Context
Requiem for a Dead White Male Part I
Curtis White
The continuing debate over the canon within departments of English in North American universities is so conspicuously fraught with failures of thought on both sides that its determination to see itself out seems not so much like something intellectually intended as like some sort of natural disaster, like waiting for a hurricane to reach shore, something everyone wishes weren’t going to happen but everyone understands that it’s going to happen anyway. What I propose to do is not so much engage the debate on its own terms as develop a line of thinking parallel to it. So I’ll be surfing in the waves the hurricane creates but some miles safely to the north.
In my judgement, John Guillory’s Cultural Capital (The University of Chicago Press, 1993) has said much of what I think needs to be said about the canon wars. His principle points seem to be that a) neither the side advocating the traditional canon nor the side representing the noncanonical understand the degree to which they participate in the construction of a “social imaginary” (in their depictions of, respectively, the traditional or the repressed); b) neither side quite recognizes how much they have in common (i.e., the assumption that canons are about social “values”); c) neither side understands the degree to which their debate takes place in “an ever shrinking island within the university itself” and d) neither side understands that other, larger social forces, the culture of Jean Francois Lyotard’s postmodern performativity, the technical literacy of the managerial class, have no stake and no interest in the debate. The professional managerial class has effectively devalued cultural literacy as a form of cultural capital and has replaced it with the needs of its own class: computer geeks to fix Y2K problems, for instance.
My interest in the canon wars has more to do with how it looks from the point of view of the one group involved in the production of the matter at hand but excluded from the debate: the artist, a practitioner involved in specific lineages of making certain kinds of things. The role of artists in this debate has been pretty much what the role of artists is in departments of English generally: idiot savant. So let me pose the question in the name of artists, what should an artist’s interest in the canon debate be?
Well, to begin with, I think the artist (you will excuse me for indulging in the construction of my own “social imaginary” here, as if there were only one perspective that could be said to be the artist’s) is very dubious about the function of a canon in general. The artist has no interest in the traditionalist’s “transmission of a legacy” in part because anyone can see what a self-serving line of baloney that one is, especially when delivered by ideological hacks like William Bennett. On the other hand, the artist has little sympathy for the “minority” position that counter-canons should displace the dominant canon of Dead White Males in this absurd zero sum game that we seem determined to play. This is so because the artist has little sympathy for arguments about art that don’t concern what is good, what is well done. The artist knows all too well what dull embarrassments can be made of mere political conviction or displays of virtue. For the artist, the “beautiful” is no mere idealist, essentialist premise, it is the necessity of every day’s work. Without it there is no work and there certainly is no art. What troubles literary artists in particular is the idea that the most attentive segment of their audience, the professional literary critic, is unconcerned with what it means to make something well.
And so as I was thinking about this question, it occurred to me that Guillory’s book itself could provide insight into the problem, and could even reveal, perhaps, that the actions of scholars of both the left and right speak louder than their positions. Because Guillory too is a maker of a particular sort of thing with its own lineage. So why would we say—as the panelists of the René Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association have concluded—that John Guillory’s book, Cultural Capital, is a good book, a book to be distinguished from the lot of unpublishable dissertations (of which there are many) and even distinguished from the lot of publishable manuscripts that are in spite of that fact not particularly good books (there are a lot of these too)? Why is his work of a quality that he deserves a seat on the faculty of The Johns Hopkins University and his book deserves to be published by The University of Chicago Press? Well, I read the book and I know why it’s a good book, and I’m not a scholar in comparative literature. It’s a good book because it is penetrating. It quickly goes beyond the cant that you might not ever have known you knew was cant until you read his book, and his arguments are sustained by a steady flow of original ideas. In fact, this book is loaded with ideas, if you know what those are. “Intelligence,” like “beauty,” is a theoretically discredited “essence” which we none the less live by, and I mean live by in absolutely the most serious and consequential sense. To live by something is to stake your life on it.
Guillory’s book is an example of the qualities which ought to make something deserving of admission to a canon, if we must talk about canons, but which the debate over the canon doesn’t know how to talk about. Guillory’s work is in a tradition of literary, philosophical and political analysis and argumentation that should be obscure to no one to whom that tradition is important. (How’s that for a tautology?) It is as a tradition so important, in fact, that I would call it not merely an intellectual tradition but an ongoing and repeatedly emphasized proposition for what it should mean to be a human being. It forwards the proposition that what it should mean to be human consists among other things of intellectual penetration, an ability to express complex thoughts, to perform marvelous cognitive feats and to break open experience in new and powerful ways. It is through these qualities that we will recognize what we call “intelligence,” even if these qualities are also unavoidably and unabashedly intelligence’s “supplement.” (The Derrideans in the audience will know what I mean.)
For many centuries, frighteningly small, often embattled communities of human beings have been advancing this “imaginary” as that which the general culture ought to embrace because the culture ought to see that this sort of ability, this sort of performance is deserving of the notion of human capacity, that beleaguered capacity that the young Marx used to fret about, and upon which the rest of his powerful intellectual edifice is ethically balanced.
But this doesn’t seem to me to be how, in the present moment, we engage a book like Guillory’s. We might agree with him, we might argue with his position, but we wouldn’t think to say that what Guillory has performed is in itself a part of the debate. I’m not even sure that the René Wellek Award committee would see this.
Now, I know how perilously close I am to making a familiar conservative argument based on “quality.” But I am not making that argument. As a good, practicing Derridean, I do not believe in transcendental and timeless qualities. What I believe in is history and context and the impressive insistence of certain communities of people that we have called artists and intellectuals to reassert the value of certain kinds of human performance, whether this performance fall under the heading of beauty or intelligence.
What I’m trying to do here is similar, I think, to what Guillory does in his book when he points out the irony in the fact that the principle of “anti-essentialism” or “anti-foundationalism” which opened the canon to critique (as the putative Eurocentric bastion of a mostly masculine ideology) was followed by the politics of identity. Why, he asks, are the identity politics of gender or race not vulnerable to the same sort of anti-essentialist critique? Similarly, in spite of the fact that the canon has been reduced to arguments about the fairness of who is represented and who is not, we continue at the level of the “everyday” making judgements about the “good” whether that means grading student papers, writing book reviews, directing dissertations, making evaluations for publication, or selecting a book to be given an award.
Guillory quite comfortably accepts the assumptions of a particular kind of intellectual making as the premises by which he is willing to be judged. There is nothing unwise in this either from my point of view or Guillory’s. What the text acknowledges in a way that is so familiar to intellectuals that it is nearly invisible is that it has as a perhaps occluded value, but a value which it invests with the force of its whole performance, a set of assumptions about what it means to do something well. This is a stance that artists understand thoroughly.
We come here to the reality that the artist has most at heart. There is simply a difference between doing-what-artists-do well and doing-what-artists-do poorly. The question of course is what sort of claim to make for this aesthetic, whether it be the aesthetic of the artist (beauty) or the intellectual (intelligence)? What we must not say is that “making well” is related to timeless, transcendental qualities. Making well is really a commitment to the absurd because of the thoroughly contingent and historical genealogy (as Nietzsche would put it) of artistic making. And what we are really saying because we continue to inhabit those traditions through our productive practices is that this is our social imaginary. This is where we put our quarter (the post-Hegelian version of Pascal’s wager). And this—to borrow Dave Hickey’s language—is where we should be trying to “win.” Wanting to win goes beyond “making.” Wanting to win reveals that the ultimate destination for artistic and intellectual making is the proposing of an idea for what it should mean to be a human being. For example, Mozart and Beethoven argued through their music that the capacity for personal suffering, for the subjective, should stand for something, both as a matter of social justice and as the beginning of a modern spirituality that culminated in the work of Søren Kierkegaard. I hope that none of us, even after the end of the metaphysics of the subject, would want to entirely unsay that old Mozartian thought, or fail to appreciate the art that made it possible.
Now, the first damage that the process of canonizing does to art works is it homogenizes them; it destroys the very real difference (I will refrain from using the word dialectic even though that’s exactly the word that’s lacking) both between the works and their culture, between works, and within the works themselves. Mozart composed in the teeth of his political master the Bishop of Salzburg, just as Haydn composed in the teeth of Bach, and Beethoven, caught between Classicism and Romanticism, composed in a gorgeously bewildered way against himself.
I’d like to conclude by quoting the last lines of Guillory’s book, lines which capture beautifully and intelligently, if not canonically, much of what I’ve been trying to say: “Insofar as the debate on the canon has tended to discredit aesthetic judgment, or to express a certain embarrassment with its metaphysical pretensions and its political biases, it has quite missed the point. The point is not to make judgment disappear but to reform the conditions of its practice. If there is no way out of the game of culture, then, even when cultural capital is the only kind of capital, there may be another kind of game, with less dire consequences for the losers, an aesthetic game. Socializing the means of production and consumption would be the condition of an aestheticism unbound, not its overcoming.”
