MLN

Ever since the publication of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987), a new academic genre has emerged: the professional memoir. This is the semi-autobiographical, part-sociological reflection on the humanities by post- or near-retirement professors, scholars whose eminent writings and powerful positions distinguish their ruminations, or at least grant them historical value. The popularity of the genre indicates that many professors wish to conclude their careers with institutional commentaries, not scholarly masterworks, that the profession of literary and cultural study has itself become the object of ultimate concern. One might assume that the “professor—examine thyself!” mode is just another version of academic narcissism, a confessional criticism for the emeriti. But in fact, the authors of academic memoirs tend to despise me-style criticism, targeting self-based teaching and scholarship as one of the woes of higher education, whether they are grounded in therapy culture, identity politics, or bare careerism. With nothing professional to gain from these backward glances, they offer their [End Page 1153] reminiscences as impersonal summations of thirty years of crisis and complacency in education, composed by insiders who lived through the theory enthusiasms of the seventies, the political resentments of the eighties, and the studies fragmentations of the nineties.

The genre lends itself to lament and nostalgia, especially for those who have grown estranged from their own profession. But Avrom Fleishman’s The Condition of English usually avoids the idiom of complaint. “Mine is not a ‘narrative of decline,’” he avows (65), and though he mistrusts the consequences of radical politics and postmodern theorizing for the humanities, he eschews the “tenured radicals” thesis of conservative harangues. When Fleishman does turn autobiographical—chapter 4, subtitled “Educating a New York Jewish Radical,” recounts the author’s upbringing and career—the narrative serves a critical, non-narcissistic purpose. Specifically, against the multicultural insistence on the recognition of identity as the cornerstone of education, Fleishman describes how his fixation upon his Russian immigrant, Zionist, communist identity (he idolized the Red Army) fueled his post-war political enthusiasms, but narrowed his experience. Only when he interacted with New School lecturers (he mentions Harry Slochower) and Columbia professors (Trilling), who shunned ethnic and political solidarity, did Fleishman outgrow his provincialism: “I can date the beginning of my intellectual liberation to this period of relaxing my ethnic ‘identity,’ class ‘commitment,’ and other early acquired social armament” (77). Entering the upper reaches of higher education required a personal adjustment: “The important thing was to do [intellectual] work well and to define myself by it. Not collective identity but professional accomplishment became the motivating ideal self-image” (78).

Fleishman singles out professionalism here not just for personal reasons, but for disciplinary reasons, for it marks the fulcrum upon which his argument about the condition of English turns. The argument begins by expounding the rough quasi-philosophy common to practitioners today, what he calls “the English ideology,” a shaky cluster of four epistemological ideas and certain “fluid . . . mental attitudes” that bolster them. The ideas are: one, that truth cannot be established for verbal statements; two, that “there can be no nonhistorical foundation for transhistorical truths” (2); three, that social phenomena are political constructs serving the interests of dominant groups; and four, that “social rules are only apparently collective in origin and are thus inevitably unequal in application” (3). Too unsystematic and contradictory to count as a philosophy (negating truth and politicizing choice, it can only be considered an anti-epistemology), the English ideology is more a hazy worldview, an outlook whose “adherents . . . are less converts to a political program than carriers of attitudes toward life” (13). Although they espouse with a tiresome concord the ideas noted above, English ideologues neither concoct a social doctrine to be disseminated to the public nor organize themselves into activist groups outside the academy. Instead, they harbor a set of “attitudes”—sensitivity to aggrieved groups, responsibility [End Page 1154] to the environment, sympathy with leftist politics (while displaying little leftist radicalism except in their self-descriptions), inclination to postmodern tastes.

To Fleishman, however, these ideas and attitudes do not sufficiently explain the revolutionary changes in humanist practices over the last forty years. The missing component in the “new thinking” is professionalism, the ethos that has mobilized these otherwise unrelated concepts and feelings into an institutional condition. In Fleishman’s narrative, the guiding notions of cutting-edge praxis—interdisciplinarity, cultural studies, theory, political critique—did not meld into an academic deportment and transform scholarship and teaching until a new self-conception took hold: “After long years of contentment as college teachers, scholars, and/or literary critics, English professors discovered themselves to be professionals—not just professing a subject but as members of a professional cadre” (28). The concept and practices of English ideology long preceded the work of de Man, Greenblatt, and Showalter, but they did not transform the humanities until academics defined themselves as professionals whose beliefs should assume professional form. Only when professors felt compelled to convert their readings of poems, theories of the novel, and classroom strategies into a school of thought, a critical movement, an -ism did English undergo radical change. Hence, it is not theory and politics per se that concern Fleishman, but how they have been ritualized into professional mores and labor habits.

Fleishman interprets this new professional professor as an analogue of the social grouping sometimes called the “New Class.” The New Class is composed of “a workforce engaged in the production of knowledge-intensive goods and services, requiring systems of substantially greater symbolic complexity (logical, verbal, and mathematical) than those that have guided modern industrial systems” (6). New Class members work in software development, communications technology, and logistics. They are trained analysts of information, knowledge technicians who prize innovation over tradition, social responsibility over capitalist greed, global awareness over nationalism. Their prototype is Bill Gates, and their counterpart is the English ideologue (18), who articulates in lecture halls and scholarly journals what the New Class worker tacitly assumes. They share a sly postmodern irreverence toward the past and conduct their labor with a blithe experimental individualism, although they are careful not to slip into bourgeois notions of selfhood. Both aim toward a post-industrial productivity, the New Class by implementing digital technology to improve the flow of information, the English ideologue by constituting literary criticism as a “type of knowledge” that works through and is generated by the reading of texts (28). Both figures peddle ideas in an entrepreneurial fashion, one by developing a better search engine, the other by developing a new theory. Just as New Class activities have divided into multiple, unforeseeable directions (who knows what the latest web technology will bring?), English inquiry has proceeded with an “alarming dispersion” (26).

But, Fleishman argues, there is one aspect in which New Class intellects [End Page 1155] and humanities professors differ drastically: effectiveness. The former have brought about a social revolution that touches every living person, making virtual reality, electronic communication, and globalist thinking an integral part of normative thinking about the world. But the latter, while sharing the ideas and attitudes of the New Class, have remained intramural and ephemeral, captive to local institutional politics and an unproductive professionalization of ideas. For example, academic feminism began as a principled demand for equal access and equal pay for women, one that tallied well with the progressive thinking of the New Class intelligentsia. But as feminism became professionalized into a career definition and a scholarly outlook, Fleishman says, it became a “critical strategy of literary victimage” (39), a “redress of grievances [that] must eventually be paid in internal acrimony and reduced ranks” (40), a “gynocriticism” that cannot get straight the relative biologistic and social determinants of gender difference. Another example Fleishman selects, deconstruction, likewise reveals the original efficacy of English ideology declining into routine practices and transitory zealousness. Deconstruction began in a “mood of enthusiasm” (44), as converts and skeptics received Derrida’s writings in a “saturnalian” fever (45). What appealed to initiates was a New Class preference for paradigm shifts, specifically, a reconstitution of the world that made it accessible to scanning and processing: “Intentionality, causality, periodization, and the others went by the board in a general reduction of all evidence and even the subject matter of history to the status of a text, open to variable interpretation and thereby to deconstruction” (44). This was a heady advent, empowering critics as legislators of the world. It also slipped smoothly into a technique, a regulated mode of production complete with owner’s manuals (de Man’s and Derrida’s readings) and preferred subjects (Romantic poetry, 18th-century social thinkers, etc.). But in its activation as a professional manner, the technique suffered from an inevitable banality. Fleishman writes, “deconstruction came onto the academic scene . . . to defeat the boredom of graduate study and research in literature” (43), but its obnoxious popularity and the tiresome predictability of its argumentation soon defeated its freshness. Instead of embodying novelty and irreverence, deconstruction soon lapsed into a normative, insider strategy. The final example of ossified professionalization described by Fleishman is new historicism. The movement matched the New Class thinking in its challenge to the academic establishment, its dismantling of authorship, its deprivileging of literature, and its commitment to marginal groups and liberation movements. But as new historicism was organized into an academic practice, a boring repetitiousness set in. According to Fleishman, the texts chosen for study remained just as few as those chosen by Leavisites sixty years ago; the resistance of textual hierarchies (elevating classics over mass culture products) was tediously asserted with a ready righteousness; and the complexities of literary form and historical context were “reduced to a dialectic . . . of ‘subversion’ and ‘containment’ (terms they employ ad nauseam)” (50). The radical, [End Page 1156] demiurgic thrust of new historicism disappeared, and the practice turned out to be just another strategy of professional reading.

To Fleishman, these wrongheaded professionalizations are fatal in a society guided by New Class attitudes. The social and political contents of feminism, deconstruction, and new historicism may be progressive and meritorious, but their implementation in higher education has proven stultifying and banal. Instead of impressing the non-English intelligentsia with their ingenuity and zeitgeist (as have New Class figureheads), English ideologues have only reaffirmed caricatures of dullness, conformity, inbreeding, and infighting. Their cutting-edge conference talks and provocative book titles have made them the object of scorn (by social scientists), parody (by neoconservative journalists), and alarm (from parents of students and their elected representatives). This is the real problem English studies faces today—not its political notions, egalitarian sentiments, multicultural agenda, or putative radicalism. Rather, the critical condition of English lies in the unfit professional designs that professors have added to those conceptions. In instituting feminism etc. as a vocational identity, professors have claimed professional recognition as knowledge-producers practicing a discrete form of work. But knowledge-workers in other fields have responded with disrespect and bemusement, while the interested public wonders at the curiously unprofessional behavior of humanities professors (their squabbles and turf wars, their silly slogans, their strictly intramural radicalism). If they care about rescuing English from its current disrepute, Fleishman advises, professors should address this response without resentment and antagonism, and search for better, non-professional ways of integrating progressive politics and theoretical concepts into the study of literature.