this issue is the lack of any serious
discussion about language in these fields. Most disciplinary histories pay little
attention to the way literature and composition reflect positions on language and
sociality. Beyond these issues, however, a clear understanding of language is central
to any discussion of culture or cultural theory. The way we construct theories of
language, the models we use and the assumptions we make, are critical to the way we
understand what society is and what intelligent behavior within it entails. The
attempts to treat language as a single field phenomenon, as a thing or a tool,
undermine this inquiry as well as the social constructionist elements of
postmodernism, to say nothing of the democratic potential they imply. Without
addressing the issue of language, there is no way to defend our pedagogical practices,
determine what our goals are, or assess our progress. Some (often unnamed)
understanding of language supports any practice of ‘English,’ and only by exposing
and altering that understanding is a productive postmodern practice possible.

It is easier, perhaps, to begin with the current conditions of language theory

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and their manifestations than it is to jump back into the Enlightenment struggle with
the subject. In both cases, however, the important issue is how a theory of language
underwrites a theory of culture and naturalizes the site and means of communication.
That is, if a positivist view of language and culture is in force, a view that argues,
pace Locke, for a perfectible use of language and reason in public affairs, reading and
writing become governed by rules and technologies of control. The goal in these
versions of language and cultural theory is to control thought and public expression by
controlling language. In the opposite direction, relativist claims of a social
construction of language, such as those found in Rorty, leave us nothing more than
strong but isolated readers with their own final vocabularies. This view can represent
what McGowan refers to as negative freedom, the freedom of withdrawal,
underwritten by a theory of language that makes incommensurability its main feature.
Either view has consequences. Every time a composition instructor enforces her
judgment of what constitutes ‘good writing' or a professor of literature imposes her
reading of a text, a theory of language and culture, of order and control, is in
operation.

In this way, among others, theories of language are theories of social and
cultural organization. If postmodernism represents, as I argue it does, a new way of
thinking about order and culture, it must also represent a new way of thinking about
the primary medium of thought and sociability, language. In the past, language
represented either the means of social and institutional control or the medium of social
and representational entropy. In 300 years we went from Locke's attempt to drive the

devil out of the language to the Derridean spectacle of the impossibility of

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signification. While these may seem to be radical opposites, they are connected by the
Enlightenment urge to force language to serve an analytical function. Either those
attempts were successful, leading to the rigid and arid codification of analytic
philosophy, or resisted, leading to the apparent disintegration of language and
referentiality, they share a systematic attitude and approach to the question of language
that must be countered.
COLERIDGE AND THE ROMANTIC CRITIQUE

The roots of the systematic attempts to control language can be seen in the way
three Englishmen, Sir Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
struggled to make language stand for and aid in the reformation of thought and
knowledge. For Bacon, the need to purify or specialize language was part and parcel
of the revolutionary agenda of the new science. In fact, it represents one of the
clearest indicators of the social implications of the new science movement. Locke's
struggle with language is evident in his long Essay 0n Human Understanding in
which the whole third book is dedicated to the problem of words. His concern was to
clarify language for common and rational use. Coleridge, both in his own work and
his work with Wordsworth on the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, pursued a different
version of the common language. It is this critical perspective, as appropriated by LA.
Richards, that underwrites the pretentious of institutional English studies.

This tripartite genealogy of language theory in the English tradition is the focus
of two works by AC. Goodson, Verbal Imagination and a later essay, “Romantic
Theory and the Critique of Language.” His sense of the importance of language

theory to the study of culture and literature reinforces and advances a strain of thought

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about language that both provides a platform for rethinking the assumptions and
approaches we take toward language and makes the consequences of any theory of
language clearer. He does this by providing a radical and strong reading of
Coleridge's intentions and thoughts on the language question. Goodson's reading of
the Coleridgean text is dedicated to the recovery of language and poetry as a social,
and socially significant, operation and against formalist or linguistic reductions of
these questions. He positions Coleridge's mature thoughts on the subject against the
poet's earlier affiliations.
Coleridge's distinctive approach to language emerges in his early responses to
Hartley, Tooke, and Locke. Broadly speaking, his symbolic understanding
represents an effort to save language from fealty to the images of nature, to
save it for drinking. . . For Coleridge it was always a question of ‘how
language and the human mind act and react on each other.‘ The countervailing
emphasis on the ‘best objects from which the best part of language is
originally derived' is what he contested forever after. (xiii)
Goodson thus sets Coleridge against the doctrine of association on one hand and the
appropriation, led by Richards, with which we have become familiar on the other.
Against the isolation of poetry and emotive language of Richards, Goodson crafts a
reading of Coleridge committed to a common and social version of language.
Goodson finally grounds his version of Coleridge's theory of language in the
etymologic of Raymond Williams, creating an alternative genealogy not only for
Cambridge English but for critical theory. Williams's importance to critical theory has

already been broached here, but the link between Williams and Coleridge emphasizes

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the role language plays in the way Williams constructs his idea of culture. Goodson
sees Williams as the rightful heir to a theory of language that preserves the social
vitality of Coleridge’s view of language and which stands against the reductive moves
of Richards.

“Language in history' readily became language as history in Williams's

criticism, and it authorized a reading of literature as social documentary. .

Learning to read in this belated moment meant recapturing the language so that

the common reality could be seen for what it was and finally changed. (61)

It is important for Goodson to be able to find a modern version of the social vitality of
language, to find a situation in which “language ceases to be the property of linguistics
with its endless formalization and reverts to the common resource it has always been”
(74). Williams provides Goodson with a reading of the cultural text that validates the
latter's sense of Coleridge's practice and theory. That link is important, because
without it Goodson would have no lineage to mark its significance to the current state
of criticism and language critique.

Much of Goodson‘s attention in Verbal Imagination is directed toward the
possible survival of poetry after Richards, Leavis, and modern formalism have reduced
or obliterated the unmediated and vital sphere of public poetic expression. In what
Goodson himself refers to as “a plunge into the scholarly fine print(xiii),” Coleridge's
affiliations with Hartley or Tooke are as or more important than the larger spectacle of
the Enlightenment critique of language. That focus is reversed in his essay on
Romantic theory, however. Arguing for a broader view, that is, a view not limited to

a definition of Romanticism based on its putative refusal of extended intellectual

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ambition, Goodson insists we “consider romantic theory as a stage of reflection on the
condition of language, the essential means not only of poetry but politics” (3). In this
view, romantic theory joins and participates in a critique of language which is:
[A]n engine of enlightenment thinking, an essential means of social and
epistemological observation that reaches from Bacon and Locke through to
logical positivism and the language revolution of literary modernism. (4)
In this context Goodson is no longer just concerned with the reputation of the
institutionalized Coleridge, the Coleridge appropriated by Richards, but with
Coleridge's role in the broader discussion of language and cultural value. By weaving
Coleridge's voice back into this dialogue, Goodson manages to recast romantic theory
as an active political and intellectual, as opposed to a merely literary or emotive,
expression.
Pragmatic in temper if metaphysical in aspiration, Coleridge's critique of
language reflects on a changing historical scene. It is committed to politics
and progress as well as to poetry and theology. Philosophical in approach
though not always in method, Coleridge points the way to new dispensations.
(31)
In this narrative, both the importance of the romantic critique of language and
Coleridge's role in articulating it become clear.
Here is the crux of Coleridge's difference. Starting as he does from an
empirical idea of language, with its public vocation in mind, he is committed
with Bacon and Locke to a general reform, an instauration involving the

progress of language toward increasing responsiveness to reason as well as to

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human feeling. Coleridge's allegiance to a socially active rationality would
associate him with Burke, and with the Shelley of the Prometheus Unbound
and perhaps the Defence: political visionaries sacred and profane, joined by a
conviction of the force and use of words. This is the party of eloquence.
Coleridge's defense of the philosophical value of the lingua communis
represents an extension of his commitment to instrumental reason. (39)
This version of Coleridge and the romantics clashes with the version that emphasizes,
as John Stuart Mill does with the phrase “Germano-Coleridgian,” a romantic
sensibility rooted merely in ‘feelings' and poetry. Instead, the struggle with language
becomes a means to reconnect the disparate elements of Enlightenment thought, not in
the manner Mill suggests as a “well rounded” but no less empirical perspective, but in
something approaching a complex social whole. Goodson's reconstruction of that
struggle suppresses the conventional connection with Kant's disinterested idealism and
focuses instead on the vital social and philosophical implications, as his conclusion to
the essay makes clear.
With Coleridge, romantic theory arrives at a defense of ordinary language,
lingua communis, which is neither nostalgic about better tongues (and better
times) nor satisfied with current terms and practices - with modern
understanding as it descends from Bacon. Trying the Tartar's bow involves
him in turning back on their informing example, limiting their authority while
recognizing its lasting value for thinking about conditions. Coleridge's critical
attitude is expressed most effectively and influentially in this line of work,

which owes nothing to Kant's critical philosophy. The real authority of his

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situation is associated with his practice of this socially sensitive line of
reflection on language, literature and culture . . . Wondering about words is the
sign of criticism's concern not only for language in its literary uses, but for
lingua communis and ordinary experience. (42)
The Coleridge that emerges from Goodson's revision of romantic theory is not, of
course, a postmodern or even a pragmatic language theorist, but his theories play an
important role in defining what a postmodern theory of language that is not limited to
nominalist excesses or binary oppositions might take as its starting point. It also
proves that such a theory does not have to appear sui generis. The integration of
linguistic, social, and intellectual forces in Coleridge's thought is a precursor of a
postmodern theory of language committed to reconceptualizing the relationship
between those elements. What Coleridge stands against may be even more significant,
however. By arguing for a common language, he makes the specialization and
rationalization of language suspect. Goodson points to the connections between Locke
and Haberrnas and their attempts to create a public sphere dominated by a rational and
instrumental version of language, a version that would suppress the poetic and
prophetic functions. Coleridge represents the refusal to make that move, the refusal to
make language transparent and rational by making it less, by thinking of the social and
intellectual as limited to the philosophical or scientific. In that sense, even though
pragmatism improves on the techniques of connecting language to social inquiry and
thought, it cannot improve, or perhaps even sustain, the creative energy of romantic
thought

The connection between romanticism and pragmatism is not new. Cornel

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West, for instance, has placed Emerson in a central role in the development of
American Pragmatism. The importance of that connection to the question of language
is significant because pragmatism, particularly in the work of Peirce and Dewey,
extends the notion that language and thought are inseparable. As John Sheriff has
noted:

Peirce's theory of signs does not deny that ‘from the moment that there is

meaning there are nothing but signs,‘ but his definition does not separate the

mind made world from the “real world' in which we live, and move, and have

being.(48)
Peirce's sense of the semiotic is expansive and natural. He turns to nature and the
natural sciences to find grounding for his theories. As such, his views on language
reflect the way signs are connected in the inquiry and life of communities, and not the
arbitrary nature of signs. Peirce's triadic sign, unlike Saussure's binary sign, is always
connected to what Williams liked to call the “lived experience” of the person or
community expressing it. The power of language lies not in its exteriority but in its
link to human intelligence, the will and ability to know and participate in our own
surroundings, natural and cultural.

There is no nostalgia here for a time before language was corrupted. In its
place are the emergent attempts to think of language not as a unified and external field
of its own but within the complex and intricate web of social life. For Coleridge and
Peirce language could not be removed from experience and thought, the linguistic
equivalent of the mind/body split, or simplified into formulas and codes. In their

view, there is no ‘out there' from which to view the phenomenon because we are

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always already inside the equation. From this perspective the spectacle of radical
dissonance in signification, certainly the impossibility of signification, is a parlor trick
of little importance. Signification is inevitable, and inevitably varied. Both Coleridge
and Peirce stand at an alternative branch of modern thought that refuses the
fragmentation of Newtonian science. What they bring to the discussion of language is
the insight that language is not, at least in the empirical sense of the word, a thing. It
is, as Williams says, “constitutive and constituting” of social life, the essence of
sociability, and like all living systems resolutely varied. What they cannot bring to the
discussion are models for capturing the complexity they insist is there. Peirce, of
course, tried. He selected his models from the physical sciences of the last century,
however, and that fact means he had to undercut and double-back on himself
constantly. Like Blake, he can ultimately communicate only in a linguistic universe of
his own making, as his tortured nomenclature attests. The way around nominalism
starts here, but it does not find its fullest expression here.

Unfortunately, not all pragmatic attempts to come to grips with language
sustain this effort. The neopragmatic alternative, as expressed by Rorty and Fish,
make the modernist error of assuming that the ‘social construction‘ of language leads
either to the absence of order or the relative order of language games. Rorty
recognizes the futility of trying to find a universal or neutral site to launch a critique
of philosophy, but in the process he surrenders ground that is not under attack. As
McGowan noted, social conventions and constructions are plenty strong, even if they
do not lead to systematic closure. The idea that the “linguistic turn” can lead only to

incommensurate language games or “final vocabularies” of strong poets is true only if

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language is made to fit systems models that separate it from its living social function;
that is, models that attempt to objectify language. It is interesting that Rorty has no
trouble with the concept of individuals but cannot manufacture a social or community
identity for the spoken word. Like Wittgenstein, Rorty's view of language allows for
totally separate ideolects locked in a zero-sum game. The assumption is that language
can be used in isolated contexts that do not depend on a more inclusive view of
language for their vitality and validity. Language communities are not like a chess
match; the rules are not entirely local or closed. Language communities are more like
cells in a larger organism. They may appear to have a specialized function, but the
function only matters in the context of the larger organism. Language communities
cannot withdraw from the larger social arrangements which manifest them without
losing the very reason for their existence.

In contrast to Rorty's radical and dispirited relativism, Fish applies the language
game analogy to the advantage of institutional structures. As I discussed in the last
chapter, Fish's view privileges the power relations already in place. In addition, unlike
the more flexible and inclusive relationship between language and thought both
Coleridge and Peirce champion, Fish's constructions act more like a disciplinary spin-
off of the Sapir- Worph hypothesis, arguing that we can only speak and think within
disciplinary strictures. In this sense he provides an image of language that is the
equally flawed, mirror opposite of Rorty's position. Both language and thought are
constructed within and return to a wider polity, a set of social relationships that are, in
turn, impacted by expression. Fish's view of language at least tries to save a wider

medium for expression, but in the process he creates new manacles for thought and

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expression.

In precisely this way, the neopragmatism of Rorty and Fish replicates the
failure of poststructuralism to conceptualize language as socially constructed without
lapsing into theories that turn that construction into linguistic entropy. A large part of
the problem lies in the models used to represent language, models based more on
closed or mechanistic systems. To preserve the insights of Coleridge and Peirce and
to chart a postmodern course for the study of language and culture, models that are
more attuned to not only complex and chaotic but living systems must be applied.
That is, the first step out of the prison house of language is a step toward recognizing
that any view of language that is just language, just conventions and utterances, is
inadequate. In their place we should use models that honor the triadic relationship
that Peirce suggested and which conceptualize the inevitable drift in signification as a
source of vitality and not entropy. Language must be in a continual state of
disequilibrium in order to function, and no appeal to reason, even “communicative
reason,” or the hope of a new tongue purged of the old riddles of comprehension will
be able to stem the structural drift between living organisms and their environment
that drives the continual changes in the coordination's of behavior and the creation of
perceptions that language involves. In short, language always involves the destruction
as well as the creation of reality, and as such is never static, completely known, or
predictable.

NEW MODELS
Before proposing a new model for thinking about language, a few qualifiers are

in order. First, there is no intent here to suggest that a shift in models is anything like

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a shift in paradigms, for two reasons. First, to return to Toulmin's cautionary
emphasis, is the postmodern refusal to think about starting from scratch or staking out
new territory. There is nothing in a new model of language that cancels out the value
of work done in any number of linguistic and theoretical schools or programs.
Instead, a model of language acts much the way Hayles talks about computerized
fractal constructions, it allows one point of emphasis or focus but it necessarily leaves
other elements out of focus. The second reason for avoiding the connection between a
model and a paradigm is the suspicion, evident in the work of Donald Davidson, for
instance, that the whole notion of a paradigm is misleading. As Kolb illustrated, and
as Williams's views of the cultural dynamic emphasize, our experience is poorly
understood by demanding the limited and totalizing perspective of a paradigm.
Certainly, the twentieth century obsession with trying to systematize language should
serve as a warning.

Instead, it is perhaps better to construct of a new model for thinking about
language more along the lines of what Delueze and Guattari refer to as a “line of
flight.” In A Thousand Plateaus, they adumbrate a pragmatics that works against the
tendency to totalize experience in “planes of consistency” or “plateaus.” One way to
avoid that, or to break it up when it does occur, is to construct a line of flight, a way
to break out of the interior consistency by emphasizing multiple perspectives. In this
view, a new model for drinking about language is more like a “war machine,” a way
of breaking down or “deterritorializing” the language question and the institutions that
house it. It is a way to reshuffle the deck. The goal then is not so much to fully

explain language as it is to shift our perceptions of it and questions about it. In the

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process, we may finally be able to disengage from the entrenched positions taken up
by realist and nominalist camps.

The problem with theories of language in this century has been their inability
to account, except in negative terms, for the unpredictability of language without
losing their sense of order and cohesion. Even the most advanced forms of structural
semiotics or the most torturous moves within the analytic tradition can account for
only small bits of language at a time. That does not mean that those methods are
without merit or that they do not lend insight into the way language functions. They
cannot, however, approach understanding of the polyglot of changing and variable
utterances that make up the common tongue. They cannot, that is, be seen as a way to
promote what Coleridge and Peirce saw as the social and imaginative properties of
language. Throwing away any hope of understanding the social dimension of
language and doubting the possibility of signification, on the other hand, is not so
much a solution as an inevitable phase in attempting to think through the social
dynamic of language. The negative semiotic can dissolve the bonds of the signifier and
the signified, but it cannot explain the continued ability of even very small children to
communicate within some boundary of social and linguistic play. The key to changing
the way we talk about language is to change the way we think about the order and
control of language.

Part of the shift in the way we think about language is foreshaddowed in the
changes in scientific systems. The Newtonian and Cartesian views of the world,
rooted in the categorization of simples and grounded in mutually exclusive categories,

give us one way to think about the world. That view gives us any number of binary

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oppositions - subject/object, mind/bodyl, signifier/signified - that are deeply imbedded

in the way we think about and explain things. The problem, as Hayles has noted
earlier(l67), is that while science has moved away from these models, because they
lack the flexibility and complexity to explain phenomena, the human sciences in
general and language theory in particular have not. Not only binary oppositions but
the space or ‘gap' between them have become the preferred grounds of poststructural
negativity. In either case, the models that these theories are based on have been
supplanted in the sciences. Therefore, one early move in constructing a new way to
think about language is to think about it as a structure of complementary rather than
binary constructions.

Menas Kafatos and Robert Nadeau make this case in The Conscious Universe:
Part and Whole in Modern Physical Theory. They explain the consequences of the
Aspect Experiments and their relationship to the work of John Bell in explaining what
Quantum Mechanics mean. Kafatos and Nadeau use the principle of complementary
growing out of the work of Niels Bohr on the Copenhagen Interpretation as a way of
explaining how categories that exclude each other in any particular action or example
(particle/wave) are still linked in any understanding of the whole system at work.
Kafatos and Nadeau apply this to the question of language.

What is remarkable in our view is that virtually all of the original examples

used by Saussure in support of his conception of the binary opposition between

signifier and signified, and virtually all of the examples that have been

subsequently used to support modifications and refinements of this opposition,

could have and should have been viewed as complementary constructs. One

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excludes the other in a given situation or act of cognition in both operational
and logical terms, and yet the entire situation can be understood only if both
constructs are taken as the complete view of the situation. (135)

They go on to extend the analysis to specifically refute the way Saussure's work finds

expression in deconstructive theories of language.
When deconstructionists raised the objection that binary oppositions between
signifier and signified are not bonded together as some structuralists had
suggested, they were correct in the sense that one tends to exclude the other in
any single act of cognition because they are complementary constructs. Since
the deconstructionists did not apparently realize, however, that they were
dealing with complementary constructs, they moved in another direction - they
posited the existence of a space or gap between oppositions. And it is this
rather disturbing notion advanced by figures like Lacan and Derrida that a
close examination of the structure of linguistic based constructions of reality
leads ultimately to the realization that the constructions reduce to a no-thing, a
nothing, or a void. The way out of this terrible solipsism is, in our view,
rather simple and direct - all one need to do is realize that the fundamental
feature or dynamic in all linguistically-based constructions of reality is, as Bohr
suggested, the logical framework of complementarity. (135)

Kofatos and Nadeau reinforce the earlier observations from Hayles that the attempt to

treat language either through unified-field field theories or to pronounce all order dead

on arrival because of nominalist pretensions both miss the point. The struggle to hold

the global and the local or the specific, context based utterance and a theory of

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language together need not lead to the confusion and negativity it has. The
poststructural semiotic has been invaluable to the genesis of postmodernism. It
brought the social and creative power of language back into play, but it has collapsed
under its own negative assumptions and constructions. It is not, ultimately, a place to
pursue the common language. Physical science, either in Quantum Mechanics or
Chaos Theory, is not an extension but a rebuttal of attempts to treat reality as textual
play.

Here, again, Hayles makes it clear that the appropriations of complex and
chaos theory into arguments about language and culture have often missed the point
and played fast and loose with the theories that putatively form the basis of new
linguistic models.

The universalizing impulse in chaos theory is hard to miss. Surely, chaos

theory would not have attracted the attention it has if it simply confirmed the

obvious, that chaos is disordered. No! What makes it noteworthy is the
discovery of order in the midst of disorder. . . that chaotic systems despite their
inherent instability, share certain universal characteristics. . . As these scientists
use ‘chaos,' it connotes not the unpredictable aspects of disordered systems but

their universal characteristics. (215-216)

The options are not just structural or poststructural. There are ways to think about
systems that are both ordered and chaotic, that produce what Hayles calls “self-
similar” and “iterative” patterns. In short, by updating the models we use we can
honor the significant insights of poststructuralism without surrendering all but a ludic

or ironic sense of order.

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Two quick references to theories of language that seem to honor the notion that
language is ordered through iterative but unpredictable forces is in order here. In both
cases the emphasis is on the complementary nature of language, including impulses
that are entirely local and unpredictable but still iterative and regular enough to be
structurally coherent. The first example is developed early in A Thousand Plateaus by
Deleuze and Guattari and is significant because it presents a pragmatics of variability,
what they call “minority” languages. The second example is M.M. Bakhtin's work on
heteroglossic and monoglossic texts. His work is somewhat more problematic to read
into this narrative because it requires extricating Bakhtin from some earlier
appropriations of his work.

For Deleuze and Guattari, the issues of complex and complementary structures
are part of the struggle between “minor” and “major” languages and the attempt to
construct a pragmatics capable of capturing the variability and multiplicity implied in
those constructions.

But the scientific model taking language as an object of study is one with the

political model by which language is homogenized, centralized, standardized,

becoming a language of power, a major or dominant language. Linguistics can
claim all it wants to be a science, nothing but a pure science - it wouldn't be
the first time that the order of pure science was used to secure the requirements
of another kind of order. . . Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the
normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. . . The

unity of language is fundamentally political. There is no mother tongue, only a

power takeover by a dominant language. . . The scientific enterprise of

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extracting constants and constant relations is always coupled with the political

enterprise of imposing them on speakers and transmitting order-words. (101)
Deleuze and Guattari offer an alternative to what they call the “arborescent” schemes
of Chomsky and linguistic science in general by focusing on the variability, which is
to say the complex and chaotic nature, of language.

The abstract machine of language is not universal, or even general, but

singular; it is not actual, but virtual-real; it has, not invariable or obligatory

rules, but optimal rules that ceaselessly vary with the variation itself, as a game

in which each move changes the rules, (100)

The essence of language in this sense is its inability to be one thing, one field, or an
object of inquiry. Every move in language occludes, momentarily, some of its aspects
and intangibles in order to express others. Our problems, according to Deleuze and
Guattari, are caused by the scientific grid we have tried to place over language to
control it, a move that is characteristic of modernism at its most oppressive and
confused moments. As they note: “You will never find a homogeneous system that is
not still or already affected by a regulated, continuous, immanent process of
variation.” (103).

Throughout A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guatarri play with other
possible constructs - “nomads,” “rhizomes,” “body without organs,” “abstract
machines” - that chip away at delimited and regulated visions of reality. Some of
their constructs are more interesting than others, but their attempts to think about the
variability of language represent one way of constructing a complementary dynamic.

There are not, therefore, two kinds of languages but two possible treatments of

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the same language. Either the variables are treated in such a way as to extract

from them constants and constant relations or in such a way as to place them

in continuous variation. . . Constant is not opposed to variable; it is a treatment
of the variable opposed to the other kind of treatment, or continuous variation.

So—called obligatory rules correspond to the first kind of treatment, whereas

optional rules concern the construction of a continuum of variation. (103)

We can use this perspective to construct what the authors might call a “war machine,”
a way to break up and break through either extreme of language theory. We can read
Deleuze and Guattari as more than just another nominalist position in the radical
negativity of the French semiotic. Their sense of the tension between variability and
consistency is more than a rejection of consistency, it is an alternative pragmatic.

M. M. Bakhtin's name has, of course, been central to the language question for
more than a decade, and while there is much of interest in his work, my focus here is
on the way his constructions reinforce the complementary nature of language. To do
so, however, is to read Bakhtin against his early appropriations. First and foremost,
reading Bakhtin into this narrative requires us to resist the temptation, which in
deterrninist models is a necessity, to force Bakhtin into a univocal position on
language. As Michael Bemard-Donals notes, even the most sophisticated of his
interlocutors “ultimately subsume most of Bakhtin's thinking under a totalizing term,
even if the subsumption takes the guise of ‘dialogizing' the body of
Bakhtin/Voloshinov/Medvedev's work”(l70). The effect is to render Bakhtin's work as
merely a more sophisticated, but no less determinist, model of social indeterminacy.

From the perspective developed in this chapter, however, it should be clear that

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there is an alternate, and I would argue stronger, reading of Bakhtin's endlessly
shifting forces. My goal here is not a detailed analysis of Bakhtin's work, but a quick
glance at his most celebrated categories, heteroglossia and monoglossia. My argument
is that these conditions are more complementary than they are opposite or mutually
exclusive. The tensions that Bemard-Donals identifies as “phenomenological” and
“marxist” in Bakhtin's work are evident in attempts to valorize heteroglossia as an end
in itself. While the artistic merits of heteroglossia, the fact that novels that produce it
do a better job of replicating the fragmented linguistic pallet of modernity, can be
argued, extending that valorization to a social notion of heteroglossia is much more
problematic. More so than Deleuze and Guattari, Bakhtin's conception of the social
seems to demand some monoglossic, some “centripetal” force that is always in
operation. Without it, there is no background against which the utterance works to
bond the speaker and the other together. The poststructural urge to read chaos as
entropic, to free the utterance of its essential social grounding, weakens the impact of
heteroglossia. At any moment, an utterance tends toward one of these states, whether
we frame them, often inaccurately in a technical sense, as heteroglossic and
monoglossic or as centrifugal and centripetal. Each utterance can only be one or the
other at any given moment, but it is the reality of both together that makes either state
meaningful. Perhaps, the best way to read the tensions in Bakhtin is to read them as
complementary constructs.

I am not arguing that Bakhtin would have used these terms. He did not. But
he did refer to “Galilean” shifts in linguistics, and he did argue that he wanted to

reproduce the significant changes that had taken place in science. It is not a stretch to

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read Bakhtin as having a post unified-field theory of language, one in which the
“tensions” are not only unresolvable but essential to the dynamics of the system.
There is an argument to be made that a chaotic and complementary reading of Bakhtin
does more justice and provides more insight into the way he sees language operating
as a cultural artifact than attempts, in Bemard-Donal's terms, to “unify” the disparate
elements of his discourse.

The key point here is that principles of complimentarity and what Prigogine
calls “dissipative” systems, systems that can spontaneously reorganize themselves,
offer an alternative to the split between nominalist and realist positions. A
postmodern theory of language that is not going to go aground on the question of
social construction and free play must look for different ways of organizing and
thinking about systems. As Jim Baggot notes in his review of what Quantum Theory
means to the way we think about and configure reality, these systems replace
“deterrninacy and certainty” with “indeterminacy and probability” (94). But they do
not lead to the entropic free fall that poststructuralism always insinuates is on the
horizon. Even the most cursory glance at the way the sciences construct systems can
offer humanist intellectuals new ways to theorize and construct their practice.

As inviting as concepts from the physical sciences may be, it is the biological
sciences that offer the most complex models that apply to the tensions and constructs
of language, particularly the work of Chilean neurobiologists Humberto Maturana and
Francisco Varela. Their work captures, in a way that models drawn from the physical
sciences cannot, the social dynamic of language that Goodson finds so powerful in

Coleridge and that permeates Peirce's triadic structures. For Maturana and Varela it

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makes no sense to speak of the conflict between nominalist and realist positions
because neither can offer a view of what they call the “structural dynamic” of
language, a dynamic that makes language both individual and social. From their
perspective, language is a biological function that concerns both the individual
(ontogenic) and social (phylogenic) behaviors that construct and maintain human
societies. Our consciousness is not, at least in their terms, understandable outside of
this structural dynamic.
[A]s a phenomenon of languaging in the network of social and linguistic
coupling, the mind is not something that is within my brain. Consciousness
and mind belong to the realm of social coupling. That is the locus of their
dynamic. And as part of human social dynamics, mind and consciousness
operate as selectors of the path which ontogenic structural drift follows.
Moreover, since we exist in language, the domains of discourse that we
generate become part of our domain of existence and constitute part of the
environment in which we conserve identity and adaptation. (234)
For Maturana and Varela language is not a thing or a field unto itself but the essence
of human life. Without it we are incapable of sustaining and coordinating the
behaviors that define as as individuals and as a society.
Every structure is compelling. We humans, as humans, exist in the networks
of structural couplings that we continually weave through the permanent
trophallaxis of our behavior. Language was never invented by anyone only to
take in the outside world. Therefore, it cannot be used as a tool to reveal that

world. Rather, it is by languaging that the act of knowing, in the behavioral

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coordination which is language, brings forth a world. We work out our lives in
a mutual linguistic coupling, not because language permits us to reveal
ourselves but because we are constituted in language in a continuous becoming
that we bring forth with others. We find ourselves in this co-ontogenic
coupling not as a pre-existing reference nor in reference to an origin, but as an
ongoing transformation in the becoming of the linguistic world that we build
with other human beings. (235)
In this version of the social dynamic of language the poles are reversed; it is not the
social that creates the linguistic but the linguistic that creates the social reality.
Maturana and Varela contend that all biological organisms generate, at both an
ontogenic and phylogenic level, an order that defines them against a background or
environment. They call this self ordering “autopoiesis” and it both creates unity
within the organism, including social organisms, and what they call “structural drift,”
which is the iterative break and dislocation between the organism and its environment.
Life is the constant creation and adaptation to manageable states of disequilibrium.
Language is the coordination of the recursive coming in and going out of sync with
the background that conserves our social, and in the process our biological, functions.
It is the ability to both conserve order and adapt that makes continued life possible.
To the degree that language is both a reflection and a creator of this dynamic,
it, too, conserves and adapts. In a Chomskian sense, it conserves an order that insures
its adaptability. To be human is to language, in its most complex, meaning seeking
sense. But language cannot be constricted by rationality if it is to conserve its

adaptability. We cannot stay put, individually or socially, and live. Adaptation

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requires excess signification, the signification of prophecy, poetry, and imagination,
that rejects preexisting mediations and rational prescriptions. Language cannot be
caged, reduced to “order-words,” without losing the adaptive quality that allows us to
change, to drift, or in their terms, to “dance” with our environment. Part of the
changing will be rational, technical, predictable, but part will not. Furthermore, even
when changes we make, individually and culturally, are the result of a rational or
technical move, the change will create a new structural drift that will have both
expected and unexpected consequences.

The sense of language that emerges from Maturana and Varela offers an
alternative postmodern critique of language. This critique preserves, and possibly
extends, the much heralded indeterminacy of language without constructing that
indeterminacy as negative. This critique is thoroughly pragmatic, based as it is on the
structural drift between individual and society and between society and the
environment. Furthermore, a postmodern critique of language grounded in the work of
Maturana and Varela establishes an ethics of communication that answers perhaps the
most damning criticism of poststructuralism. From their perspective, all utterances are
significant, or in Maturana's terms, “not trivial.”

Every human act takes place in language. Every act in language brings forth a

world created with others in the act of coexistence which gives rise to what is

human. Thus every human act has an ethical meaning because it is an act of
constitution of the human world. This linkage of human to human is, in the
final analysis, the groundwork of all ethics as a reflection on the legitimacy of

the other. (247)

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The goal, for Maturana and Varela, is what they call a “knowledge of knowledge,” the
recognition of how we know what we know and how what we know creates the world
we live in. The key is to recognize both the limits and the potentials of the plasticity
of the linguistic domain.

Maturana and Varela construct a different view of society and culture that the
familiar Enlightenment scenario of rational and scientific growth, of a social world
dominated by rational and positive programs advancing some increasingly technical
and empirical view of reality. Even when this vision shatters, it continues to cleave,
as Hayles notes, to a negative cohesion, the tyranny of the local. Maturana and Varela
create multiple realities that are still related, similar to Sandra Harding's use of
standpoint epistemologies, each conserving not only a different set of experiences but
a different way of reasoning about them. In this model, an objective reality is, in
Maturana's terms, a “command for obedience.” As with Deleuze and Guattari and
their “order-words,” Maturana and Varela are interested in the multiple versions of
reality that are hidden behind any attempt of a “major language” to impose order.
What makes their take on the subject richer than the one found in A Thousand
Plateaus is their insistence that multiplicity is a natural part of both cultural and
natural formations. The postmodern move of throwing up a vale of multiplicities is
unnecessary after all, the multiplicities are inherent in the conservation of behaviors
needed to adapt to the different “structural drifts” we experience, both as individuals
and as members of communities and societies.

The search for a way to understand how and why we construct alternate

subjectivities is advanced by the realization that all subjectivities coordinate behaviors

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that organize both our individual and collective identities against a variety of
backgrounds. That is, there are structural limits to both the physical and linguistic
domains that have to be honored, but they can be honored in a variety of ways, all
recursive and tied into the cycle of drift and closure. Language cannot change
material reality except by changing social reality, the interactions among and between
the multiple, lived perspectives of individuals and groups. Therefore, language, like
all systems with a living structural dynamic, evolves by changing and being changed
by the conditions, both material and social, of its expression. The goal is to preserve
a cooperative social domain that conserves both our position/identity and those of the
others we encounter.
Anything that undermines the acceptance of others, from competency to the
possession of truth and on to ideologic certainty, undermines the social process
because it undermines the biologic process that generates it. . . without
acceptance of others, there is no social phenomenon. (247)
What makes their analysis so valuable to an alternative or strong version of
postmoderism is that it both constructs an ethical and social dynamic of languaging
and limits intrusions of rational, technical, and intellectual dominance. That is, it
conserves and extends the notion of a common language. Language is made
‘common' by its intrinsic involvement in the creation and modification of a social
world, of a human society, and in the process it maintains, regardless of the
technologies applied to it, all of its oracular functions, the ability to change, surprise,
terrorize, and delight. It cannot be managed or controlled, except at the risk of losing

its primary function. That does not mean that rational and scientific applications are

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not possible or valuable, even critical, only that their value is directly related to the
conservation of alternate and congruent applications. The problem with totalizing
narratives, the bane of the postmodern critique, is that they limit adaptation; they
destroy life. On the other hand, we cannot escape the structural dynamics of what
Maturana calls our “bodyhood.”

This view also creates an entirely different perspective for intellectual practice.
From the standpoint of a “knowledge of knowledge,” control is less important than
congruence. For example, one of the critical flaws in Coleridge's vision of a common
language grew out of his theological and nationalist demand for purity and superiority.
His notion of a “clerisy” exemplifies what humanist intellectuals have promoted, in a
variety of forms and functions, as the natural role of the cultural elite. Even, perhaps
especially, leftist intellectuals promote their own reified interpretations of cultural
reality as a “command for obedience.” At the same time, it is important not to
mistake this position for the uncritical celebration of diversity or individual experience.
Intellectuals have a responsibility to use their considerable cultural capitol to clarify
the political, material, and cultural conditions that support power relations that exclude
some and privilege others, including themselves. But they can only do this by fighting
the deracination of their own position and discourse by connecting it to the ethical,
social, and biological imperative for congruence and cooperation. They must, in short,
create a new path to close the structural drift between our ideals of community and the
reality we play a leading and privileged role in perpetuating.

Thinking of language this way connects it to the postmodern practice discussed

in the First Chapter. It is a model of languaging that has an ethical and pragmatic

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trajectory grounded in more than abstract and often conflicting narratives about the
liberal state. Only by thinking about the common language from a new perspective
can we step away from the modernist extremes of making language everything or
nothing. In this model, language creates the structural dynamic of social life. Only
by exposing and examining that dynamic can we begin to understand how that
increasingly complex matrix is constructed and what possibilities exist for changing it.
POMO IN THE CLASSROOM

A new model of language is crucial to any hope of moving English studies
away from its current state of confusion. A new practice simply cannot be constructed
around Literature and Composition. Neither sub-discipline can sustain any rationale
for its existence that is not deeply implicated in an educational establishment
predicated on the maintenance and reinforcement of dominant power relations. The
attempt by radical poststructural critique to dislodge or reform current practice can
provide an insightful definition of the problem but lacks any ethical or pragmatic
trajectory of its own to help build a new practice, and it offers no sense of how
specific theoretical mediations can avoid a descent into solipsism or relativism.
Focusing on language, however, creates an entirely different scope and direction.
Instead of adding to the hyperspecialization and fragmentation of knowledge, the
deracination of intellectuals, and the reification of language etiquette as social
distinction, a disciplinary practice rooted in the understanding, promotion, and creation
of a common language can address the conditions that define postmodernism.

To begin with, shifting the focus to a common language inherently shifts the

focus to social relations. As Maturana and Varela make clear, language both creates

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and is changed by the social dynamic which allows us to conserve some behaviors and
to modify others. One focus of a postmodern language critique anchored in this
realization is how we go about moving away from the colonizing narratives of the
modern state and toward a new cultural dynamic which, without collapsing into
relativism, is more inclusive. That is, we must begin to talk about how languaging
allows us to put phrase regimes, Lyotard's “differends,” representing different
experiential and linguistic realities together into something that resembles the kind of
communities we want to live in and the kind of social relationships that will conserve
that behavior. We cannot continue to argue that our choices are: 1. to follow Lyotard
and other postmodern theorists down the blind alley of incommensurability that denies
the need for social congruence, or 2. to hope to find a solution by continuing with the
technical rationality that Habermas identifies with the Enlightenment project. Put
another way, we need an alternative to defining reality as one thing and then
demanding obedience to that definition, or defining it as many things that have no
meaningful relationship to each other.

Part of the problem is that we have inherited a tradition that views language as
a conduit of information or meaning that can be controlled by and reduced to reason
instead of the structural determinant that creates a social consensus, a “coordination of
coordination of behaviors,” in Maturana's terms, about how meaning is created.
Habermas, like Locke, would have us carry out this dialogue in a public sphere that
admits only part of the structural dynamic. Language is more than rationality, it also
transmits and is part of what Maturana and Varela call the “emotional domain,”

which characterizes much of our attitudes and experiences. As we grope our way

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toward reordering the social world to reflect new realities, we need to express more
than technical and rational perspectives. By putting language in the background, we
have naturalized the power relations of modernity and conflated the Enlightenment
project of emancipation with the liberal obsession with property and power. That is,
we have been unable to use the language of rights, freedom, and democracy to create
a new dynamic of meaningful inclusion. Instead, as both Toulmin and McGowan have
observed, we have created a peculiar notion of freedom that exists only in a negative
sense of withdrawal; we are free not to disrupt the liberal conservation of property and
dominance. Additionally, our identities in this social construct are increasingly
fragmented. We have a diminishing sense of social congruence, the essence of
linguistic competence, and an increasing sense of being limited to interactions with
isolated groups of people, whether that distinction is driven by race, gender, class, or
the discursive practices of hyperspecialized professions.

Schools, of course, promote and support this obfuscation of the structural
importance of language in the social domain. Instead of directing our practice toward
understanding the way we use language to create the social environment, we focus our
practice on the distinctions between communities of language users. These
communities fall into two related but different categories. The first category is
composed of natural language communities, what the Student's Right to Their Own
Language resolution referred to as a “language of nurture.” The other communities
built and maintained on linguistic distrinctions are professional discourse communities.
Before dealing with them separately, I think it is important to recognize that both

types of communities add to the fragmentation of social discourse, sometimes

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necessarily so and other times not, and both types of communities depend on linguistic
distinctions for their identity.

Of the two types of communities, the one most abused by current practice in
language classrooms are the natural language communities. They suffer at the hands
of what John Mayher refers to as “commonsense learning,” which is dedicated to
controlling the learning environment of schools and limiting students' active
engagement in their own language and learning. Mayher juxtaposes his notion of
“uncommonsense learning,” learning devoted to the active engagement of students in
the production of their own knowledge, to the ingrained practices of most language
classrooms. His analysis, which is built around the psychological theories of Kelly,
Bruner, and Grice, emphasizes the transactional nature of language and knowledge
production. His conclusions are similar to those promoted by Freire and other
liberatory educators, promoting a view of language and education which is inherently
social. The purpose of this type of analysis is to underscore the way that natural
language communities become the grist for linguistic discrimination which results in
Watkins's circulating evaluations. This creation and reproduction of distinction, most
of it class and race based, continues to be the focus of the composition classroom in
spite of repeated attempts to dislodge it.

Geneva Smitherman, one of the framers of the Student's Right proposal in
1974, reflects the frustration over the inability of linguistic research to displace the
obsession with surface correctness.

Unfortunately, much of this important work by linguists is framed in the jargon

and concepts of modern linguistic science, with terminology that is confusing,

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technical and often unintelligible to those outside the field of linguistics. Thus,

despite truths now well over a century old, this vitally needed scientific

information has not filtered down to precisely the place where it could have the

greatest impact - the public schools. (11’ 191)

Smitherman's appeal only reflects part of the problem, however. Not only is linguistic
science ignored, composition has its own social agenda. Susan Miller is only one of
the more notable and recent examples of a critique that grows out of Albert
Kitzhaber's oft-cited doctoral dissertation, Rhetoric in American Colleges: 1850-1900.
Miller cites the importance of composition, as opposed to rhetoric, to Eliot's reforms at
Harvard and the importance of the Harvard reforms to the development of
composition, which is the heart of Kitzhaber's criticisms. The point is that this view
of language is not about language at all; it is about social distinction and the
preservation of language policies that replicate those distinctions.

In other words, composition conserves a view of language that divides and
fragments rather than helping to unify or create a public sphere. Current practice
rejects, social constructionist apologists not withstanding, the attempt to adhere to what
Smitherrnan calls the “language of wider communication,” the language of “power, not
mere ‘correctness,' but the use of language to make the impossible possible” (LP 32).
A practice dedicated to the language of “wider communication,” intelligibility, or a
common language must start by asking why this condition persists. Why does
composition pedagogy, no matter how much it twists itself in knots trying to deny or
avoid it, boil down to the evaluations, marks of social distinction, that Watkins remind

us circulate with their own logic and institutional mission? I think the answer must be

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that we lack any clear sense of what language is or how it works. We lack the
perspective that Maturana and Varela suggest of language as the essential element of
the social dynamic. Therefore, instead of promoting a knowledge and understanding of
language, we promote and conserve the linguistic distinctions of modem or late
capitalism, distinctions that are at the root of the postmodern struggle to create a more
populist and democratic society. Language communities represent an essential
resource in that struggle, but their potential will never be realized in today's
institutionally sanctioned set of practices.

At the very same time that the language of daily life is being extinguished at
one end of the spectrum, at the other end the language of hyperspecialized discourse is
racing away from the public sphere. Specialized discourse about language, whether it
be the “jargon of linguistic science” Smitherman cited earlier or the specialties of
composition, rhetoric, or literary theory, miss the mark if they fail to engage a public
understanding about language. In slightly different disguises, these specialized
discourses mark the path that Bacon saw for language, and it leads now, as it lead
then, away from an expressive common language. That much of the problem is
widely acknowledged. What is more difficult is negotiating the merger between these
specialized discourses and a common, public language. Here again the postmodern
response cannot be to wish away the specialization, to hope for clear ground. Instead,
the challenge is to make what we know about language work toward a more inclusive
social dynamic.

As a first step, it would help to make it clear that specialization itself is not the

problem. Rather, it is the use that is made of specialized discourse that is in question.

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The study of language, like any scientific or intellectual domain demands an
impeccable and critical approach. Further, as Donald Macedo notes, the cultural
capital that accompanies the study of language is valuable and not only worth
maintaining but expanding. The problem is with the practices that support this
specialization. As it currently stands, that practice isolates rather than connects
language communities. The specializations associated with the study of language have
not only failed to change, as in Smitherman's example, the practices of language
education in school, they have reinforced it. These practices have, as Bourdieu and
Passeron would have it, “reproduced” social distinctions by continuing the power of
the school, the teacher, and the classroom.

In essence, both types of language communities are ill-served by current
practice. Either we return to language communities already marked by social
distinction or we work in specialized discourse communities that depend on isolation
from daily life for their cultural capital. The knowledge that is created is either
pushed aside as unsanctioned knowledge or absorbed by what Richard Peterson calls
the “technologies of expertise.” Neither of these alternatives helps construct a public
and democratic sphere of language. Neither acknowledges what Freire calls the
“gnosiological cycle of knowledge,” which, he argues, is obscured in the schooling
process.

Knowledge is produced in a place far from the students, who are asked only to

memorize what the teacher says. Consequently, we reduce the act of knowing

the existing knowledge into the mere transference of knowledge...Then he or

she loses some the necessary, the indispensable qualities that are demanded in

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the production of knowledge as well as in knowing the existing knowledge.

(8)

It is this separation from the act of knowing, of producing one's own world, that make
the “technologies of expertise” so powerful and destructive. A postmodern language
practice should connect these disparate language communities by creating a common
language, one that first recognizes what language is and then negotiates the grounds
for a pragmatic practice.

The approach that Maturana and Varela take toward language could serve as
the foundation for precisely this type of new practice. Concentrating on how language
creates a social dynamic, what kind of relationships it encourages and conserves,
would sustain a practice that could borrow from existing efforts in rhetoric and
linguistics but provide a new focus. In this model, the idea of literacy moves from the
mastery of a dominant register or dialect to understanding, integrating, and mediating
between multiple registers, dialects, and materialities of communication. That is,
literacy is the awareness and ability to manipulate discourses to create understanding.
Understanding in this context is not the transferal of information or the dominance of
reason, it is, instead, the facilitation of coordinating behavior, as Maturana and Varela
note.

[E]ach person says what he says or hears according to his own structural

determination; saying does not ensure listening. From the perspective of the

observer, there is always an ambiguity in a communicative interaction. The
phenomenon of communication depends on not what is transmitted, but on

what happens to the person who receives it. And this is a very different thing

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from ‘transmitting information.' (196)

This idea of language promotes a version of literacy compatible with Freire's
gnosiological cycle, a literacy focused on the social creation of knowledge and the
ontogenic and phylogenic investment in that creation.

Obviously, this kind of literacy demands a different set of practices surrounding
the teaching of reading and writing. Rather than demanding students learn the “order
words” of the dominant dialect, this kind of postmodern language instruction examine
and teach how to negotiate between dialects and language communities, including the
negotiation of a public sphere that connected natural language communities and
specialized discourse cormnunities. Composition can aid in that negotiation by helping
students understand how written language becomes intelligible, how it engages and
changes the “social determination” of both the reader and the writer. It would have
little to do with manufacturing social distinctions out of the minuscule differences
between registers or dialects. As Dennis Baron argued in the wake of the Student's
Right resolution, the whole focus of the composition classroom changes when
intelligibility becomes the focus.

The function of the composition teacher, then, should be to focus the student's

attention on the intelligibility requirements of the written code, rather than to

attack the student's use of language. The arbitrary standards of correctness
must be ignored, the relative means of effectiveness must be stressed, the

student must develop a self-confident attitude toward his language. (182)

The standards that Baron suggests are still rigorous. As Freire and Ira Shor argue in A

Pedagogy for Liberation, The rigor of negotiating the standards of intelligibility may

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be greater than those required to mimic a standard register. They certainly require a
greater understanding of what language is and how it works than the mindless drill
and practice of mandatory language etiquette.

Reading must also be separated from the demand to interpret the text correctly
and the canonical demand to choose the correct text. Indeterrninacy, which has long
been a staple of reader-response theory, provides an answer. Louise Rosenblatt
created one of the earliest and most influential views of an indeterminate reading
process in the reader, the text and the poem. The key is that the reader must produce
the reading.

What each reader makes of the text is, indeed, for him, the poem in the sense

that this is his only direct perception of it. No one can read it for him. He

may learn indirectly about other's experiences with the text, and he may then
be stimulated to attempt to call forth from the text a better poem. But this he
must do himself, and only what he experiences in relation to the text is - again

let us underline - for him, the work. (105)

Rosenblatt's formulas have one set of possibilities in a set of theoretical mediations
concerned with preserving the text. They have quite another in a postmodern model
of language where the indeterminacy exists not only within the text, but between the
reader and the text and between different readers of the same text. In that context,
there are no “efferent” readings, only “aesthetic” readings that each demand not only
the competency to read but the will and desire to do so. In an antifoundational world,
there is no appeal to authority, except in an oppressive move demanding obedience,

that can close the text to other readers anymore than there is the possibility of

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“transmitting information.”

The real consequences of reader-response theory are only visible in a world in
which multiple standpoints are arrayed in a perceptible pattern of power relationships.
Postmodernism is built on the realization that such a condition already exists. Using
language to connect, without trying to unify, those standpoints is the postmodern hope
for a sense of community not based on dominance. Current language practices deny
both the possibility and the value of trying to work through that process. Reading
requires a connection between the reader and the text, Eco's “inferential walks.” It
also requires sufficient incentive to bridge the gaps between the multiple readings the
text offers. In the postmodern moment, texts abound. Current practice either obscures
them, as with television; denies them, as with the semiotic of consumer culture; or
reifies them, as in the formation of the canon. Reading cannot be based on any
preexisting cultural authority. Instead, reading is always the act of drawing and
redrawing the contexts and operations of meaning both within and between
communities.

The key to any new practice must begin with the realization that the creation of
a common language demands a new approach to the connection between language and
culture. It must promote multiple ways of negotiating between standpoints that can no
longer be subsumed under a univocal authority. Reading and writing are critical to
those negotiations, but only if they are freed from an educational project that uses
them to produce and reify social distinctions. Part of this work is rhetorical, although
the scope would seem more suited for a semiotic and pragmatic approach. In any

case, language instruction in the classroom is an important part of the project.

l 1 l
MACHINE LANGUAGE

The final consideration in a postmodern model of language is the way
technology has changed both the sites and means of cultural transmission.
Languaging takes place in ways that continues the extemalization of memory, plays to
the reemergent pictorial nature of language, and challenges our notions of
communication and relationships. My intent here is neither to bemoan nor glarnorize
technology but to point to the fact that languaging through machines creates and
conserves different behaviors than does either oral or print culture.

Whether these concerns manifest themselves as Williams suggest in Problems
in Materialism and Culture as a history of “communicative production,” a process
which is the concern of the first half of The Long Revolution, or what Hans Ulrich
Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer refer to as “materialities of communication,” the
central theme is the exteriorization of languaging. It may be, as Williams argues, that
the changes in technologies of communication will continue their democratizing force,
creating access to a public sphere more and more reflective of those potentials. It may
be, as Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer argue, that the materialities of communication will bring
us to the end of interpretation and hermeneutics, to the end of authority over semiotic
production. What matters most is that any postmodern model for language must
consider and problematize these forces.

In contrast to school, which seeks control over the supposed elite forms of
expression, reading and writing, and ignores the others, the postmodern impulse is
toward the understanding of all popular and emergent forms of communication.

Already, it is an article of faith that the subject positions of modernity are fragmented,

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pace Baudrillard, in the postmodern moment and that the control and autonomy of the
modernist subject is lost to us. While Baudrillard's constructions have limitations of
their own, he clearly shows that as both creators and objects of our own projections
we have crossed a line that makes certainty about our status impossible. It is precisely
these kinds of issues that a postmodern model of language must engage. If, as
Maturana and Varela argue, we “exist in language,” what are the consequences of the
language existing in machines? Clearly, any definition of literacy must include these
concerns as well as the ability to read not just the semiotic production of emergent
technologies but the power relations that shape and control them.

It is impossible to chart this path too far into the future. As Hayles has noted,
the iterations of culture in which information has already been cut loose from context
are more random than ever before. The solid, socialist confidence that Williams
evoked is more problematic at a time when information, even in the political domain,
fails to carry the same value or promise the element of control in the social dynamic it
once did. The material conditions of postmodern languaging will create and conserve
a new dynamic as it moves to close the drift in structural coupling that initiated it. It
will both threaten and expand the potential of the structural determinants that bind all
human society. It may be glib to talk of existing as and among “simulacra,” of being
“cyborgs,” or living in a “cyberhood,” but each of these visions are also conditions of
social life. There is no hope here for Habermas's reasoned public sphere. There is
hope, however, that with diligence and struggle void of what Pfeiffer calls “cultural
nostalgia and technical euphoria (12),” we can create a common language, a language

suited for inclusion rather than domination.

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These concerns could form the basis of a revival of English studies. That is,
the continuation of a language critique that has as its focus the creation and promotion
of a common language is compatible with postmodernism in a way that even radical
reforms in the discipline are not. A new critique requires new models for thinking
about language and new terms and technologies for discussing it. It should concern
itself with the social dynamic that language creates and brings into focus and the way
knowledge is produced and communicated in that dynamic. This model cannot claim
any selective cultural authority, it may not even be able to claim an interpretive
dominance so much a part of the literary model of the discipline. It can, however,
provide a project that has a future in ways that current practices do not. Finally, it
provides a means of framing critical intelligence outside of hyperspecialized fields. It

is a model of reflective practice and pragmatic promise.

Chapter Four

MULTIPLE OBJECTIVITIES:
AUTOPOIESIS, AESTHETICS, AND CULTURE

One of the important distinctions between the model of language discussed in
the previous chapter and most postmodern theories of language is that an autopoietic
model does not promote separation of the rhetorical and material domains. Unlike a
postmodern theory of signs growing out of a linguistic or nominalist position, this
model connects, as one complementary whole, the rhetorical and material. The
consequences of thinking about language this way extend beyond linguistic concerns.
For humanist intellectuals, it also changes the way that aesthetics, culture, and
intellectual practice are constructed. This chapter will explore a pragmatic
restructuring of aesthetics and culture consistent with the observations of Maturana and
Varela developed in the last chapter.

The most important aspect of this model is that languaging coordinates the
coordination of behaviors, the act of adapting and conserving both the ontogenic and
phylogenic structures of identity. That is, it is only through languaging that we
construct and live in the world. Language is not an instrument for truth seeking,
except as truth seeking helps coordinate adaptation or conservation of behavior, and it
is not a vehicle for describing the external world. Instead, language defines the
dynamic through which human organisms, both individual and social, create and
coordinate the interaction between the organism and a background or environment.

Neither part of the equation, organism or environment, exists without or outside of

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languaging. Because of this, because we create the world we live in, we must place
objectivity, as Maturana puts it, “in parentheses.” That is, there can be no appeal to a
unified or consensual objectivity, except as it is negotiated and created through
languaging. In one sense, this characteristic is common to multiple versions of
postmodernism, including those based on a mentalist semiotic. What distinguishes
Maturana and Varela's version of constructivist thought is that the material world is
part of the formula. Rather than being lost in language, we are connected through it
to the limits and potentials of the material world, including what Maturana calls our
“bodyhood.” This construction has much more in common with Pierce's notion of
“thirdness” and Dewey's notion of experience and aesthetics than it does with French
semiotics that grow out of or in resistance to Saussure. It is this connection to an
aspect of pragmatism often lost in its more reductive and instrumentalist constructions
that connects Maturana and Varela to a pragmatic postmodernism.

Maturana and Varela describe the integration of organism and environment as
“autopoietic,” or self-organizing. In human societies autopoiesis is also evident in the
recursive and iterative drifts and couplings that define individual and social identity.
In fact, it is only in this process of self-organization against a background, which is
coordinated through languaging, that identity is possible. Identity involves an ongoing
disequillibrium which is evident in a series of cultural drifts and co-ontogenic
couplings that mark an organism's continual involvement in and creation of material
and cultural domains. Knowledge is always an action or behavior which is consistent
with these constructed domains. There are no “free particulars” outside of the social

couplings which we create and which define our identity, and there is no objectivity to

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adjudicate disputes in perception. That is, an individual or group will not, in fact
cannot, think or act except in the context of their mutually constructed domains. These
domains are not merely behaviorist because the environment does not cause behavior
and because the external world is itself created in languaging. Nor are these
constructions nominalist or mentalist. They do not and cannot exclude the dynamics
of bodily and external structures. They are, instead, complementary.

Maturana speaks of our living in what he calls a “multi-verse,” a series of
adaptive and adapting couplings that create different “objectivities.” His sense of
difference is not like the postmodern sense of difference or diversity in which identity
is a negative and marginalized space away from a putative hegemony. Nor does this
view privilege the creation of difference. It has more in common with Harding's
notion of “standpoint epistemologies,” situated and situating spaces expressing
overlapping and iterative but different perceptions of a shared reality. As such, these
models or ways of thinking about language and culture support and adumbrate a sense
of the postmodern as a condition of conscious and material specificity. That is,
difference exits because we now share, in both material and social sense, the
“objective” world with more, and more different, people. The need to construct a
“knowledge of knowledge” is part of an adaptation to social couplings that have
expanded to the point of imploding the old consensus-making institutions

One way of applying this model to humanist intellectual practice is to use
autopoiesis as a means of interrogating and understanding aesthetics. An autopoietic
model of aesthetics would emphasize the way that organisms conserve, in both

ontogenic and phylogenic cases, their generation of and adaptation to a background. It

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is only against this background that an organism, individual or social, can construct an
identity. Aesthetics in this model is simply the process through which the organism
constructs its identity. There is no distinction between material and rhetorical
strategies of organization, or at least no distinction which is expressible. The aesthetic
domain is the organism's construction of a background or field, defining not only its
identity but the conditions of its knowledge production. This construction is
intentional, taking place in languaging, even if its consequences are unintentional.

Early adherents of Maturana's work, particularly in family therapy, stressed the
highly individualistic aspects his thought. Their examples tended to emphasize the
distance between each individual family member's experience of the family unit and
the incomensurability of those experiences. It is true that every individual has a
uniquely constructed background, but it is also true that our social couplings
thoroughly mediate those constructions. In many ways, Maturana's constructions are
compatible with the way that Bakhtin and Mead talk about individuals being
constructed and reconstructed in social interaction. For instance, as different as each
farme member's experience might be, it is still constructed in the interaction both with
other family members and the society at large.

The key point is that languaging inevitably connects us to larger co-ontogenic
or social structures, what Maturana calls “third-order unities.” The social dimension is
also part of an autopoietic aesthetic model, helping explain the iterative, diachronic,
even redundant characteristics of aesthetically constructed backgrounds. That is, even
allowing for individual and cultural difference, the structural dynamics that govern the

construction and interplay create similar and overlapping experiences. This is

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important because it reinforces the social dynamic involved in the construction of
knowledge. In this model, knowledge is created and understood only in relation to the
background against which the organism defines itself and the co-ontogenic couplings
that sustain it and are brought into being through languaging.

Aesthetics, then, is both locally specific and generally social. It defines a fluid
interface between both individual and social organisms and their background, part of
which is the co-ontogenic couplings that define and mediate social existence. It is
only through and in reference to this fluid interface that knowledge or thought is
possible. That is, the background against which we define ourselves also defines the
parameters and the specifications of what and how we think, including what we will
accept as proof or evidence. Thus, all knowledge has an aesthetic and experiential
component, which is another way of saying that the “multi-verse” of our perspectives
is grounded in our own objectivity. Although science, communicative reason, or other
discursive practices can mediate, through languaging, the constructions of our multiple
objectivities, they cannot, and in fact do not, bring a universal objectivity into being,
except in a command for obedience. This is not to say that science, or any other
intellectual practice, is merely discursive or that it is unreasonable, only that science or
reason are, in and of themselves, inadequate grounds to change the individual and
social constructions of reality. This is demonstrably the case in our daily lives where
religious, emotional, or irrational forces undercut and invalidate, even for some
scientists, the “objective” claims of science and reason. Even the behaviorist
assumptions about manipulating the stimulants in the environment are invalid, because

the intent and importance of those stimulants still depend on linguistic affirmation to

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bring them into the autopoietic construction of a background. The point is that any
referent must be part of the field that constitutes the background to have impact and
meaning. More forced education, government studies, or institutional demands will
not change the background, although they may silence opposotional perspectives.
This view of aesthetics is compatible with both Dewey's emphasis on
experience and Harding's on standpoint epistemologies. As Harding notes:
However, there is not just one legitimate way to conceptualize objectivity, any
more than there is only one way to conceptualize freedom, democracy, or
science. Understanding ourselves and the world around us requires
understanding what others think of our beliefs and actions, not just what we
think of ourselves and them. (461)
The concept of a multi-verse, of an intensely experiential and aesthetically grounded
notion of thought and knowledge, requires us to see these multiple objectivities as
related, as standpoints that must be reconciled and combined to be objective. This
view is also compatible with Dewey's emphasis on experience as “doing” and
“undergoing.” Experience, in his words, contains "no division between act and
material, subject and object, but contains them both in unanalyzable totality” (18).
This excerpt from Experience and Nature provides insight into his pragmatic rejection
of reality as a fixed and stable construction, as something “out there.” The individual
must experience, must “do” and “undergo,” the consequences of her action. Of
course, Dewey's faith in the science of his time creates its own limited sense of reason
and order. His instrumentalism notwithstanding, however, there is a trajectory to his

sense of inquiry and lived experience that is very much in line with Maturana and

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Varela.

In all of these examples the mind/body split, the assumption of a
stable,objective reality, and the adequacy of reason in expressing reality are
overturned. Unlike postmodern position that theorize difference as merely aesthetic
(in the classical sense), these constructions make aesthetic difference an integral part
of a living dynamic and not just a problem of representation. At stake here are both
the requirements and consequences of inclusion in postmodern culture. Inclusion must
mean that our multiple objectivities, which is to say the separate aesthetic domains we
inhabit, be brought into contact through the act of languaging. Unlike Habermas,
however, the relation cannot be dictated by communicative reason. Instead, these
objectivities or standpoints must negotiate, often in domains apart from the scientific
or rational, “contact zones” and “borders” that will affirm their similarity and
compatibility. In this model, there is no “real” world we can refer back to, and there
is no scientific or rational method that command obedience, except as an act of
oppression.

To think of aesthetics as part of the process of autopoiesis means moving away
from specialized notions of the aesthetic, both in the positive sense that would
supplant religion with art, and in the negative sense that would make difficult or
“ugly” art resistant to capitalistic and Enlightenment totalities. Even a materialist end
run around these positions, such as Terry Eagleton attempts in Ideology of the
Aesthetic, fails to conceptualize the difference. Eagleton begins by fixing the
historical implications of our struggles with the aesthetic as a contradictory force.

The aesthetic, then, is from the beginning a contradictory, double-edged

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concept. On the one hand, it figures as a genuinely emancipatory force--as a
community of subjects now linked by sensuous impulse and fellow-feeling
rather than by heteronomous law, each safeguarded in its unique particularity
while bound at the same time into social harmony.... On the other hand, the
aesthetic signifies what Max Horkheimer has called a kind of ‘internalized
oppression,‘ inserting social power more deeply into the very bodies of those it
subjugates, and so operating as a supremely effective mode of political
hegemony. (28)
Eagleton will eventually argue, after careening through a series of commentaries on an
eclectic group of thinkers who impacted our use and notion of the aesthetic, for a
materialist, yet strangely individualist, aesthetic. Emphasizing “full participatory
access,” Eagleton situates the struggle over the aesthetic as a struggle between an
“image of emancipation” and “ratifying domination” (411). In Eagleton's telling of it,
this tension can only be resolved by a radical materialism that brings to the public
sphere an open debate over identity, and that guarantees equal participatory rights to
all.

This materialist view of aesthetics both changes and extends assumptions made
in both negative and positive views of the aesthetic. The changes, mostly associated
with the concrete particularity of individual bodies, form the basis for politicizing the
aesthetic. In that sense, Eagleton argues, the material conditions of identity are a new
“base” of radical cultural theory. This much is hardly original. The work of Foucault
and countless feminists has already made the inscribed body the nexus of local

political critique. Eagleton tries, to his credit, to drag the aesthetic into the fray, thus

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disarming both the universalizing and naturalizing assumptions usually associated with
the aesthetic. He fails, however, on two fronts.

First, in his vitriol against postmodernism, Eagleton tramples all over the seeds
of his putative rebellion. His unrelenting and self-rightous political agenda always
undervalues the role and importance of aesthetic difference in a politicized notion of
the aesthetic. It is one thing to correctly point out the futility of merely celebrating
difference; it is quite another thing to subsume those differences in a materialist
politics. Eagleton is left with a psychological and erotic individualist aesthetics and a
programmatic cultural aesthetic. Ultimately, and his late and continual appeals to
Habermas confirm this, it is a rationally constructed and intellectually mediated
aesthetic that emerges.

The second problem for Eagleton's aesthetic, and the one that keeps him
connected to the tradition he seeks to overturn, is his insistence on constructing
aesthetic consciousness as separate and marginal. In the end, what difference does it
make whether the aesthetic is subsumed as a part of a hegemony of reason, negativity,
or materialist politics? This is the essential problem with earlier constructions of the
aesthetic: All of them view the aesthetic as something ‘left over,‘ something, no
matter how important, which is outside the scientific and rational. This is not to say
that the aesthetic lacks significance, but it does seem to lack substance. When
someone speaks of aesthetic values, even in university departments dedicated to
defending them, no one may doubt the seriousness of the charge, but no one confuses
them with the ‘real' issues that will determine policy. In many examples of

postmodern theory, aesthetics is little more than ergonomics or the bricolage and

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pastiche of ad campaigns. The point is that the aesthetic is not an area of great
concern, except in the conservative diatribe about cultural disintegration. Eagleton,
too, is spite of the importance he places on individual participation and pleasure,
relegates the aesthetic to a marginal supporting role in a materialist agenda.

The contrast between that position and an autopoietic notion of the aesthetic
should be clear. First, an autopoietic aesthetic requires agency, or as M. Gottdiener
puts it, “even popular culture is culture” (175). His point is that every cultural
construction is intentional, an intelligent attempt to make sense of the world around us.
This means that the aesthetic is both the framework for and the limitation of
knowledge and action. It is this point that separates an autopoietic aesthetic from
earlier constructions. All versions of the aesthetic attempt some reconciliation
between the sensorial and a dominant epistemology, but for Maturana and Varela the
equation is inverted. In this construction we can only know what we aesthetically
define, through languaging, as knowable. Further, the act of knowing must conserve
our adaptive relationship to our environment, making us resistant to radical
dislocations of our aesthetic couplings. This means that we must aesthetically validate
any attempt to influence or educate us. If the new input invalidates our aesthetic
coupling, it is difficult if not impossible for us to accommodate without losing our
own sense of being. That this process is aesthetic and not necessarily rational has
obvious implications for the way we create and transmit emergent cultural knowledge.

The consequences of thinking about aesthetics this way are at once greater and
more limited than much postmodern discourse would allow. They are more limited

because they do not lead to the death of science or some version of what Lyotard

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refers to as parology. They are greater because by demystifying the aesthetic and
putting it at the center of knowledge making, the postmodern turn toward anti-
foundationalism and pluralism takes on a deeper significance. Trying to articulate the
consequences of an autopoietic model of aesthetics necessarily involves rethinking the
focus of humanist intellectual practice and the assumptions we make about knowledge,
culture, and language.

To begin with, it is important to note that Maturana, Varela, and Harding never
even consider that relying on languaging or standpoint epistemologies would reduce
the value of science. Maturana makes it quite clear that the observational techniques
of science are valuable and that it is the job of the scientist to be “impeccable” in her
execution of these techniques. As troubled as Harding is with the “strong sense” of
objectivity, she still wants to preserve the notion that objectivity “ is useful in
promoting a way to think about the gap that should exist between how any individual
or group wants the world to be and how in fact it is”(46l). Just as Hayles debunks
the notion that chaos is the enemy of science, these scientists see no inherent
contradiction between good science and social construction. What they all attack,
from different angles, is the notion that science is neutral, that it is beyond social or
linguistic critique. For Maturana and Varela the key is that while science can claim
impeccability it cannot claim to be universal. Science will not convince someone who
does not operate in or agree to perceive the world through its observational domain
that it is accurate. Nor can we argue, as Harding notes, that the findings of scientific
research are neutral, that they are not part of the autopoiesis of scientists.

It is this problem, the problem of explaining how and under what conditions

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acts of languaging and technologies of observation merge to create a new social
coupling, that should drive a postmodern intellectual practice. We cannot simply
throw our hands in the air, say that all acts of languaging and perception are relative,
and walk away. On the other hand, we cannot privilege our professional discourses as
universal or even particularly relevant to the various autopoietic structures of reality
we encounter. We cannot, as Eagleton would have it, predetermine the priorities or
touch points required or rule out specific acts of languaging, as Habermas does by
separating aesthetic from rational discourse. The intellectual burden of autopoietic
notions of thought, aesthetics, and culture is be both impeccable and inclusive.

We must also realize, in a way that theories promoting an aesthetic distance do
not, that aesthetic responses to autopoiesis and drift require both elegant and inelegant
energies. That is, not only do we require movements of elegance and synthesis,
movements that bring, however temporarily, our couplings into sync with our
surroundings, we have to also value the energies that create a new drift. In this sense
there are no universal characteristics of aesthetic objects or fields. Instead, our
aesthetic domains are in constant flux. This makes finding contact points more
difficult and unpredictable, but recognizing this as part of a broader aesthetic field and
cultural dynamic should prevent despair over the changes in institutions that promote
and transmit cultural meanings. What is significant is not the particular form but the
behaviors being conserved or adapted.

An autopoietic and pragmatic view of the aesthetic is, in Homi K. Bhabha's
terms, perforrnative. Rather than fixed categories, even categories as seemingly stable

and tangible as race, gender, and class, we find ourselves working in and living

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through multiple and unpredictable blendings, redefinitions, and reconstructions. As
Bhabha puts it:

Terms of cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affiliative, are produced

perforrnatively. The representation of difference must not be hastily read as the

reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of
tradition. The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective,
is a complex on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities

that emerge in moments of historical transformation. (2)

Even if Bhabha's emphasis is shifted away from minority voices, the process is the
same. It is the inability of tradition to signify identity that marks the postmodern
moment. Self-reflexive to the core, subjectivity is no longer unified or unifiable. This
is not to say that the traditional locations of power have been vacated or disabled. On
the contrary, the likelihood of an inclusive and democratic sense of cultural synthesis
may be determined by our ability to disarm those positions without making the result
look like Bosnia or Rwanda. The key insight is that the situation is fluid; it is being
acted out not just before us but among us. An autopoietic and pragmatic notion of
aesthetics should explain how we coordinate our behaviors to conserve some and adapt
others.

This sort of inquiry depends on a better understanding of languaging. The
aesthetic is the source of the common language, the ability to bring all of our
experiences and imagination to bear. Rather than focusing on a canon of works, our
focus should be on a semiotic that may include a canon but emphasizes the

performative nature of aesthetics. As Gottdiener notes, that semiotic requires both a

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material and a historical sensibility, the ability to both understand how the signs being
manipulated have emerged and the consequences of the struggle to reclaim them. The
aesthetic, in this model, happens in real time across increasingly fragmented
boundaries. What is being negotiated is how identity in an inclusive politics is
possible, how it can be both reclaimed and performed within the structural dynamic of
a particular cultural formation.

The history of intellectual involvement in cultural production is, however,
dubious at best. The impulse of instrumentalist and modernist intellectuals is to
freeze the interface and pre-determine the outcome. Lacking models for thinking
about complementary and chaotic constructions and locked into professional discourses
opposed to public access, humanist intellectuals have turned away, for the most part,
from the fluid, the popular, and the everyday. In the past, the abandonment of all but
the most reductive and selective notions of culture has taken three forms. The most
traditional approach is often labeled as Amoldian, but its most repressive incarnations
have come in this century. Parallel to the first method, the second type of intellectual
retreat is represented by the avant-garde and the negative formation of “mass” culture.
The third and most recent method employs a leaden Marxist or materialist view of
culture that deprives the masses of their agency, power, and intelligence.

What all of these approaches have in common is a disdain for mass culture.
What differs is the way they position aesthetic impulses within the culture to defend
selective traditions from contamination. After W.W.I, the first of these approaches
sought to use a universal, Amoldian view of the aesthetic to reposition a class

consciousness devastated during the war and to fuel a new economy, much as Eliot's

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reforms at Harvard were connected to a post -Civil War economic shift. While
Arnold, Leavis, and TS Eliot are oft-cited referents in this approach (the latter's
inclusion somewhat complicated by avant-garde tendencies in his poetry), perhaps a
more relevant focus is Lord Newbolt. Newbolt, a military hero, government official,
and popular poet headed a Board of Education committee examining the role of
education in England after the “Great War.” Faced with what the report called the
“morbid condition of the body politic,” meaning a more diverse and less gentrified
populace, the report encouraged the use of literature, Shakespeare in particular, as a
corrective. As Derek Longhurst summarizes, the report offered literary
recommendations in support of the “common good.”

To prevent ‘lamentable consequences,‘ educational institutions should promote

‘fellowship' through literature, as an embodiment of the best thoughts of the

best minds, the most direct and lasting communication by man to man. (151)
What is significant is the educational focus of this approach generated by the historical
need to replenish an administrative class. The Newbolt Report makes the case, cited
in numerous forums, including current conservative back to basics reform movements,
that the right literature taught by the right people can improve social life.

While this approach runs aground on the basis of trying to impose an aesthetic
response and promoting an empty and obedient notion of reading, it is still at least
marginally inclusive. What is interesting is that the parallel development of an elite,
avant-garde aesthetic movement undermines the first approach from the start. Many
writers—- Eliot is a notable example-- worked both sides of the street during this

period. On one hand we have the promotion of a putative cultural salvation through

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literary studies, on the other we have the conscious disparaging of “mass” culture and
the creation of elite cultural institutions. The arrangement is as diabolical as it is
clever, and it is still played out in almost every school curriculum in the country. The
first phase is to create a market, to produce broad literacy skills that promote and
validate the importance of literary texts. Once that market, an essential part of
legitimizing literary culture, is in place, the second phase kicks in. In this phase,
“difficult” literature, literature expressly not for, about, or by this newly educated
public, becomes the standard bearer for literary culture. As John Carey summarizes:
The intellectuals could not, of course, actually prevent the masses from
attaining literacy. But they could prevent them reading literature by making it
too difficult for them to understand - and this is exactly what they did. The
early twentieth century saw a determined effort, on the part of the European
intelligentsia, to exclude the masses from culture... How deliberate this process
of alienating the mass audience was is, of course, problematic and no doubt
differed from case to case. But the placing of art beyond the reach of the mass
was certainly deliberate at times. (16-17)
Carey's narrative makes intellectual involvement in culture problematic at best. The
urge to reify a difficult, often “textual,” definition of cultural production denies a
broader semiotic and pragmatic approach.
Even when leftist intellectuals attack these constructions, two problems emerge.
The first, as Bové points out, is that they do so within the institutions that privilege
their positions. Bové's example is Edward Said, arguably the quintessential

oppositional intellectual of our time, who is still limited in his opposition by the site

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of his practice.

Said, or any other magisterial intellectual modifies and perpetuates one central

component of humanism: the sublime role of the leading - even if adversarial -

intellectual whose work is able both to shake the order of forces and make
possible a new accommodation -- an intellectual whose image as the
empowered revisionist alone is attractive and authoritative within the otherwise

anonymous network of discourse and representation. (31)

Bové's critique is echoed by Jacques Ranciére, who faults Bourdieu's work on the
classist nature of the testing process in the French academy as benefiting Bourdieu and
not the students.

The second, closely related, problem is that leftist cultural criticism is itself
inaccessible. As Bérubé points out, most of the heat generated by leftist cultural
critique is felt in a few elite graduate programs, while the public arena is dominated
by right wing parodies of that critique. Part of this is a function of what Watkins
refers to as the “recruiting “ function of theory, its appeal as a glamorous and esoteric
calling. Part is the need for any profession to protect its discourse and methodology
or risk losing the patronage of its supporting institutions. But a large part of the
problem is that leftist intellectuals abhor the “masses” and see themselves, just as
Eagleton does, holding the keys to their political, economic, and cultural salvation.

None of these versions of culture is aesthetic in an autopoietic sense. None are
even what Williams would called “constitutive,” seeing culture as “the signifying
system through which necessarily (though among other means) a social order is

communicated, reproduced, experienced, and expressed” (SC 13). Non extends the

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intelligent and intentional act of cultural reproduction to non-intellectuals, unless it be
in the negative sense of false consciousness. This point is important because if the
aesthetic is a normal and necessary part of our individual and cultural identity, then
cultural theory must honor it as multiple and not institutionally dominated. Further, a
postmodern theory of culture should track not only the fragmentation of subjectivity
and the shift in sites and means of cultural reproduction, but also the emergence of
new forums of consensus. That is, both the drifts and closures of cultural couplings
need to be understood if a true picture of how cultures act as complex systems is to be
obtained. The goal here is not the descent into relativism that postmodernism is so
often accused of, but a deeper understanding of how the multiple energies,
technologies, and subjectivities of culture negotiate and authenticate their identities.

To begin with, although culture is intensely ontogenic in our experiencing of it,
it is the diachronic nature of our behaviors and couplings that give culture its specific
function and gravity. Maturana and Varela emphasize what they call the
“transgenerational stability of behavior patterns ontogenically acquired in the
communicative dynamics of a social environment” (201) in their definition of cultural
behavior. That is, though we experience our behavior as unique and individual, and to
some extent it is, we also rely on “transgenerational stability” to orient us. This,
again, is McGowan's point about the strength of social construction. While our own
experience is limited, coordinating behaviors in a stable field of experiences and
behaviors creates a cultural dynamic. Raymond Williams points out that our selection
and arrangement of those points of stability changes over time.

The selective tradition thus creates, at one level, a general human culture; at

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another level, the historical record of a particular society; at a third level, most

difficult to accept and assess, a rejection of considerable areas of what was

once a living culture... In a society as a whole, and in all its particular

activities, the cultural tradition can be seen as a continual selection and re-

selection of ancestors. (TLR 51-52)
In other words, culture is always different from and less than “lived experience,” to
use Williams's term. As periods emerge and recede the contents and perceptions of
the transgenerational behaviors change.

The key to a progressive sense of postmodern culture is to realize that the
“lived experience” or the ontogenic forms of cultural expression and coupling now
play a greater role in the performative selection of cultural traditions. This is simply
another way of saying that the local, aesthetic groundings of individuals and groups
have emerged to fragment and break apart earlier traditions. Not only the traditions,
but the institutions created to perpetuate them, from national governments, to museums
and universities have, for the moment at least, lost the power to force the selection of
particular definitions of behavior. Instead, we live in a cultural period when aesthetic
(in the autopoietic sense) distinctions multiply rapidly and are diffused more rapidly
into a cultural setting unable to absorb or re-couple them. Like the computer
generated fractal constructions Hayles describes, these cultural expressions lack any
one, coherent point of focus. Even the sites and means of production have shifted to
such a degree that the transgenerational stability is in question.

One response to this situation is to argue that academics have been reading too

much Nietzsche and the “problems” we have result from a loss of traditional values(or

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points of focus). Given McGowan's observations and the importance of
transgenerational stability, it would be a mistake to underestimate the power of the this
interpretation. The political right in all Western societies has gained untold power and
influence promoting versions of this agenda. This response assumes that by returning
the focus, or process of selection, to its traditional sites and means that the crisis will
pass. It assumes, that is, that the crisis is not the result of a more fundamental drift
between old institutions and new conditions.

The contrary attempt to merely celebrate difference and diversity simply
overlooks the autopoietic urge toward closure. This culture, and other nationalist
cultures in the fast and third worlds, will eventually close the current drift. As
insightful as it is to realize, pace Baudrillard, that the drift invalidates traditional
subjectivities and technologies of self, it is foolish to think that the drift is permanent.
If it were, the culture would die, having no way to sustain its own structural dynamic.
Much more likely, and historically probable, is the attempt to close the drift through
repressive means.

As I argued in the first chapter, an alternate response is to see the drift as a
critical reconfigurement of the basis for cultural selection. Toulmin, for instance,
argues that the focus on nation states must be replaced by a complementary
construction of local and global politics. Humanist intellectuals are particularly at risk
in this period because the base of their cultural capital is anchored in the very
institutions called into question by the current sense of drift. They cannot engage in
closing the gap without abandoning their current conditions of patronage and practice,

but even that brings no guarantees. Cultural theory emerges as critical at precisely the

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point where rethinking language and knowledge making, the metaphors of thinking
about thinking, come into contact with the new attempts to make sense out of what
appears to be darkly chaotic and to construct multiple and complementary points of
focus.

Constructing a theory and practice to honor and utilize these multiple
objectivities is problematic on several fronts. First, our models for talking about
culture are as bound to the need for categorization and consistency as our models of
language are. Even if the most egregious oversimplifications, such as Newt Gingrich's
appeal to an “American civilization,” are set aside, cultural theory still assumes the
existence of a coherent cultural matrix. Constructing that matrix means categorizing
and ranking spaces and practices with the cultural dynamic, or what Bourdieu calls the
habitus. Even though these approaches often leave those with a strong political
agenda of their own, such as Eagleton, uncomfortable, the systems still provide a
privileged objectivity to academic practitioners. Second, this project is impossible to
implement unless we abandon the idea of the ”mass.” As both Carey and Bové
recognize, and as Williams noted as early as the conclusion to Culture and Society, the
concept of the “masses” is primarily a legitimizing trope for intellectual pretense.
Finally, there is very delicate balance to be struck between maintaining the rigor of
intellectual practice and relocating that practice in cultural sites currently impervious
or hostile to it. The first two concerns will be the focus of the rest of this chapter,
and the third will be the focus of the next.

The question of models has already been discussed in the previous chapter. In

fact, it is the need to more accurately and inclusively understand languaging that

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makes a new model for talking about culture necessary. The goal here is to not
merely reduce culture to a “text,” which first Richards and later the poststructuralists
accomplished, but to maintain a broader semiotic and performative focus. Here, again,
a pragmatic sensibility infused with models and metaphors of post-quantum theory
science is a large part of the solution, but culture implies, even more strongly than
language, a Western bias toward order and a deep sense of Gnostic truth seeking.
Even the most amateurish of interpretations seeks to cloak itself in the mantle of
cultural synthesis. This tendency grows out of the need to construct stable forms of
order. David Hall addresses the shift in emphasis from stable to process or pragmatic
models of thinking, and his summary is worth quoting at some length:
The traditional understanding of harmony in contrastive terms tacitly assumes
the priority of consistency, conjunction, and unity over their opposites. This
tacit assumption is both cause and consequence of the belief that norms, or
pattern criteria, exist independently of the flux of passing circumstance and
function as forms of togetherness characterizing the harmonies we objectively
experience
In the truest sense process understandings must have the notion of
insistent particularity as both ground and goal. Process and particularin are
mutually implicative. If there were but one kind of entity, uniformity would be
complete and the varieties of logical order (the sole object of enjoyment in
such a world) could be enjoyed in abstraction from the entertainment of any
actually living thing. Any item in such a world could serve as the surrogate

for any other. Total stasis would be the rule. In a world of inconsistent

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particularities persistence is less valuable. Items and their complex unities
must move off the scene to make way for other items and complexes
impossible with regard to the former. Particularity argues for process if the
fullest values are to be realized.And process, if it is to be more than a shifting
of components and patterns (whose possible existence is thought to be as rich
as the actualities so patterned), requires particularity. (E&I 133)
One example of particularity is the multiple objectivity imbedded in third-order unities
brought forth in languaging. That is, our lived experience of the culture is neither
interchangeable with anyone else's nor reducible to expert summary or observation.
The goal is not to essentialize these standpoints but to find the emerging points
of contact between them. That is, if we accept the muti—verse as an increasingly
accurate picture of a postmodern democracy, then we also need to be able to create
and identify the new touch points of that democracy, the new sites of consensus
building. These sites and means of reproduction are unlikely to look like the
modernist institutions that relied on controlling and legitimizing information and
information technologies to create and maintain identity. This is so because
information in the computer age is no longer contextualized, as Hayles notes.
Humanist intellectuals cannot depend on specialized discourse precisely because it is
this specialization that disconnects them from a public discourse that is structured
around aesthetic concerns, much like Williams's “structures of feeling,” that are not
experienced or communicated as technical specialties. As a consequence, these newly
aestheticized cultural reproductions are not just unconventional material for academic

discourse, they are entirely different aesthetic couplings that have their own logic and

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semiotic consistency. Progressive political thought cannot predetermine the site,
means,or outcome of the performative interactions needed to both study and work
within these constructs, no matter how “right” their analysis of the situation may seem.

One possible scenario for future cultural analysis would abandon the totalizing
notion of culture in favor a more organic model, one that recognizes multiple levels
and forms of disequillibrium and uses its analytic powers to identify and create new
points of focus. Instead of a dominant and overriding view of culture, one that
emphasizes paradigms, epochs, and historical trends, the alternative would emphasize
the way that these multiple objectivities could communicate with each other. It would
bring these perspectives into a linguistic and co—ontogenic coupling, including the
specific material conditions needed for this to happen. This does not mean that they
have to agree or communicate across a broad range of cultural representations, only
that they find a mutual means of recognition. There is no reason that a large part of
this effort could not include a great deal of the critical and materialist analysis
commonly associated with cultural studies. There is no reason, for instance, to
exclude material and historical critiques of current and former products of cultural
reproduction. The mistake is to assume that the sites of cultural reproduction we
inhabit will influence objectivities disconnected from them, or that the current field is
already comprehensive. Instead, we must construct a model of culture and cultural
studies that emphasizes multiple sites and means of communication.

Given this analysis, it would seem that bringing new models of language and
aesthetics into the classroom would be a central part of this undertaking. Further,

honest pursuit of this goal would reconstruct our whole notion of theory and practice.

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Instead of promoting yet another ‘back to basics' revival or encouraging some revised
version of the Newbolt Report, politically progressive intellectuals should offer an
alternative to business as usual. That alternative could start with the changes in
language education discussed in the last chapter, and it should include a revision of the
way aesthetics is constructed and taught. The focus should be on providing an
understanding of how communication is, in Williams's terms, “constitutive and
constituting,” and of how an aesthetic dynamic could extend democratic potentials in
emerging social formations. As Williams notes, every culture is in the process of
selectively reorganizing itself, of choosing some sites and means of cultural
reproduction over others. In a postmodern culture those selection processes are more
profuse and diffuse than in modernist institutions, and there is no reason, other than
nostalgia, to believe that the sites and means currently studied would some how be
privileged in new constellation of cultural practices. In other words, the focus has to
be on the lived experience of the students, the way they construct, and are constructed
by, their aesthetic domains.

This approach would signify a change in the relationship between theory and
practice because it would put practice first and return theory to a reflective role. That
is, instead of predetermining the order of events and the priority of focus, this
approach would emphasize the performative aspect of culture, the point at which
identity and understanding are constructed. Theory becomes a point of reflection and
contemplation, what Hall refers to as “theoria.” Both elements are critical. The
behaviors associated with cultural production require an observer, a point Maturana

and Varela continually stress, and that observation, the techniques of its practice, can,

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if properly performed, provide insights into the context of the production. But the
observer cannot impact on the observed behaviors without interacting with the
participants, without entering their aesthetic domain and they his. The last point is
critical because it challenges the concept of distance assumed by a universal observer,
an uninvolved objectivity. For understanding, a new coupling, to take place it is not
enough for the theory, the explanation of the behavior, to stay within the observer's
experience, it must also circulate and interact with the experiences of the observed.
They may resist and reject it. This is similar to ethnography in some ways, but it
challenges the objectivity of the observer. It challenges, as Ranciére does in The
Ignorant Schoolmaster, any technology that reduces the observed to inactive and
uninvolved subjects.

This sort of program has to value the everyday because that is the only
legitimate site of cultural reproduction for most people, and is a site of cultural
reproduction for everyone. Unlike theoretical mediations that limit the performative
aspects of culture, this approach preserves the agency and intelligence of the
participants instead of reducing them to unthinking pawns. Agency is critical because
it explains the vitality and importance of our ongoing, autopoietic reconfigurations of
our individual and cultural identities. Popular culture offers, in fact it demands, the
continual rewriting and restructuring of identity in real time. A selective tradition only
offers the opportunity to do so against a limited, historically fixed background. Only
by focusing on the everyday can the complexity and intensity of aesthetic activity be
understood and contrasted to the more limited and restrictive aesthetic distance

common to academic practice. Instead of trying to predetermine the outcome of

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cultural production, ignoring in the process the lived experience of most of the
members of society, the goal here is to create some understanding of what takes place
and what is conserved or adapted in the process.

Models of the everyday, such as those found in de Certeau and Fiske,
emphasize the progressive and resistant aspects of everyday or popular culture. For
deCerteau concepts such as “poachings” and “guerrilla raids” convey both the agency
and the resistance of the popular. Fiske, building on de Certeau's analysis, explores
these elements in shopping malls, movies, and jeans, for example, and the way these
elements form complex interactions. Fiske has been attacked for essentializing these
resistant elements at the cost of losing critical and political perspective. While there is
merit in raising a cautionary or corrective flag on that question, it is equally important
to preserve some direct interaction. If we look at cultural and aesthetic practices in
what Edward Hutchins might call “the wild,” in the real time construction and
experiencing of them, then we must also look at the way these practices conserve and
constitute a cultural site. We need to think about what the consequences of our
practices are on the environment that sustains and surrounds them. What academic
criticism is too likely to conserve is a judgmental distance between the observed and
the observer. What we should be concerned with conserving are new practices of
agency, positive freedom, and democracy.

Hutchins develops one possible model to use in thinking about a cultural
studies program grounded in the everyday in his book, Cognition in the Wild.
Hutchins, a cognitive psychologist working for the US Navy, studied the way

navigational teams on Navy vessels performed their tasks. By “in the wild,” he means

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cognition as it takes place in real situations, not in a laboratory or artificial
environment. What he found was that rather than one clear, or predetermined
procedure, each team, acting with and through items such as tools, communication
systems, rank, procedures, and history, created its own medium of operation. Further,
cognition took place not just among the crew members but in and through the
medium. That is, the medium also “learned,” or became more or less intelligent and
adaptive. In that sense, cultural formations “in the wild” are not inert systems. We
learn and act within a cultural medium that either expands or limits our intelligence
and adaptability, conserving some behaviors over others. Either way, the medium is
part of the picture. The challenge for humanist intellectuals is to think of how
emergent sites might promote this sort of adaptability and intelligence, particularly as
part of an educational practice. Instead of promoting a weak sense of relativism,
difference and diversity play a role in defining and promoting the adaptability of new
behaviors. Transferring critical perspecives and knowledge may prove difficult,
however. As Williams notes, the relationship between dominant and emergent is often
problematic.
Privileged Institutions: This interlocks with the sociological detail of the
privileged cultural institutions, such as universities. These not only protect
certain unsubordinated standards and procedures of culturalwork, but under
stress protect them differentially. They often have full effect in residual areas
(e.g. classical scholarship) by the recognition of relative distance. They usually
have functional effect in dominant areas (e.g. applied science) where internal

standards and procedures can be accepted as the conditions of effective service.

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But quite often they have minimal effect in emergent areas (e.g. critical
sociology) where the conditions of privilege may be threatened by their
practice, and where the received ‘standards' can even be evoked against new
interests and procedures. (SC 225)
Williams confirms the difficulty of bringing a new intellectual practice across the
borders that separate a privileged intellectual class from everyday and popular
formations. Unless that transference is possible, however, the aesthetic backgrounds
against which each community organizes its identity cannot be brought into contact or
dialogue.

Obviously, the notion of “masses” or “mass culture” is antithetical to this sort
of revised practice.There is no sense of intentional or intelligent agency in these
concepts. Instead, they promote an elite privilege in these areas while assuming
observational domain of the rest of society. Any performative and complex model of
culture has to abandon these categories to pursue its goals. As simple as that may
sound, it is difficult to even trace evolution of the term intellectual without reference
to the masses as an oppositional and defining construct. Inherent in this construction
is the notion that public affairs can be better managed by elite and specialized
intellectuals, whether their specialty be science, humanities, business or government,
than by the populace at large. In some areas that is no doubt true. But intellectuals
working within these dominant institutions cannot translate their knowledge across
aesthetically diffuse structures, and as a result have failed to make the cultural medium
more intelligent and adaptive. It is impossible to locate or develop a means for

dialogue and interaction necessary to perform the task of changing our practice using

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“mass” as a category of cultural identity.
CONCLUSION

It is important, in conclusion, to reposition this view of culture and aesthetics
within a broader constellation of critical practices. To begin with, even though this
approach is based in language it is not mentalist or nominalist. Instead, this approach
has more in common with a view of language that can be traced from Coleridge to
Pierce that is grounded in the material as well as the linguistic nature of the sign. In
that sense, it is part of a pragmatic response to the pluralistic and antifoundational
characteristics of postmodernism. From this perspective, the question is not how to
recognize or create diversity but how diversity becomes part of a cultural dynamic
intent on preserving multiple voices and objectivities without essentializing them.
Beginning with an understanding of languaging and the aesthetic that makes the
material part of an adaptive and autopoietic structuring of personal and social identity
frames the problem in new ways. It returns us to the pragmatic search for
communities of inquiry, and it focuses the need to negotiate the sites and means of
cultural reproduction.

Nothing in this project denies the validity or importance of cultural critique
pursued through other theoretical approaches. It does, however, question how
effective those approaches can be in changing an emerging cultural dynamic utilizing
dominant or residual sites and means of transmission. Put simply, the question is how
to take the work done by progressive intellectuals in the academy and make it part of
a broader social and educational dialogue. This approach argues that any dialogue that

moves across boundaries of identity must recognize and honor the aesthetic dimension

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of understanding, including the recognition that all cultural production is intentional
and intelligible, which is not to say it is critically acute. This approach challenges
intellectuals working in the humanities to change their orientation from modernist
strategies of control and domination and explore how a postmodern democracy might
create and recognize emerging sites of transmission, including a revision of
educational institutions and practices.

The demystification of the aesthetic changes the grounds for meaningful
intellectual work, making it necessary to both include alternative standpoints in the
formation of any project and to communicate the outcomes to standpoints with
different aesthetic groundings. This reality makes the creation of a common language
at once more challenging and more rewarding. Most importantly, it means that
intellectuals cannot simply replicate their internal discourse and expect institutions to
translate it to a broader public, unless, of course, they are content to endorse the
modernist program of unity through oppression. This is not the first time that
intellectuals (although they would not have been called that) have faced the challenge
of a changing cultural dynamic, one that invalidated previously sanctioned knowledge
and created new sites of cultural production and new guardians of emerging
technology. In this case, the emergent formations are undercutting, both through
technology and scientific metaphors and models, the naturalized assumptions of work
in the humanities. In this setting, even an updated version of a clerisy is no longer
appropriate; they no longer speak to the conditions of valid cultural work.

Hall argues in his conclusion to The Uncertain Phoenix that this kind of

cultural vision is properly polytheistic, a reversal of a tradition that sought order

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through the denial of chaos. The Gnostic echoes of that tradition are found in
foundational intellectual practices today. Changing the models we use to understand
language, aesthetics, and culture is one step toward revitalizing our practice and
bringing it in line with an emerging cultural determinant: post-unified field theory
science. Like everything in the postmodern world, it is likely that the change will be
scattered among a multitude of practices and sites. What they are likely to have in
common is the creation of a more adaptive and intelligent cultural dynamic, one that
honors and learns from previously excluded voices and standpoints. Ultimately, it will
require that we change our definition of intellectual practice, probably even our

definition of intellectuals.

Chapter Five

POST - INTELLECTUALS

Ultimately, if, as Hayles argues, postmodernism is a response to a new cultural
determinant that involves rapidly changing conditions, including changes in the way
we think about order, then intellectual practice should reflect that shift. That is,
postmodernism must be explained in relationship to modernist intellectual sites and
practices and not just as a radical freefall within isolated intellectual or artistic
communities. The question is what adaptations should be conserved and which have
outlived their usefulness, or how do current practices either promote or inhibit a
postmodern expansion of agency and intellect. The grounds for making these
decisions, of course, depend on how postmodernism is defined and what it means to
say we live in a postmodern age or society.

In the preceding chapters, 1 have tried to sketch what I have called a strong
sense of postmodernism, one grounded in a material and pragmatic sense of practice.
It is my contention that postmodernism can best be understood as a shift in both the
conditions and metaphors of cultural reproduction, at once including positions and
voices previously silenced and encountering a new sense of order in the material and
social world. Part of that new sense of order grows out of a performative and
complementary understanding of language, aesthetics, and culture which problematizes
the modernist assumptions about intellectual practice and both the goals and means of
knowledge production. In simplest form, the question is whether institutions and

practices designed for one form of social and cultural order can be revised to fit

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another, in some ways very different, set of assumptions.

There has, of course, been a lot written about the plight of intellectuals, almost
all of it by card-carrying intellectuals. Most of it, even when airing specific
grievances, naturalizes the site and function of intellectual practice and is Optimistic
about the position of intellectuals. Most of it is produced and consumed within
university communities. If there is a postmodern sense of intellectual practice,
however, it must be more than an elite discourse. It must instead address the state of
democracy, education, and cultural reproduction in a broader public arena. In that
sense, I would argue, much that has been written about intellectuals by intellectuals is
largely self-congratulatory and not terribly relevant to the question of what a
postmodern intellectual practice, or even a post-intellectual practice, might become.
This is so both because intellectuals, both humanist and scientific, have become
entrenched in institutions of limited postmodern value and, as Bové argued, they have
often defined themselves in opposition to the broader emancipatory sense of agency
and intelligence that marks the postmodern.

Several versions of radical or progressive intellectuals have emerged. Of the
versions critical to current intellectual self-perception, none is more salient than that of
Antonio Gramsci. Key terms of his critique, including “traditional” and “organic”
intellectuals, “war of position,” and “hegemony,” are deeply situated in current
discussions about intellectual practice. Gramsci recognized the function of
intellectuals in sustaining and challenging the operational, and largely invisible,
cultural consensus by virtue of their leading roles in institutions. But he also held the

view that only parties could stage the required revolution, and parties required leaders.

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For Gramsci, the true focus of the organic intellectual was the party and its purpose
was to educate the populace, what he called the “people-nation,” from the intellectuals'
position within emerging institutions. Current appropriations of Gramsci often
overlook the party, postulating instead a loose affiliation of university intellectuals as
organic or, in Said's term, “oppositional.” They also do not take into account the
historical and material inability of so—called organic intellectuals to control the
institutional sites of their practice. From this perspective, it makes no sense to talk
about resisting or overthrowing hegemony. Gramsci was quite clear that the goal was
a “counter-hegemony,” and that a culture without some form of hegemony probably
was not a culture at all. The point is worth making because it refutes what McGowan
describes as the “negative” sense of freedom promoted by intellectuals who see
freedom as separation and exception from social order. Finally, Gramsci precedes
Williams in inverting the base/superstructure model of vulgar Marxism, causing a
strong emphasis on the sites and means of cultural and not just economic production.
Gramsci said that “every hegemonic relationship is essentially pedagogical” (1331),
recognizing the role that intellectuals of either stripe played in the construction of a
political and cultural formation.
One cannot make politics-history without this sentimental connection between
intellectuals and the people-nation. In the absence of such a nexus the relations
between the intellectuals and the people-nation are, or are reduced to, relations
of a purely bureaucratic and formal order; the intellectual becomes a caste or a
priesthood. (1323)

What Gramsci describes is precisely the balancing act faced by modernist intellectuals

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with a social conscience: how to lead without alienating or losing one's followers. In
a postmodern democracy, that problem is overwhelmingly complex.

Gramsci provides a starting point, a way of beginning an interrogation of
intellectual practice. His program was both elitist and utopian, believing in the power
of an emergent intellectual class to create a new social order, which is to say, a new
hegemony. As Luciano Pellicani has noted in his analysis of Gramsci and the PCI,
even though Gramsci sidesteps a naked materialism, such as that of Lenin, his
constructions still fall close to the quasi-religious notion of vanguardism promoted by
more instrumental or vulgar forms of communism. The historical record, as Pellicani,
a noted Italian socialist himself, reads it is that the balance described above never
materialized. For current intellectuals Gramsci offers a mixed bag. His concepts of
organic intellectuals and war of position are appealing, and hegemony is a useful
concept in explaining cultural reproduction, but their appropriation is problematic in
current practice. It is questionable whether individuals who work within the university
system can rightfully think of themselves as organic intellectuals. At best, as Bové
noted, they can gain control of the institutions of state dominance. Further, I would
argue, it is dishonest to attack hegemony without clearly explaining the counter-
hegemonic position being proposed. Not to do so is perpetuates a negative sense of
freedom. What should be noted is how traditional Gramsci's view of intellectuals is in
the final analysis. He proposes a view of politically astute, educational class with
hopeful but extremely problematic relations with the common folk.

The alienation that Gramsci feared is confirmed and reconfigured by Alvin

Gouldner in The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of a New Class. For Gouldner,

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the key is to “not focus on what intellectuals think but how they think” (58). The

“culture of critical discourse,” or “CCD,” becomes the defining characteristic of
intellectual practice.

CCD is radicalizing partly because, as a relatively situation-free speech variant,

it experiences itself as distant from (and superior to) ordinary languages and

conventional cultures. A relatively situation-free discourse is conducive to a

cosmopolitanism that distances persons from local cultures, so that they feel an

alienation from all particularistic, history-bound places and from ordinary,
everyday life.
The grammar of critical discourse claims the right to sit in judgment

over the actions and claims of any social class and all power elites. (59)

The price university intellectuals pay for these powers may be alienation, but this
distancing is also the source of what Gouldner predicts will be the gradual rise to
power of this new intellectual class.

Gouldner's constructions may seem more accurate in describing intellectuals in
the technical and scientific areas, intellectuals that become the managerial class of
what Stanley Aronowitz calls the “technoculture,” but humanist intellectuals are
implicated, at least to the degree that they claim the privilege of intellectual practice.
For either class of intellectuals, the issue of patronage is central. As Aronowitz points
out, even scientists breach the rules of autonomous and independent discourse to
defend state and industrial patronage, exactly the claim Harding makes in reference to
objectivity. What is illustrative about Gouldner's analysis is that while preserving the

and expanding the critical elitism found in Gramsci, though certainly not on Gramsci's

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terms, Gouldner can already recognize deracination rather than solidarity as the telling
characteristic of intellectual practice. That is, even though Gouldner's analysis is
fraught with problems defining autonomy and privilege, he clearly represents the failed
hope for an “organic” intellectual practice growing out of the dominant cultural
institutions of the modernist state, which is not to say there could have been a moment
between the wars when those institutions might have emerged differently. Instead,
those institutions, notably the research university, provide a site of authority and
distance, serving as a legitimizing agent of professional intellectuals.

The point is not that Gouldner and Gramsci have the same view of
intellectuals; clearly, they do not. The point is that given their disparate focus and
grounding of intellectual practice, key areas of convergence emerge. In both schemes,
intellectuals occupy a leading or “pedagogical” role that separates them, Gramsci's
hope for a contrary outcome notwithstanding, from ordinary people and everyday life.
The confluence is telling precisely because it represents a broader point of focus: the
deracination of intellectuals. Whether their separation occurs as a failure to connect
with the “feelings of the people- nation” or is willingly sought as the condition of
autonomy and the will to power, it is a material condition of their professional
identity. Given the fact of their deracination, intellectuals must occupy sites, specific
and material and cultural spaces that legitimize their cultural production, which are not
a consequence of who they are. Even when “oppositional” or “transformative”
intellectuals attempt to ground their work in their own specific circumstances, in their
own race, gender, class, or sexual orientation, the work is subsumed by the site of

intellectual production. For both Gouldner and Gramsci, although for entirely different

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reasons, that is an acceptable risk or condition of intellectual practice, whether in the
pursuit of a socialist utopia or as a phase in the emergence of a new dominant class.
Outside the institutional site, and the patronage it implies, there is no defensible
concept of intellectual authority.

This is not to say that intellectual practice is a black hole which absorbs all
potential social and political benefit of progressive or radical thought. Obviously a
number of social movements (civil rights and feminism are compelling examples) have
been constructed out of a blending of intellectual production and cultural values. The
critical agency and practices of that production, however, have not filtered into the
ordinary or everyday, perhaps one reason that decades of progress in those areas seem
so vulnerable today. Instead, as Peterson noted in his criticism of the “technologies of
expertise,” a “passive political sensibility (36)” has become part of the intersection of
intellectual and technological practices that thwart critical agency in the culture. Thus,
even when the goal of intellectual practice is politically progressive and personally
grounded, even when it is successful in influencing the cultural dynamic, it is still not
part of a broader, more democratic and performative sense of critical agency or an
enhanced public intelligence.

Jurgen Habermas, cited by both Aronowitz and McGowan in the arguments for
a more involved practice, is, of course, one of the most prominent and influential
proponents of a theory and practice designed to enhance the public sphere. I have
criticized Habermas for relying too much on reason to bridge the gap between
competing or uncoupled linguistic and political structures. Yet, I think it is also

important in this specific context to grant the power of his communicative reason.

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Even if it misses the mark on identifying how and under what circumstances cultural
couplings are possible, it still provides an attempt to think about how adaptive
structures and cultural production can be combined. Habermas provides what is
perhaps the last, best chance for modernist intellectual practice to coexist with
democratic sensibilities. Aronowitz identifies the adaptability of that model as one of
the strong features of a progressive practice.
Where ‘problem solving' mechanisms no longer suffice because the rules of
the game do not encompass the class of actions in question, society tends to
reduce the problem to manageable proportions, thus eluctably occluding or
excluding issues that cry out for collective address. The intellectuals, whose
main activity can be described as providing noninstrumental knowledge through
the invention of new language games, ought to be able to intervene in the
affairs of both state and civil society to represent the new questions as well as
their solution, even as class-based or work based knowledge remains ensconced
in particular interests. . . . The real criterion of a dynamic society is whether
new, noninstrumental knowledge is genuinely valued, not only as an art, but as
the basis of social decisions. (OI 34)
Even allowing for the emancipatory element of Aronowitz's analysis, which echoes
McGowan's claim that the common language is the medium of political revitalization,
this construction still specializes the production of intellectuals and marks it as
somehow superior. Why must intellectuals be the ones to formulate new language
games, and how do those games change the dynamic, if not through the power

apparatus of the state?

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Peterson's account of the role intellectuals play in the culture sets out to
address some of those issues. It emphasizes the division of labor, not just in critical
agency or intelligence but in the new and ever expanding technologies of political
imaging and communication. His call for a “specifically democratic political sense
making of the social world (33)” is linked to the limitations of expert or technical
knowledge. There is much here that moves beyond Aronowitz and McGowan,
especially his willingness to put political consensus above purely technical or
intellectual expertise.

[A] democratic alternative to the division of labor is one in which such

knowledge does not have the last word in social choices and the bearers of

such knowledge do not derive political authority directly from their cognitive

capabilities. (47)

What remains, however, are those technical and intellectual sites of dominance which
may be denaturalized and neutralized by the kind of examination and resistance from
within the academy Peterson calls for, but then again may not. The question raised
here and in Aronowitz is how intellectuals place themselves in “the wider social
debate,” to use Peterson's terms. That is, can intellectuals leave the sites that define
them as workers in the modernist state and still function as intellectuals, their desire to
do so notwithstanding?

Foucault's “specific intellectual” offers an affirmative answer by separating the
functions. That is, he seeks to delineate intellectual work within a specific discipline
from individual political activity.

The work of the intellectual is not to shape others' political will; it is through

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the analysis that he carries out in his own field, to question over and over again
what is postulated as self-evident, to disturb peoples' mental habits, the way
they do and rethink things, to dissipate what is familiar and accepted, to
reexamine the rules and institutions and on the basis of this reproblematization
(in which he carries out his specific task as an intellectual) to participate in the
formation of a political will (in which he has a role as a citizen to play). (PPC
265)
Whether one's response is to applaud, as Harpham and Rajchman do, this position as
an “ethics of resistance,” or to replicate Said's skepticism of the political quietude
represented, this is a thoroughly odd construction. It promotes not only deracination
but schizophrenia. What remains, however, is the firewall between intellectual
production and ordinary experience. In that sense it does not so much answer as beg
the question. What Foucault does evoke is the chilling effect intellectual work can
have on the “formation of a political will” by suggesting that there is a manipulative
exterior discourse shaping the dimensions of the public sphere. As with Peterson's
refusal to grant technical and intellectual positions the final word, Foucault reserves a
somewhat different cultural space apart from politics for intellectual work.
McGowan, who has a much more favorable view of Habermas, contends that
intellectual work and politics are only tangentially related.
Does the preceding vision of social interaction and democratic norms provide
humanist intellectuals with a specific social and political role? Certainly not, if
intellectuals expect either to have some privileged role to play in society's

adoption of norms and making of decisions or to have their distinctive

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activities as intellectuals validated as, in themselves, politically efficacious

and/or necessarily on the side of the angels. . . . Intellectuals may, it is true,

form a recognizable subgroup that pushes particular points of View in various
social disputes, but nothing they do as intellectuals will differentiate their input

practically from the input of other social groups. (274)

Here, again, is the claim that intellectual work and politics can be separated.
McGowan's own statement indicates how problematic that is. He describes
intellectuals as a “subgroup” or “social group.” Setting aside for the moment the
homogenizing effects of these labels, these are precisely the markings of a political
class. Not only do they have recognizable interests and identity in this formation, they
have a unified and specialized discourse. Further, they, and other technical experts,
frame the parameters of social and political debate. Finally, it is impossible to
separate intellectual practice from the political sphere when intellectuals play such a
dominant role in defining what is and is not political. That is, any separation of the
intellectual and the everyday, including McGowan's, is already an intellectual
distinction.

Even when intellectuals try not to be intellectuals, inhabiting contrary and
alternative cultural sites, they still function as a separate and elite group. Andrew
Ross, for instance, writes about the “white hipster intellectual” of the fifties and sixties
in No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture, as “each trying to outdo the other in
their articulation of a correct white hipness” (68). The resulting argument over
“authenticity,” or trying to balance intellectual coolness and distance with a popular

anti-intellectual heat and sensualness, dictates not a popular or “organic” cultural site

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but a temporary intellectual site which subsumes the popular or hip as intellectual
capital, in much the same way that Bourdieu does. Ross is too “hip” not to realize
this, coolly measuring the distance between extremes.

Even with today's interest in a common culture, at once more demotic and

informed - a culture which is undeniably part of the postmodern agenda - the

dialectical character of the relationship between intellectuals and the popular

retains its organizing power over our daily cultural experience. In fact, in a

society that is increasingly stratified by levels and orders of knowledge, the

powerful antagonisms traditionally generated out of the wars of cultural taste
are likely to be sharpened by new kinds of disrespect even as they multiply to
reflect the endlessly flexible and fissionable creation of new hip categories of

taste. (231)

This observation from Ross's closing essay frames the conflict well, and the idea of
disrespect between the “levels and orders of knowledge” provides an appropriate
postmodern twist.

At the end of The Tree of Knowledge, Maturana and Varela tell a little fable
about an island people who live entirely on cabbage. Horribly bored and depressed by
the situation, one of the islanders finds a new, uninhabited island (no colonializing
fable, this) that provides a cornucopia of edible delights a swimable distance away.
The response? The islanders refuse to leave without their cabbages. As self-serving
as little fables tend to be, the point applies to intellectuals and postmodern conditions
of knowledge production. Intellectuals, even those intensely aware of the conflict

between a deracinated intellectual elite and a democratic and performative notion of

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culture, want to take their cabbages with them. That is, they want to hold on to the
modernist construction of the intellectual while trying to blend with emergent sites of
cultural production antithetical to the concept.

Even if the construction is explicitly “radical” and socially oriented, as in the
case of Ben Agger, and openly questions the validity of the division of cultural labor,
the problem persists.

The radical intellectual in this sense begins to live the revolution by becoming

less isolated, refusing to stay within the narrow confines of the academic role.

It is the multidirnensionality of role—playing that I contend is transformative,

challenging the very essence of technocratic society that counsels people to

only consume (commands and commodities). It would-be hypocritical to
preserve the role of the traditional intellectual while counseling others to

destroy their division of labor. (268)

Rather than an institutional practice, Agger calls for changes at the local level, in the
“ways people do things” (275). While this matches the spirit of a postmodern
practice, the ways intellectuals do things makes it difficult to imagine how it could be
accomplished.

In all of these constructions, the emergence of a postmodern practice can be
seen. It exists in the call for communicative reason, in the rejection of privilege, in
the recognition of disrespect, in the call for democratic rather than expert priorities,
and most importantly in the pervasive need to move intellectual practice out of its
institutionally grounded sites. The problem is that the modernist concept of

intellectual is simply not compatible with the broader and multiple cultural practices of

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postmodernism. That is, knowledge in a postmodern culture is not necessarily
specialized, as in Gouldner's constructions of the intellectuals as the thinking members
of the society, existing in decontextualized and diverse conditions and sites. It travels
not only through institutionally sanctioned channels, but through the permeable borders
of aesthetic couplings, absorbed, transformed, and accelerated along the way. Further,
the postmodern impulse toward pluralism and inclusion values these emerging sites
more. The very idea of the intellectual is a hindrance in this context to the idea of
critical agency, which is already making the leap from modernist institutions and
linear graphing to the liquid contexts of instant information and endlessly fragmented
and fragmenting forms of consumerism. The problem, then, is not a better intellectual
practice but the need for a post-intellectual practice.

Of all the modernist institutions and practices, intellectuals may be the least
adaptive to a postmodern turn, a truly ironic condition given the role intellectuals
played and still play in its creation and promotion. If postmodernism is seen as a shift
in the specific conditions and definition of agency, of the role that ontogenic and co-
ontogenic couplings of local particularity, and not abstract institutions, play in
constructing and maintaining a cultural matrix, then intellectuals, as site based
practitioners in those institutions, are of little value. This does not mean that specific,
knowledge producing discourses and practices are unimportant. Nor is this an
argument for a defeatist sense of relativism. The point is that for any progressive
political vision to take root it has to penetrate beyond the legitimizing function of
intellectual and technical expertise. It has to become part of the everyday dynamic in

which people ground themselves and bring forth a world they share with others. It

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cannot be passive or sanctioned by institutions far removed from the aesthetic
coherence, which may be grounded in any number of languaging and observational
strategies, of individuals and groups. We need a practice which is not so much anti-
institutional as it is extra-institutional, a practice that substitutes the organizational
patterns of modernism for those at once more organic and performative. Serious and
rigorous work can only influence this dynamic from the inside out, by finding points
of contact in actual dialogue and in real time, not in the sterile theater of university
departments.

It is also important to recognize the benefits to intellectuals. A post-
intellectual practice should reverse Ross's notion of disrespect and promote mutual
recognition and solidarity. Post-intellectuals would have greater latitude and creativity
and less sense of coercion and conformity. As a pragmatic construction, post-
intellectual practice should avoid the deracination of intellectual practice, as well as
the obligatory disdain for ordinary experience. At the same time, there is an organic
and urgent sense of responsibility to post-intellectual work.

The evidence for this change is visible in the balancing acts cited earlier, each
trying to balance between emerging conditions that seem beyond the scope of current
practice and the privilege of that practice. It is evident in the increasing flight to
interdisciplinary studies (culture studies is a prime example) to escape even a little of
the stifling air of specialized discourse. Even, perhaps particularly, in the sciences,
practitioners struggle to find new methods and models to talk about what they find
that are simply not available to them in their home disciplines. Most importantly, for

humanist intellectuals, who are, in Watkins's terms, “intraeducational” workers, it is

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evident in the increasing disrespect for their practice in both public and institutional
settings.

The analysis Peterson applies to politics could be applied to all modernist
institutions, especially education. Citizens are not just disenfranchised in the political
arena, they learn to be disenfranchised in school. Every bit as much as they modeled
the Taylorism of the industrial workplace, schools promote a passive and undemocratic
sense of learning and participation. While Peterson is on point in reference to the
effect that technologies of expertise have on pacifying the electorate, the same sorts of
technologies have been applied in schools. In fact, it is likely that school was the first
point of contact with them. It should not surprise us that students educated in a
system that strangles their creative participation mature into adults who feel they have
nothing to contribute to our shared social domain. Nowhere is “disrespect” a more
accurate description of the problem. The convenient fiction that this passivity is new
or the result of television simply overlooks the reality of classroom experience which
is only now, and only occasionally, emerging from the dullness and repression of
behaviorist pedagogies. Schooling has not, and will not as presently constituted, make
the cultural dynamic more adaptive or intelligent. In all of these challenges the
postmodern intensification and localization of agency is evident, and it draws itself
closer to a sense of cognition “in the wild.”

Education is not, at least in any postmodern sense, an institutional function.
That is, it does not take place exclusively or even primarily in schools. In modernist
schemata, schools house and train intellectuals, primarily in disciplines. The

postmodern rejection of modernist institutions includes rejecting school as a neutral or

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ahistorical practice and insists on expanding critical intelligence and agency beyond
both the walls of the school and the discourse of the discipline. Rather than looking
toward schools or intellectuals to lead some sort of educational reform toward a more
adaptive and intelligent cultural medium, we need to think differently about the
problem. We need to think of post-intellectuals contributing to but not leading the
effort to see knowledge creation, and not just some limited sense of transferable skills,
as taking place throughout the society. No culture can ever learn to be adaptive or
intelligent enough to face increasing complexity if it institutionalizes the site and
means of knowledge production. Nor can we depend on a specialized class of workers
to exclusively engage in that work. Instead, the whole complex field of learning and
knowledge production must be moved into “the wild,” and attempted as a constant and
continuing reflection of lived experience.

Some attempts, of course, are already in progress. Henry Giroux, who refers to
teachers and intellectuals as “cultural workers,” shifts his long concentration from
pedagogy to cultural practices in Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics
of Education.

Over the past decade, most of my writing has been concerned specifically with

schooling. Within this context, I worked within a political project aimed

primarily at reforming the sites of teacher education, public schools, higher
education, and certain aspects of community education. While I still believe
that these sites are crucial for encouraging students to be educated for critical

citizenship, that is, as political subjects capable of exercising leadership in a

democracy, I no longer believe that the struggle over education can be reduced

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to these sites, nor do I believe that pedagogy as a form of political, moral and
social production can be addressed primarily as a matter of schooling. (1)
Giroux's sense of focus here matches both a postmodern sense of culture, which he
refers to repeatedly, and a post-intellectual sense of practice, which I think he would
resist. Clearly, he sees the need to move out of sites limited to schooling and draw a
broader line of flight, one that has more to do with knowledge production than
certification.
Giroux's strategy is to move critical practice out into the culture at large while
maintaining a certain transformative power of intellectual work.
[C]ultural studies provides the basis for understanding pedagogy as a form of
cultural production rather than as the transmission of a particular skill, body of
knowledge, or set of values. In this context, critical pedagogy is understood as
a cultural practice engaged in the production of knowledge, identities, and
desires. As a form of cultural politics, critical pedagogy suggests inventing a
new language for resituating teacher/student relations within pedagogical
practices that open up rather than close down the borders of knowledge and
learning. Disciplines can no longer define the boundaries of knowledge or
designate the range of questions that can be asked. (165-166)
Here Giroux's acute sense that cultural practices of knowledge production are extra-
disciplinary and extra-educational is clear. His sense of expansion, of changing the
dialogue, and the metaphors that govern it, between teacher and student, of including
more voices, is clearly in line with a postmodern sense of plurality. In this sense his

work echoes other attempts, such as Seyla Ben-Habib and Diane Dubose Brunner, to

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include more voices in educational practice. Just as with Peterson's suggested
repositioning of philosophy in the real politick of democracy, Giroux's constructions
meet one part of the postmodern and post-intellectual condition, the need to expand
practice beyond institutional and discursive borders. What is less clear is how this
expansion is communicated. To whom do Giroux's cultural workers and Peterson's
reconstructed philosophers intend to speak, on whose turf, and in what language? For
Giroux, that answer is problematic. He returns in his concluding essay to the
connection between “cultural workers” and “public intellectuals” who transform their
educational practice into democratic “discourses of possibility.” While the thrust of
this shift is laudable, there remains a hint of the Gramscian intellectual, a true
believer predetermining the outcome.

A much politicized look at the postmodern take on education is provided by
William E. Doll, Jr. in A Post-Modem Perspective on Curriculum. Doll lacks the
acute sense that Giroux has that schools themselves might be part of the problem.
Ironically, his failing on that point leads him to the heart of the issue, the sense that
the process of knowledge making is already in the hands of the students. As does
Giroux, Doll calls for a reconstitution of the dialogue and relationship between teacher
and student, going so far as to suggest that the relationship itself may have outgrown
its usefulness.

In a reflective relationship between teacher and student, the teacher does not

ask the student to accept the teacher's authority; rather, the teacher asks the

student to suspend disbelief in that authority, to join with the teacher in

inquiry, into that which the student is experiencing. The teacher agrees to help

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the student understand the meaning of the advice given, to be readily

confrontable by the student, and to work with the student in reflecting on the

tacit understanding each has. (160)

In the phrase “suspend disbelief in that authority” Doll captures the essence of Ross's
“disrespect,” of a radical rupture in shared experience or aesthetic coupling. When
Giroux approaches much the same issue, he uses phrases such as, “the need for
educators and other cultural workers to fashion (241),” which crystallizes the
difference in agency. The point here is certainly not to vilify Giroux, who is widely
considered an exemplary radical educator, but to pin- point the importance of agency
in a postmodern educational perspective.

In Empowering Education, Ira Shor, drawing on his long association and
working relationship with Freire, develops what he calls “generative themes,” themes
that grow out of the words and experiences of his students. In other words, they
represent what Doll referred as the students' experiences. So as not to misrepresent
Shor, he blends these with “social” and “academic” themes, but my point of interest is
in the Freirian emphasis on the students own words and experiences. His strategy,
part of a larger program of teaching and modeling democracy in the classroom for
students who do not know what it is or what it requires, is to begin the dialogue with
the student. The dialogue should evolve to a critical and rigorous phase, but only in
connection with the students' interests and language. The issue is not just inclusion
but respect. Post-intellectual practice is committed, in a way that intellectual practice
seldom, if ever, is, to letting those without academic capital make the first move, of

listening to them and trying to address their issues first. If a postmodern democracy,

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one not dominated by technologies of expertise, is to emerge, it will start with
concerns and voices that are not only seldom heard in the current construction but
which bear little resemblance to political discourse in this century.

An expanded notion of agency and its importance in a complex and
performative model of culture also means we must realize that both the expression and
development of agency are nonlinear. That is, agency, in politics or education, cannot
be systematically developed, nor can the multiple points of contact between and
among emerging standpoints be predetermined. Instead of programs that define
learning, teaching and knowledge making as site based activities, the challenge is to
identify all the other places they emerge and the acts of languaging that bring them
into being. The same is true of politics. There are no answers to the problems that
confront us except those that grow out of the lived experiences of those making the
change. The order that emerges is more likely to be iterative and redundant, in a
word postmodern, than it is to look like a traditionally structured discipline or
curriculum. People, unfortunately, do not go to school to be able to interrogate the
conditions of their life; they go to be interrogated.

Here, again, models are important. Intellectual practice assumes a fixed site
governed by discursive and theoretical principles that predetermine both the content
and form of any likely outcome. There is reason to doubt the validity of both in a
post-intellectual practice. Mark C. Taylor and Esa Saarinen provide one possible way
of formulating a critique of these practices in Imagologies: Media Philosophy. Their
critique sits at the intersection of work by Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard, and

deconstructionists such as Gregory Ulmer and Michel Serres. The thrust of this

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criticism or, as Ulmer calls it, post-criticism, is to see critical and intellectual thought
as it is influenced by the same relationships that separated modern art from
representation. That is, Taylor and Saarinen look at intellectual practice after
electronic media have raided it, picking over the carcass for images rather than ideas.
Intellectual practice, just as literature or painting before it, loses its ability to speak for
itself and is instead the site of emergent practices that seek to bread it down, Ulmer
actually uses the word “compost,” to form a more immediate yet mediated experience.
This line of inquiry has a lot of different dimensions and surfaces, but the one
of importance here is how the speed and fragmentation of electronic communication
changes our notions of intellectual work. It is a fair question to ask how much of
what we call intellectual practice depends on libraries, universities, book publishers,
and museums, and if the ability of new forms of communication to call the future, at
least as dominant institutions, of these formations into question does not do the same
for the practices connected to them. If the media move too fast for theory, they move
too fast, and in too many cultural sites, for intellectual control. The issue for
intellectuals is how they can continue to play a cultural role grounded in the control of
information when the information is out of control. Taylor and Saarinen offer a series
of aphoristic commentaries, such as “expert language is a prison for knowledge and
understanding. A prison for intellectually significant relationships”(8) to emphasize
the shift they see taking place. Emphasizing concepts such as “speed” and
“amplification” as keys to imagology, they try to explain how intellectual work is
transformed by collaborative and interactive networks. On the other side of this shift,

the work is post-intellectual, lacking both the ownership and credentialling power of

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modernist practices.

One of the reasons that postmodernism demands a post-intellectual practice is
that intellectual practice simply cannot keep pace. As we move toward mutiversities,
profs on CD, and networked forms of distance learning, not to mention the explosion
of free information available, intellectuals will lose much of their cultural and
economic cover. Like artists on the world wide web, they will find an audience less
interested in completed products and more interested in being part of the process.
Web artists, such as Brian Eno, who create design parameters or algorithms that
people download and finish may foreshadow what a post-intellectual practice can
expect as an operating context. It is not just the technology, however, that challenges
intellectual cultural sites. Before the technology, in fact central to the development of
the technology, was what Hayles calls the “decontextualization” of information. The
“information revolution” depends on this first step of separating information from its
context and treating it as a problem of energy and not meaning. She tells us the “the
disappearance of a stable, universal context is the context of postmodern culture”
(272). In this world, “context becomes a construction rather than a natural result of
shared activities” (272).

For intellectuals, this decontextualization means the loss of any coherent site of
cultural production. Instead, we are likely to be faced with not just overdeterrnined
but overloaded information sites from which temporary contexts are constructed and
then deconstructed. Only a more fluid, post-intellectual practice can move or flow
with a decontextualized cultural dynamic. Even neo-luddite attacks against the

technology, while they make some valid claims, miss the point that there are already

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no stable modernist contexts to return to. Where do cultural workers go when they
want to influence the political process? They may just likely, and with greater ease
and more success, move their message from a web site or MTV than in front of a
congressional hearing, especially now that C-Span has made congressional theater
vulnerable to the same electronic logic. As Taylor and Saarinen would say, the
“image,” and not the data or idea is the critical touchstone in negotiating between
related, iterative but unconnected objectivities. The high seriousness of modernist
intellectuals is a burden in cyberia where playfulness and fluidity are the dominant
norms.

Much of this goes back to the teacher/learner problem in education. Students
simply do not need teachers to find information. They do need teachers to help them
build and understand the temporary contexts they use to organize it, but only in an
atmosphere that respects the students' control of the process. The decontextualization
of information creates new versions of learning, teaching, and education that will have
to struggle to find new metaphors and new values. This must start with the everyday,
because it is the ordinary contexts of everyday life that must be enhanced, made more
adaptive and intelligent, if critical intelligence is to be more than a “school” behavior.
Agency is crucial to a post-intellectual practice in which the intellectual can no longer
do the thinking or leading for the masses. That is, post-intellectual practice must
redefine and relinquish control.

In Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization, Kevin Kelly gives
one view of how what he calls “vivisystems” frame this issue. In the ongoing

collision between “the made and the born” a fusion of biological, mechanical, and

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electronic models creates not just Harraway's cyborgs but a new landscape and logic to
go with them.
This is the universal law of vivisystems: higher-level complexities cannot be
inferred by lower-level existence. Nothing - no computer or mind, no means
of mathematics, physics, or philosophy - can unravel the emergent pattern
dissolved in the parts without actually playing it out. (13)
Kelly's vivisystems are companion constructs with the view of languaging found in
Maturana and Varela, the post unified field theory physics that Hayles describes, and a
postmodern pragmatism. It is one thing to understand the principles in operation; it is
quite another to exercise distance and control in relationship to them.
In the realm of recursive reflections, an event is not triggered by a chain of
being, but by a field of causes reflecting, bending mirroring each other in a
fun-house nonsense. Rather than cause and control being dispensed in a
straight line from its origin, it spreads horizontally, like creeping tide,
influencing in roundabout, diffuse ways. Small blips can make big splashes,
and big blips no splashes. It is as if the filters of distance and time were
subverted by the complex connecting of everything to everything. (72)
In these sorts of systems more intelligence and rigor does not translate into more
control. The situation must still be “played out”, but more complex models can lead to
a better understanding of what is actually happening.
Kelly covers the waterfront from artificial intelligence to evolutionary genetics,
and the process reveals how all of the emergent sites share in complex and

evolutionary systems thinking. To the degree that these models emphasize portability

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and intense localization, they reflect a post-intellectual practice that is highly
situtational without becoming institutional. Kelly's work itself is an example of how
someone can occupy a cultural site, build a temporary context, and not attain the status
of a modernist intellectual. He can cross borders, look for new combinations, and
create a new cultural synapse without the credentialing and discourse restrictions of
intellectual practice. In these cases, rigor is both a methodological issue and a matter
of timing. Rigor, at least in a post-intellectual practice, must occur in real time; it
must connect and adapt to diffuse and emerging contexts.

Post-intellectualism, a site-free, institution-free critical practice, is an essential
part of postmodern cultural work. In a discipline that concerns itself with the cultural
reproductions created in languaging, it places praxis in the middle of the struggle to
create new social couplings that recognize the aesthetic dynamic of both material and
linguistic domains. It will work not just to bring new voices or standpoints into the
cultural selection process; we must also increase understanding of how that process
works. Unlike its modernist predecessors, post-intellectual practice will not promote
or serve the modernist agenda of a false meritocracy by trying to adjudicate linguistic
interaction in the name of standardization. It is more concerned with how cultural
reproduction works “in the wild,” in the way people choose to conserve some
adaptations and abandon others. None of this is possible from within institutions that
limit contact with the ordinary and the everyday. Post-intellectuals may conserve
some of the vestiges of the current patronage and resulting privileges, but they will
have to abandon others. These choices will be multiple and will have to be “played

out” in local and specific material contexts. Some form of intellectual practice will

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undoubtedly continue, just as modernist institutions will, but they are likely to become
residual rather than dominant. Operating as a cultural worker will require a new
constellation of sites and means of production.
CONCLUSION

A post-intellectual practice is a critical element in trying to describe how
English studies might function as a postmodern cultural site. Even if we developed
more pragmatic, complex, and complementary models of language, the shift toward an
autopoietic aesthetic and cultural model requires a shift in practice, specifically an end
to site-based intellectual dominance. A postmodern version of English studies would
situate itself in the same kind of place Giroux and Peterson describe, at the
intersection of emerging democratic practices, practices that bring politics in line with
a more diverse set of people and experiences. It has been my contention that only this
sort of response will adequately reflect the deeper cultural changes that
postmodernism stands for, changes that expand beyond concerns about textual
practices and toward issues about knowledge production and the legitimization of
experience and representation. As such, we must be prepared to respond to
multiplicity by first reconstructing our understanding of order and then by realizing
that the multiple sites and means of cultural reproduction are not connected rationally
but aesthetically.

How English departments respond to this challenge is another question.
Perhaps no other discipline has so much invested in the modernist technologies of
cultural containment. The most telling example is composition, but literature and even

cultural studies are constructed on a model that requires intellectual and academic

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mediation of experience. What gets obscured in this practice is any real understanding
of how languaging works to create a world, a sense of how things work and how we
come to know things. In their daily operation, English departments are a cog in the
modernist program of creating a meritocracy, of creating the illusion that through both
language etiquette and literary tastes language can be used as the basis of keeping
most out and letting some in. While these obviously bourgeois practices are part of a
larger economic and educational program, they are particularly ingrained in English
departments. Even radical attacks upon them, as long as they maintain the status of
the department and make difficulty and distance a measure of selection, leave the
sorting mechanism, Watkins's circulation, intact.

Additionally, a post-intellectual practice has to be performative; that is, it must
work without and against the distancing of bourgeois institutions. In English studies
both composition and literary studies create distance through textual analysis which
naturalizes the right to analyze - to judge instead of interacting. The literacies of
modernist institutions are literacies of control, zero-sum games managed from a
distance. The literacies which English departments, operating as part of a larger
institution of schooling, promote legitimize some voices or standpoints while silencing
others. Literacy thus becomes a barrier to overcome and sanctions the voices of
experts in place of the “illiterate” voices that fall outside the institutional domain. In
other words, English departments manage the act of enfranchisement, creating barriers
that mark speakers as acceptable or unacceptable in line with economic conditions. At
some points the flow of “qualified” and “literate” students is increased to respond to

economic pressures, but in the last three decades that flow has been reduced to a mere

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trickle, corresponding to the lack of jobs for qualified candidates.

A postmodern practice would promote a different kind of critical literacy, one
rooted in the recognition that every social coupling demands a “literate” and
“intelligent,” which is to say appropriate, response. In this sort of literacy the voices
speak for themselves instead of being spoken for. The goal is not to destroy or lower
standards but to create standards of intelligibility. This approach denies distance as a
condition of production, emphasizing instead the aesthetic and immediate nature of
real communication. This sort of literacy welcomes specialized knowledge concerning
how this might be accomplished, but it does not specialize the notion of literacy. The
point is that in a postmodern democracy critical practice must respect aesthetic
dynamics that are not attuned to it, not merely as subjects of research but as
participants in the process. This is so because only a more intelligent cultural
medium, and not expert practice, is inclusive enough and fluid enough to deliver on
the promise of a participatory and performative cultural dynamic. Critical literacy cuts
both ways, challenging the expert position as much as it challenges the position
subordinated in current practice. In both cases, the goal is to achieve some level of
mutual recognition and to use that recognition to connect more, and more different,
standpoints.

The conditions and practices that facilitate connection rather than distance will
still require rigor. Every speaking environment requires some sort of rigor for there to
be any understanding at all. The difference between modernist and what I have been
calling postmodern practice is the point of emphasis of the rules that govern

communication and what happens when languaging breaks down. The modernist

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assumption, based on a social context emphasizing difference and an economic
structure that differentially rewards those distinctions, is that the rules must sort out
and rank dialects and the speakers who use them. This focus is as much grounded in
the Enlightenment transferal of religious principles to national and scientific activities
as it is in economic conditions. Marxists, who have no love for either the religion or
the economic system, still demand a unified outcome, a right answer. Postmodernism
rejects not just the practice but the underlying assumption, which I have referred to as
Gnostic, that there is an objective, singular reality there to find. For that reason,
inclusion, or in Hall's terms, polytheism, becomes a new standard. In the postmodern
view, the emphasis is on intelligibility, or how one position can mutually engage
another.

Those situations only occur in everyday, ordinary experience, and they occur
along aesthetic and not rational polarities. We can study, and I think it is entirely
appropriate to do so, specialized discourses in captivity, modeling the linguistic
strategies that allow access and competency. The creation of new cultural mergers,
however, always happens “in the wild,” and only a practice geared to those conditions
can claim a critical perspective. The other part of the problem is that the contact
points between and among these standpoints require fluidity on the part of both or all
standpoints involved. That is, both positions become modified in the negotiations that
have to be “played out” in the creation of intelligible couplings.

Whether English is capable of brokering a place for itself as a postmodern
practice is problematic. My claim is not that English departments are going to

disappear, although Bérubé and Cary Nelson paint a pretty alarming picture. Nor am I

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naively claiming that English studies can just decide to change in an academic and
political environment already hostile to faculty and universities. But real engagement
with what postmodernism promises cannot be managed by a few new textual practices,
exotic theories, or minor pedagogical corrections. Postmodernism in its strong sense is
a sea change in the way we look at the structures around us, both cultural and
material. It penetrates to the roots of a religious, scientific, and philosophical system
of thought that pits order against chaos. Science has overturned those assumptions.
The Bell experiments proved that God plays dice, and that only complex, chaotic, and
complementary systems are sophisticated enough to keep score. The dominant
practices of another era are destined to go aground on those realities sooner or later.

If it is later, the discipline will gradually find its way to a new cultural site and
practice. If it is sooner, however, and the speed of cultural reproduction and the
decontextualization of language argues it will be, then we need to understand the depth
of the changes before us and begin to construct a practice that faces rather than dodges

the implications.

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