Transcript: Hungover From The Bad Old Days of High Theory (Criticism LTD, Episode #2)

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EDITOR'S NOTE: These transcriptions are generated by the editing platform, Descript. I lightly edit them for proper names, etc. The transcription quality is, in my opinion, very impressive, but it isn’t perfect. Transcription software has been known to make basic errors, even confusing homonymic antonyms, like adequate and inadequate. While I hope such errors are rare and I invite you to let me know when you find one, so I can correct it, if you are going to quote from an episode of The American Vandal (which I encourage!), please review the associated recording (or have a colleague do so), as that is the proper source of record.

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[Snoring Dog]

Kim Adams: Yeah, and I think maybe the sort of a Version of the answer that we may be driving at.

Sorry, um, my dog is snoring really loudly in the background. I don't know if you can hear it.

Matt Seybold: I was wondering, I was wondering what that was.

Kim Adams: Uh, I have a very large dog. When he snores, it sounds like a motor. Okay. Um, what was I saying?

Matt Seybold: The snoring dog belongs to Kim Adams, one half of the production team for High Theory. Kim and her co-host, Saronik Bosu, are NYU grad students. High Theory is a keywords podcast, although saying that doesn’t exactly capture how incisive it is, and Kim is about to turn to their hallmark, asking me to define my terms. 

Kim Adams: Oh, well, I guess. Um, maybe the easiest way to do this and I don't, I don't want to be combative either.

Like, I don't want to try to catch you out. But I kind of want to know what you mean by criticism or literary criticism. Because I'm, I'm not sure. Like, I think that one of the things that, you know, Guillory's book and all the stuff around it made me think is that, wow, no one knows what that thing is anymore.

Matt Seybold: Yeah. Yes. Yes. Thank you. No, this is great. And this is definitely something I have been intentionally orbiting around and resisting. For the, some of the reasons that you guys articulated earlier is I don't want to try to catch people in their terms, right? What literary criticism means to them is something that I hope will sometimes, come out in the context.

Some conversations have just offered my interpretation of what criticism is is the art of interpretation and it has to, be guided at a specific audience or in a kind of specific set of venues and I define criticism either by a set of methods or like the types of archives or texts that are being enjoyed Or the actual outlets through which a work is being processed, right?

So I, I have sort of. intentionally left that vague. And as you said, I feel like it's often vague, for me personally although I am constantly feeling as you just described as though am I going crazy? Right. Do I know what criticism means? I have generally tried to distinguish it from something like critique or something like theory or something like scholarship, right?

These are all things that seem to get thrown around as synonyms for one another, and maybe justifiably so, maybe to some extent we can superimpose them depending on context, but, for me, Criticism is a act of literary or cultural interpretation, which has some sort of active purpose whether that is to Simply persuade the reader, the audience member to go out and buy this book or not buy this book, but usually hopefully something a little bit more concrete than that, to understand some kind of vocabulary or some kind of conceptual apparatus or framework or narrative that is existing in these cultural works that needs to be either embraced or resisted. In some very conscious way that's for me what criticism means, but I want to utterly acknowledge.

I'm not sure that I am very my application of that term, and I am very sure. That as a discipline as a community of literary scholars, we are not very consistent in the application of that term, right? And I think that that's one thing that, that needs to be fleshed out and acknowledged in these spaces, right?

Is that, you know, you may feel as though... You have an incredibly clear and rigorous idea of what criticism is and how to distinguish it from other modes of writing that exist within the academy or exist within the public sphere that are engaged in some sort of, culture work , but the likelihood that what you think And what the person you're conversing with or the person whose work you are critiquing thinks criticism means it's likely very different, part of the stakes of what's going on and the part of the reason why there's. seems to be so much sort of animosity and and even bordering on rage that is wrapped up in our discussion of criticism. And this crisis in criticism is we're all a little bit uncertain whether we thought criticism was, is in fact it.

[“Makram” by Joe Locke]

Matt Seybold: Welcome to The American Vandal, from the Center For Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College. I’m Matt Seybold.

In this episode of our Criticism Limited Series, we’ll be talking not just about what criticism is, and what it does, but whether it matters that we don’t often agree. 

When I sat down with the High Theory team I had already been working on this series for almost three months, and it had never occurred to me that I might need an answer to this basic question, and I’m still not absolutely sure that I do. Here’s Saronik. 

Saronik Bosu: I agree.

And also like, you know, if there's, there has been a. I don't want to say conflation, but if these terms have come together or come closer as a result of, historical directions that academia has taken there's also value in not trying to parse them

Kim Adams: Yeah, I really wanted to parse what I thought the term criticism meant in our MLA paper and Saronik was like, no.

Saronik Bosu: Let's do an episode parser.

I think the cover of John Guillory's book has these terms kind of graphed the graphs don't overlap, but these are terms that have been used anonymously but you know, I don't, I wouldn't say that 100% of the times there is value in parsing criticism and theory, if we are doing it together so very often.

Matt Seybold: It just so happens, I asked Guillory about the cover design Saronik is describing. 

John Guillory: It was my idea, if it's all right to say that. I mean, I didn't design the cover, but I suggested the use of a Google Ngram. The reason I did that was that I wanted as many of the major terms of the book to appear on the cover because of the nature of the book, because there are a lot of terms.

That belong to the history of of literary study that just aren't in use today and which are really important in that history. So I wanted to sort of key in readers of the book to those terms. So I proposed this to the press. They liked the idea. I had several ideas about how to do this, you know, a word cloud.

They didn't like the idea of a word cloud. They like the idea of the engram so it made for a very simple, but I think effective way of getting some words on the cover besides the title.

Matt Seybold: I agree. And for listeners who may not have seen the cover, it shows a kind of ngram graph of many of the key words in the book, criticism, discipline, et cetera.

And the usage rates for most of those terms over time is pretty flat, perhaps declining gradually in some cases. But there's one that's shooting up, right? And that's crisis rather steep incline. And the book, you know, rightly or wrongly, has been characterized as part of the crisis discourse surrounding the humanities.

Right. Which dates back a long time, as you note but has maybe escalated, especially since 2008. And one of the questions I've turned to repeatedly in this series is whether there's a relationship between a perceived crisis and the methodology of criticism. For instance, the substitution of method wars for reasons for being, which you cite in your conclusion.

Mm hmm. And a crisis of academic labor felt, many places throughout the university system, but more keenly in humanities disciplines where tenure track and even full time renewable appointments have fallen off a cliff since 2008. And I really want to know how are these two crises related and can we address one like say the renewed commitment to purposeful conservation and appreciation of a cultural work is sort of like what you argue for in the.

Conclusion, the cultivated capacities for aesthetic pleasure that we might help engender as teachers. Can we address that without first addressing this collapsing infrastructure, right? The working conditions. Are those two independent of one another or are they somehow?

Interconnected mutually determinative.

John Guillory: Right, right. I was asked a version of this question I, I think it was , in one of the conversations I had with Nicholas Dames. And I don't think I answered the question very well. On that occasion I think I may have left the impression that I was simply throwing up my hands at the magnitude of the problem the difficulty of trying to relate those two things.

There are, in my view, two crises. There is an external crisis, which is a crisis of funding and public support. And there is an internal crisis, which has to do with the feeling of exhaustion in the sort of basic enterprise, the basic mission. of the discipline. All the excitement in the discipline now is related to subfields.

To, you know, eco criticism and disability studies and affect studies and the discipline I shouldn't use the word balkanized because it's stigmatizing without being very helpful. But we do have a discipline in which. The, some fields dominate over the fields. The fields were defined, and this was a, this was the, it was part of the occasion of the internal crisis of exhaustion by periods and and definitely connected.

With the category of literature, with literature as object. And I think there was a sense of exhaustion. Something, something gave way in, in high theory. Some failure to carry on with, The kind of extrapolation from the concept of high theory, essentially an extrapolation from concepts like writing or the sign signifier the whole constellation of high theoretical concepts.

Matt Seybold: I just want to dog-ear John’s allusion to “high theory” here, not just because it’s the title Kim and Saronik chose for their podcast, launched from an institution where John was a professor, NYU, but because John identifies one potential pivot in the history of criticism, a break from what Kim and Saronik are going to later describe as “the bad old days of high theory.”

John Guillory: There was an exhaustion with that at the same time as there was an exhaustion with the basic organization of the discipline into literary periods. And the way in which the discipline responded to that exhaustion was to break up. We didn't experience it as a breakup. I think we experienced it as a kind of bold new ventures for the discipline. Ecocriticism, you know, all the post colonial studies and critical race studies and various kinds of queer studies. None of which is a objectionable. But what is produced is a discipline that doesn't appear to have any core mission, anything that holds it together. So people are essentially working in their sub fields.

Now the interesting thing about that is that the subfields have an inherently interdisciplinary tendency. So, you have a discipline in which the field concepts seem to be exhausted concepts have taken over, but the subfield concepts have actually depended upon interdisciplinary enterprises.

So there's a weird way in which you have a discipline, you know, the whole of literature and its history and its. present and its future. You have that, and you have all the period concepts that organize that discipline. And then you have at an even more specialized level, the subfields, what I'm calling subfields.

But these subfields are actually bits and pieces of interdisciplinary enterprises. So they're not really necessarily literary at all. If you're talking about eco criticism, what exactly is the relation between literature, that's concerned with, or readable in the context of the ecological crisis of humanity and works of literature?

It seems like a little bit of a falling off. If you're matching the climate crisis of the human race, you know, the Anthropocene with a particular poem by Wordsworth, what's the relation between those two things? It's very hard to say what literary study is doing on behalf of the climate crisis by talking about a particular poem by Wordsworth.

Not that there's not a relation between Wordsworth and the environment, because, of course, we've, you know, rediscovered the whole subject of nature in Romantic literature by way of the climate crisis. But what is it doing? What is that criticism doing for the climate crisis? If it's going to be solved, it's going to be solved at the level of politics.

at the level of engineering probably the most important thing, so far as the important human practice. So far as the crisis is concerned, it's engineering. And we don't really have all that much to do with engineering. I don't know if I'm making myself sufficiently clear about this subject, but what happened was the emergence of what ought to have been a series of interdisciplinary enterprises. Let's say relating to, if you take eco criticism as one of the subjects, but you know, you could take disability studies or critical race studies. All of these things are by nature interdisciplinary. They're not necessarily rooted in literature.

And it's not easy to say how literature is central to those interdisciplinary. if you see what I mean, the internal crisis has made the position of the study of literature kind of fictionally central to these interdisciplinary fields where other parts of the interdisciplinary enterprise, probably are more important than the study of literature.

So in the case of critical race studies, you're talking essentially about an enterprise that has its focus in the law, in legal studies and the interface of legal studies with the political domain. So yes, there is, the subject of race and literature is enormous. And important and something that we can do, but what we haven't figured out is the institutional structure the relation, between disciplines, fields, and subfields in as much as the subfields relate to what are essentially interdisciplinary enterprises.

We haven't found a way to bring all those things into relation. And that, I think, is the internal crisis. That's where we have experienced... What we think is a remedy for the irrelevance of literature for its minor status in the scheme of things. So the major problem, even beyond that, what's the relation between that configuration in which the discipline has become a discipline of a series of sub-fields that are actually interdisciplinary enterprises.

What's the relationship between that and the external crisis where it's funding and public support from the advantage of the external crisis. What you have is administrations, legislatures these funding agencies that previously were supporting the enterprises of the humanities and literature among the humanities.

And they're looking at us and they're saying, I don't know what you're doing. This doesn't sound like literature to me. I thought we were supporting literature departments. You see what I mean? There's a disconnect between these two crises because we haven't found a way to explain what we're doing.

In the terms that would be recognizable to those outside of humanities discipline, who thought they understood what these humanities disciplines were supposed to be about. So, I did not have a good answer to that question the first time that I was asked it. I certainly don't have a remedial response.

What I have is the sense that there are these two crises. One internal to the discipline and having to do with the exhaustion of its inherited paradigms and the other crisis having to do with the financing and support, public support for humanities disciplines in which the excuse there for defunding is that we don't know what you're doing.

[“Shifting Moons” by Joe Locke]

Matt Seybold: The notion of dual crises, what John describes as internal and external crises, which may be causing one another, or somehow loosely correlated, or even purely coincidental, is one we will return to repeatedly throughout this series. Though there is widespread agreement that crisis is, as the cover of John’s book suggests, increasingly urgent, the nature of the crises and the relationship between them is a matter of considerable debate. As we will discuss with him at greater length later in the series, John suggests that to address this crisis, literary studies needs to articulate its reasons for being, not just to fellow practitioners, but to institutional gatekeepers. Though John and Chris Newfield diverge in how they regard what John calls the interdisciplinary subfields of literary studies, this is where they come together. Here’s something Chris said on the podcast I recorded with him in Anna Kornbluh on the eve of MLA this past January.

Christopher Newfield: And I think something we have to face, and I’d love to talk with you all more about, is a kind of confrontationalism that none of us got into this business to do, right? I like just sitting here at my desk. I don’t like to argue with people. But I have enough experience in stuff like academic senate to know that arguing makes a huge difference. And we’re going to have to do it on a national scale now.

Matt Seybold: In that episode, Chris, Anna, and I discussed at some length how literary critics and scholars might orient themselves towards a range of interlocutors, including colleagues in other divisions, students, government agencies, private endowments, and university administrators. I don’t want to cannibalize that episode, one of the most popular we’ve ever made, but it well worth revisiting in the context of this series,

Instead I’m going to turn to Bruce Robbins, the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, and the author of, most recently, Politics & Criticism, which we’ll be talking about later in the series. We’re talking here about a somewhat fuzzy and contested distinction between amateur and professional criticism, one which is integral to Guillory’s argument in Professing Criticism, but dates back much further than that, and may be somewhat analogous to the distinction Ryan Ruby made in the first episode, between academic, para-academic, and popular criticism. I’ll let Bruce explain why this distinction matters, but also why the existence of a professional criticism forces upon its professionalized practitioners, the continuous articulation of reasons for being, rationalizations and self-justifications, which both Guillory and Newfield allude to.

Bruce Robbins: Professions are responsible to the societies that give them very provisional authority, uh, and allow them to self police and not be policed by the market or by the state. That is a kind of carved out space. It's obviously not an ideal space, but it's a space that people like us can really use, have, have in fact used, and can continue to use.

Now, it's not a guaranteed space. I mean, one of the things that we've all noticed, the changes, you know, in the past 20, 30 years, even medical doctors, who are the exemplary case of professionalism, controlling a market and not allowing the money people to make decisions for them. Only I have the medical knowledge necessary to decide what this, this patient needs, etc, etc, etc.

That is not what it used to be, doctors have been pushed around by the market in a way that 30 years ago, I wouldn't have been able to imagine, right? But if, you know, you talk to them now, they'll say, I'm on the phone with the insurance companies all the time. Can I do what I want to do, what I know the patient needs, or are they going to, you know, apply some kind of profit loss logic to this?

But, you know, even admitting that, I continue still to think that being able to call ourselves professional and Uh, act like it and, and kind of enforce claims to, you know, a kind of, uh, expertise that not anybody out there has, it's a limited kind of power, but it's a real kind of power and I sort of think that John would probably agree with me, even though he has said very dire things about the terrible fall of criticism from a kind of amateur independent status into professional status. I think that the ending of his book is more in accord with,, what I was just saying about, about professionalism. You can ask him

I made the case, my God, 30 years ago that professionalization was not the sort of political death of criticism, and this goes back to this story that I tell the first person story about Walter Jackson Bate, confronting us with a businessman who put a gun to our heads and said, Why should society pay you to do what you're doing.

My suggestion 30 years ago was that professions don't survive unless they have answers to questions like that. But professions do survive because they do have answers to questions like that.

Matt Seybold: Bruce is referring to an anecdote from the third chapter of his 1993 book, Secular Vocations, published by Verso. I asked him the read the passage for us. 

Bruce Robbins: In the fall of 1972, when I was starting graduate school, the professor in charge of the first year colloquium asked us all what we would say if a businessman held a gun to our heads and demanded to know why society should pay for us to study literature. What we would say, that is, that Matthew Arnold had not already said.

Nobody had the confidence to take up this challenge. Our painfully prolonged and embarrassed silence seemed to make, among other points, the point our instructor desired to make. That there hasn't been a better case for criticism since Arnold talked about poetry taking the place of religion, about culture as the best that is known in thought, and the free play of the mind, and so on.

We did not seriously expect to have our brains But we were, I think, more nervous than usual. It may have been the general fearfulness of the first year of graduate school, or the respect we all had for the professor, Walter Jackson Bate, who had conjured up the gun toting businessman and was probably somewhat confused with him in our minds.

Or it may have been, at least for me, the fact that my father had good reason to be mystified by what critics do since he was a businessman who had not been to college. Whatever the reason, there was something intimidating about this forceful bit of pedagogy, and at the same time, also something exhilarating.

The moment stuck in my memory, but I didn't begin to reflect on the imaginary scene of self justification before a menacing outsider or ask what it might have to do with my own or anyone else's sense of vocation, until the scene was repeated. Almost two decades had gone by. I was now a member of the profession to which I had then been starting my apprenticeship.

Along with two other faculty members from other literature departments, I was asked to speak to a large group of Rutgers University undergraduates, most of them not English majors, about what I did and why I did it, specifically about what it meant to do Marxist literary criticism. The audience was hostile and bored.

Correctly, as it turned out. We discovered later that the students were forced to attend a certain number of panel discussions like ours in exchange for the privilege of not living several miles from campus. Under the pressure of their visible hostility, I dropped my prepared but manifestly insufficient remarks about such things as Marx's preference for the royalist Balzac over the socialist Zola.

Instead, I found myself blurting out That I certainly hadn't gotten into this line of work as they might think because I dreamed of spending my life in the analysis of sonnet structure or digging up unknown manuscripts. I had gotten into it because what it studied was narrative. And narratives, whether they realized it or not, were what they themselves were living by.

Ethics, or religion, or science, or politics, it was all narrative. My fellow panelists had been chosen so as to represent different approaches to literary study, but they rallied behind my impromptu bit of disciplinary rationale with surprising enthusiasm. And they held to it even after the most articulate students had reacted with anger and outrage.

Are you saying that my religion is like Sidney Shelton? I was less permitted the fantasy. That rather than simply embarrassing myself, I had successfully, if inadvertently, ventriloquized the discipline of literary criticism itself. It suddenly seemed that after and perhaps because of two decades of literary theory, the same two decades roughly since my fellow graduate students and I failed to respond to the gun to the head ultimatum, A new answer had indeed emerged to supersede Matthew Arnold's famous formulas, something like the phrase, everything is narrative.

[“Elegy For Us All” by Joe Locke]

Matt Seybold: Bruce acknowledges that what you say to the gun-toting businessman can, and indeed must, change over time. Criticism’s reasons for being during the “bad old days of high theory” may be as different from what we need to say now as they were from what John Crowe Ransom called for when he made the distinction between amateur and professional criticism in his 1937 essay, first published in The Virginia Quarterly, called “Criticism Inc.” While the title for John Guillory’s book most directly derives from Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature, it also alludes to a line from “Criticism Inc.” which Guillory quotes multiple times in his book, “Rather than an occasional criticism by amateurs, I should think the whole enterprise might be taken in hand by professionals. 

The title I have given this series, “Criticism Ltd.,” likewise has dueling inspirations, including the very next line in Ransom’s essay: “Perhaps I use a distasteful figure, but I have the idea that what we need is Criticism Inc. or Criticism, Ltd.” Ransom abbreviates Incorporated as Inc. and limited as LTD, as such terms would appear in filing documents for businesses, thus emphasizing that, to him at least, professionalization is inextricable from commercialization, even though “the proper seat” of the professional critic, as Ransom puts it, “is in the universities.”

As we’ll discuss in future episodes, John Crowe Ransom was a somewhat surprising advocate for industrialized education and the submission of knowledge production to market conditions, but that is, in part, what Criticism Inc. suggests, and it is certainly what has happened. In an era when many universities are becoming vehicles for extraction by venture capital and private equity, and targets for takeover by partisan legislatures and Christo-fascist ideologues, it’s pretty hard to argue that professors are insulated from either the market or the state, as Bruce describes, which is not to deny that that once was and perhaps should be, the aim of professionalization.

The gun-toting businessman was an absurd hypothetical when Bruce first encountered him in 1972, he is now quite likely the president or provost of your local university, or at least he sits on the board of trustees, or the statehouse budget committee. Colleges and universities are by and large run by trigger-happy managers with long corporate resumes, who do ask faculty members, and sometimes entire departments, to justify their existence in terms of specious market metrics, and who have the power to kill off entire fields of inquiry by starving them of resources.

And sometimes they shoot first, before even posing the existential question, because they come ideologically preconditioned to regard certain disciplines, usually in the arts and humanities, as fruitless, obsolescent, or politically dangerous. Let’s listen to how Ryan Ruby, a critic sympathetic to, but working outside academia, imagines these thorny interactions with corporate gatekeepers.  

Ryan Ruby: There's so much discussion. Less so on, on my end of the field, but within the academy itself is like, well, what value does this have? What they mean is like, how can we instrumentalize this for greater economic production? Well, if you take value as in people are willing to sacrifice a great deal to make it happen, and people respond to that sacrifice in a way that is one of, Hey,, I'm learning something new. I am having my mind altered and changed. I'm having my whole way of being altered and changed. That is something that is of enormous value and whatever. Meta theoretical justification that needs to be given to some administrator to open up a wallet, is never going to be enough, but the thing speaks for itself.

I really do think this, the value of the thing speaks for itself. And You know, market conditions aside for the production of this abundance of writing. I think people who are producing it should know that the reception of it. Is the proof of the value of it without any other theoretical justification necessary.

Matt Seybold: I want to follow up on that because you mentioned earlier that one of the crises is about the raising the air for criticism, like, if the purpose is not as it is often been characterized, especially within the academy to conserve, preserve, curate to make decisions about what is best and what needs to be both publicized and historicized,

and I would agree. Some of the things you said earlier we are reading criticism for criticism. And our access to the object of the criticism or our choice to go beyond the criticism to the object seems to be less and less important. And that the criticism is, the art unto itself.

And I do want to talk to you a little bit about Wilde's formulation later. But if conservation, preservation, canonization, if those are not the raison d'etre for. Criticism., what is, how do we metatheorize justify, because it becomes very important at some stage to say, if this stuff is really good and we can recognize it as really good, how do we tell the administrator, the publisher, the board of directors, that this is valuable and what is its purpose?

Ryan Ruby: Yeah, so I think that we should make a distinction here, and of course this is one that Gallery makes, right? I won't use this language precisely, but there's a difference between criticism here and scholarship.

The things that you are describing preservation, canonization, . , these are scholarship , right? These are things that in fact, actually now I will say, speaking as a non-academic critic, these are things that academics are best suited to do in the institutions with the institutional resources that they have.

And, in the most basic way, the archive in the library, these are serving preservative functions. Canonization has to do of course, very much with transmission in a pedagogical setting that's a major feature, which of course is not something that exists in the same way or to the same extent outside of the academy all of these things are important as scholarship as such, in my view, there is no crisis of criticism when we're talking about these things, whatever debates one might have about which book gets preserved, which book gets canonized and so on and so forth. Those are debates that are always going to happen because history happens and Canons are about a relationship between the past and the present, and the relationship between the past and the present is in perpetual flux, I don't lose any sleep over that because things reappear in the moments in which they need to reappear, and they always get debated about, and part of, The discipline, is actually just debating this question, right?

And so when we're talking about the justification for that particular series of activities I've got a really grandiose one, which is both really simple and really grandiose, which is to say, if there's a thing that exists and doesn't really matter what it is, I happen to think, you happen to think that this particular object.

And let's just agree to call it the literary object. Obviously that's controversial, but the literary object exists. It has a history. That history, by virtue of its existence, and being a part of our culture, you know deserves to be preserved in an academic setting and subject to scholarship.

And when I say deserve, I mean, that's the kind of moment in which you have to present to an administrator this question, which is like, are you going to live in a civilization which doesn't do that? Right? Are you going to literally tell me that we are going to live in a world in which we are just going to allow our historical memory to totally atrophy because it has no productive value whatsoever for your, you know, for your show holders, right?

Is that the kind of society we want to live in, that's a social question. That's a civilizational question. Do we want to live in that world or not? And if the answer is we do not want to live in a world, we would like to live in the world that we've been living, until very, very recently then we will have to expend resources non productive resources for the express purpose of training a specific group of people to keep that culture alive.

Literally, right? The conditions are very different when we're talking about paper media versus electronic media. But electronic media is not, it's not this like, there's this sense in which it's a non physical item which has unlimited preservative capacity and we can just scan everything.

And no, no, no, those are institutions. Those are objects that need to be preserved. They require resources. They require literally energy. And so in that respect, and again, I've never had this conversation before, but I can easily imagine a world in which the administrator does say, in fact, he is like, yeah, who cares?

That person, such a person is an enemy of, and I mean, I mean, this is like, of, of, of humanity. Like that is a person doesn't care about the continuity of human experience over time. And that person has power. Over the people who are trained and responsible for making that happen.

You know, with all sorts of, again, like, classificational debates, methodological debates. All these things go into the preservation, canonization, reception of this one object, which is one object among many but nonetheless is a very significant one and has to be preserved if we would like to consider ourselves part of human civilization, right?

So that's one group of people. And again, really simple, but really grandiose. And you can push back on that if you, if you, if you want, definitely. But when we're talking about criticism as a sort of question of like methodology. Interpretational strategies hermeneutics, and of course, the extreme amounts of very sophisticated sort of meta theoretical apparatuses to do the very basic activity that we all do called reading

Then the question is, well, what, what is the use of that? And from that I have a sort of different view than I believe that someone who is working in the Academy. Again, Guillory tells this story about the way in which the discipline forms in which these two particular concerns Let's call it scholarly concern and a critical concern get merged together in the space of the Academy where the criticism provides a kind of methodological justification the model being scientific knowledge and inquiry.

I will say that I have no particular interest in that. I do not care what I do scientific inquiry. And I don't care that it doesn't produce knowledge in the sense. That's not what I'm interested in doing. And therefore I'm not worried about it. And of course in my particular position, no one's asking me to do that.

So that's in a way a kind of luxury, but of course. The reason scientific self conception is important is because it allows for professionalization. And it allows for, what Guillory says is like the privileges and responsibilities of professionalization along the lines of the sciences.

And it allows you to get slotted into a professional culture with a certain kind of, you know, you get, you get. benefits. You have to go to professional conferences and so on and so forth. So for me, that simply has no. Like, my freedom here, not to consider what I'm doing science, comes at the expense of not being a true professional in this sense.

And I don't mind, because what I consider myself is doing is not at all science, but but the art of interpretation. That is what I consider myself to be doing when I'm writing a book review. Or a critical essay. And I think when I say the art of interpretation, what I mean is, I aim to produce the kind of effects in the reader that we normally associate, like I said before, with fiction.

Except the means at my disposal to do them because I'm working in a different genre is I would like to produce a way of looking at the particular text in question that produces the I think, I experience it this way when I read good criticism the pleasure of seeing something new. Through new eyes, the pleasure of having something noticed for me that I hadn't seen before, the pleasure of connecting the work of art in question to broader social questions and simply, the pleasure of taking something that seems like incidental in a literary text and showing it to have significance that one would not have otherwise seen without the sort of noticing of this particular So that's what I mean by the art of interpretation.

Just as a very classic example , there are a group of theorists and literary critics who you know, obviously we're working in the academy, but have a purchase in the, public sphere that people read. Take for example Like deconstruction, just as a very good example.

People read Deconstruction people read Derrida outside of the academy. I'm a big fan of Friedrich Hitzer. People read him outside of the academy as well because there's a sort of totemic theorist quality to each of them. And I think what people read them for is not just for what they're saying about literature, but the way they're saying it, their own formal considerations, and for the pleasures of watching a person engage in a very sophisticated performance of interpretation.

Susan Stewart does this excellently, or Frederick Jameson does this excellently, but these group of people who are in that para academic space, and what they're providing to their readers is not just The production of knowledge, they're providing the pleasure of being able to sit in on a mind reading in a very sophisticated fashion.

[“Makram” by Joe Locke]

Matt Seybold: As Ryan intuits, reasoning with the gun-toting businessman may be futile. And I think its important the we recognize the limits to productive persuasion are not the limits of our professional defenses.

Sarah Brouillette: Even if you have a new program for the legitimation of English literary studies, and you have a way of explaining exactly why it should be publicly supported and broadly embraced. How are you going to spread that how is that going to manifest in the kinds of transformations that we need to see?

And though the transformations that we need to see are not really at that level, they're at the level of like adjunctification and underpaid grad student workers with no prospects of employment after their degrees. And, the horrific rising cost of living in loan debt and all these kinds of things.

Matt Seybold: That’s Sarah Brouillette. She’s a professor of English at Carleton University in Ottawa. And the author of two really important books for understanding the institutional architectures of cultural, and especially, literary production. She’s also the author of “Reading After The University,” one of the first review essays published on Guillory’s Professing Criticism, which appeared in Public Books before the hubbub of early 2023. 

Sarah Brouillette: I found myself wondering how one would be translated into the other. I know people make arguments about this, and that there's ways of substantiating these claims, but it seems to me a convincing argument about the crisis in the university has to be primarily situated at that level of material resources and how to win them.

And spread them fairly. Otherwise, who cares? Otherwise, what's the point? Who cares? It's more important to me that those things happen than that people are convinced it's important to study English literature.

Matt Seybold: So I asked Guillory a version of this question. response essentially was that All of the people who we have to turn to for funding, legislatures, administrators, granting organizations, so on and so forth, don't understand what literary studies is.

And so what he calls the internal crisis, which we might exist in complete comfort with. In fact, I would say that I do, right? The big tent of literary studies does not bother me. One bit. How various our methods are the interdisciplinarity of many works of literary scholarships. on and so forth.

That doesn't bother me at all. But Where he says that becomes a problem is when we have to explain what literary studies does to the people who control the purse strings. And they don't understand what it is that we do.

Sarah Brouillette: In the vast majority of cases certainly in the Canadian context, it's not that they don't understand. It's that there's not even a method of communication. There's no conversation going on about this. They're not listening.

They don't care. I think even if there was a very, wonderfully articulated program of legitimacy, that would not result in increased funding. In this context the government is struggling to fund like forest fire remediation and obviously spending all kinds of money on what's perceived as essential, but it's Garbage, like geopolitics, policing, whatever.

And I don't think that's an argument that's going to be won through persuasive rhetoric. That seems like a fantasy to me. I don't know, like, where are the platforms? Where's this happening? It's just hard to see. And that's why I say it's rhetorical. Anyway that's how I feel about it. And I don't really see how it's going to be reversed unless there's a fundamental transformation, like the economics of the whole social organization, like that will happen first, yeah,

Matt Seybold: And this is where The academic labor movement comes in, one of the things that for me is a backdrop to Guillory gate, or maybe more accurately, Guillory gate is a backdrop to it, is that simultaneously during the winter term of 2023, we have all of these strikes happening university of Illinois, Chicago the sort of aftermath of the university of California strike temple, university of Michigan, so on and so forth. So many I was having trouble keeping track of all of the different academic worker groups that were in some form of work stoppage. And so that's all happening. And to your point, I think what we saw from that is that the, there is a sort of fundamental ideological disconnect that happens before any conversation even begins that can only be mitigated by the recognition of how important academic laborers are, including those in the humanities when they are no longer around, when they are no longer doing the work, like the university ceases to function. That's the most persuasive thing.

Sarah Brouillette: Yeah, but I also think that probably the vanguard of campus repression in a way now is eliminating university labor because it's irritating. So they're working a pace on that. So I even think the value of academic labor is something that you have to just fight for and hold on to. I'm the graduate supervisor in my department, so I was at a meeting yesterday going over the new collective agreement for the teaching assistants and they a hard battle in the most recent round, went on strike, won a whole bunch of Things from the university. But this meeting was run by university labor relations people, and it was just amazing seeing them present these as positive gains oh, great news.

Now they have this fund they can draw upon in case of emergency, I'm like, oh, you think that's great news. No one wanted to give it to them. They had to fight for it. Tooth and nail. My sense of the university's disposition toward especially the lower ranks of academic labor, like graduate students and adjuncts is basically open hostility and irritation that they want anything and, all kinds of still.

Prominent ideological justifications for that, like that it's an apprenticeship. If you're in a grad student, like apprenticeship to what pray tell or that it's great to have flexible work hours, or that their hourly wage is really high, , And I'm talking about the administration of my own university, but I know these are common rhetorics, but the fact that they trot this out during contract negotiations is so offensive.

And it just suggests like a total disregard of the actual lives and working conditions of these people. And I think they perceive them as spoiled, entitled is a common word there's more hostility than there is bargaining and good faith going on in a lot of these cases.

And as you, you've written about this yourself, the ed tech kind of thing, it's, there's so much of this is about creating systems and conditions and situations in which you won't need as many employees and you can, create efficiencies and run a smoother system because you can get around the.

Sticky fact of labor agitation on campuses, but I totally agree with you that was a background for the book. It was like a read the room situation. Like it wasn't entering into the right space. It was entering into the right space to become contentious but not just to be, straightforwardly embraced.

[“Lush Life” by Joe Locke]

Matt Seybold: During that exact same week in February which I highlighted as the peak of Guillory Gate last episode, graduate students at Johns Hopkins, University of Chicago, and Boston University voted to unionize, and the Temple University Graduate Student Association began a strike that would last more than six weeks, the one which I would write about, as Sarah references, and which ended not only with a union victory, but with the resignation of the university’s president. Grad students are the vanguard of the academic worker movement, in part because they are caught between the amateur and professional statuses we’ve been discussing, treated as apprentices during labor negotiations, but at all other times as perfectly adequate replacements for full professionals in the classroom, the library, the laboratory, and in both the peer-reviewed and para-academic publications. Kim and Saronik, discuss, in the paper they co-authored for the ACLA conference earlier this year, how being in this paradoxical position, essential to the function of the university, but somehow peripheral to the professions it credentials, impels them to “code resource scarcity” into their scholarly and public-facing work.

Saronik Bosu: When we wrote this talk, we were responding to a call for papers that included a line about critique being “a hangover from the bad old days of high theory.” Kim and I loved this phrase not just because we host a podcast called High Theory, but because it locates the history of critique in the body. In the bad old days of high theory, with Deleuze and Guattari, “We had hallucinatory experiences, we watched lines leave one plateau and proceed to another like columns of tiny ants. We made circles of convergence.”^[1] Then we woke up with a hangover and a grumbling ambition to critique. When we were deciding on a name for our podcast, the word ‘high’ signifying the ambition of our remit – we planned to be promiscuous with our definitions (just as we are in real life, perhaps). Theory would include the Frankfurt School and its descendants to an extent, but rather than trace a tap root that takes us back to Aristotle, we would follow the rhizomatic tendrils of thought to all sorts of adventures in cultural criticism. We would even talk to physicists and computer scientists. An interdisciplinarity of method of query, we thought, could be met by the grand inclusivity of theory in our historical moment. Despite the hangover.

A word here about parsing theory and critique and criticism as distinguishable methods. We based our podcast on the connotative overlap between theory and critique not so much as contingency in the history of literary critical humanities, but as the prerequisite condition of our work. As grad student and contingent scholar, our interest lay in what ‘doing theory’ could say about the state of the profession, or more importantly, what it could do. In 2020-2021, that corner of Twitter where literary humanists live was rocked by debates that were collectively termed the “method wars”. Lines were drawn in the sand, especially between efficacies of critique and post-critique, between supposed attitudes towards the pleasure of the text in both camps. In due course, academic twitter made fun of academic twitter and the fact that it had found devolving into a “method war” necessary. In her essay titled “The Shush”, Kyla Wazana Tompkins pointed out that “These are not method wars: these are resource wars. Every “war,” if we even want to use that term so loosely from here on out, is going to be a war of resources pretending to be something else. As perhaps all war has ever been.”^[2] As grad student and contingent scholar, we wanted to code resource scarcity into the way in which we deployed theory, never bound in stringent definitions, and often as euphemism for all sorts of readings. Times are hard, and no kind of analytical pleasure should be foregone.

If we take Twitter for the public sphere, and we do so cautiously, the method wars become a contemporary form of popular theory rather than a spat of academic infighting. The pleasure of the text at stake in the methodologies of critique and post-critique looks a bit more embodied and a bit less arid when we focus our attention outside the classroom. What is it that makes theory worth fighting for? Our hunch is that it’s something that lies between the university and the public.

[“Shifting Moons” by Joe Locke]

Matt Seybold: The bad old days of high theory were the good old days of academic labor. In 1975, nearly half of all university instructors were on the tenure track, now less than a quarter are. College tuition was less than half what it now is, even when adjusted for inflation, and inflation-adjusted university administrator salaries were one third what they are now. 

According to a 2016 AAUP study, at Research 1 universities, which train the majority of graduate students, those graduate students are also the largest segment of the instructional workforce, teaching nearly 30% of all classes. Graduate students are a close second behind adjunct instructors at Research 2 universities, and those adjuncts, who are often recent graduates, make up the largest constituency at every other type of institution. Across all U.S. higher education, graduate students and adjuncts teach more than 60% of classes. They are also extensively involved in research, grant-writing, administration, service, and assessment, even when they are not the instructor of record. They are also publishing much of the para-academic and popular criticism which constitutes the Golden Age Ryan Ruby has diagnosed. The representative critic of our time has about 0.85 PhDs, 1.7 employers, works 50 hours a week, has $30,000 of student loan debt, 3.4 streaming subscriptions, a cat, and a very long CV filled with temporary and contingent appointments, peer-reviewed and para-academic publications, and teaching experience in 2.8 departments. Though this critic’s work circulates widely, they have no illusion of becoming a star, as in those bad old days, but the trace of high theory is still visible.

The space between the university and the public which Kim and Saronik are trying to navigate is also surveyed in a piece on “The End of The Star System,” published in The Chronicle of Higher Education earlier this year. It’s author, Katie Kadue, just completed her second postdoctoral appointment, at Cornell, and is starting as an assistant professor of English at SUNY Binghamton this Fall.

Matt Seybold: I really love. Your piece for the Chronicle.

Katie Kadue: Thank you.

Matt Seybold: I think it captures something about a kind of cultural collision between an old infrastructure and maybe a new infrastructure, right? The English Institute and things like Twitter and The Chair

In Katie’s piece, the English Institute, an event with eighty years of history across some of the most prestigious U.S. universities, and which has the reputation for platforming the hottest names in literary studies, appears anxious about its status, and its amplification effects, especially by comparison to new media ventures like AcademicTwitter, para-academic publishing, and streaming media. Kadue suggests that despite all the inequity and willful ignorance of the star system the English Institute emblematizes, its decline does leave something of a vacuum. In the absence of a cohesive canon or discipline, as Guillory diagnoses, we have been tempted to turn to a series of theory stars, master figures, celebrity critics, like Guillory himself, and if literary studies no longer produces them, it might feel like an even more dire crisis. 

If we are moving away from the canon, if we are moving away perhaps from even the kinds of hegemonic roles, That theory played or that a certain set of common critical methods played. What should we see as our shared text, right?

As the thing around which we can orient ourselves as critics what can move into that space if it's not a celebrity, if it's not a, a, you know, a. Theory star. And if it's not, Shakespeare, Milton Dickens Twain, right? , what goes into those, the spaces that those kinds of cannons occupy?

Katie Kadue: That's such a good question. I'm not sure it's all bad if our shared objects are things like not even re's book with the discourse around re's book, but everyone is kind of commenting on its several layers of remove or the critique, post critique method wars or academic celebrity or gossip.

Because I do think people's brains are broken this way, , and it can get . Too recursive. But if it's used as a starting point for serious inquiry

yeah, I think part of what interests me about both the conversations about the Star system and about Diary's book and about New Yorker articles, about criticism and academic Twitter is this kind of like second order of remove that these are all things that all of us. Can talk about in this meta discursive way because, and this is part of what GUI is talking about, part of what the method wars are about too, that we don't have shared objects anymore.

Or we never really did, but. As there's more and more literary objects being produced, more and more different subfields within English and disciplines that are splitting away from English, we have less and less that we can actually talk about together across specializations. So that seems to be part of the appeal of something like a STAR system, both the idea that even literary critics could be celebrities and the idea that we all can share those celebrities even across

Field and subfield, that that's something that that David article on the Star system gets into that. Part of what made theory stars the first stars is that theory is something that is not confined to a particular. Part of literary history or particular subfield. So yeah, I'm interested in these meta dispersive questions.

And it's funny 'cause I think part of what people both like and don't like about Guillory is the way that he is speaking from this point of. Olympian detachment, right? That he's above everyone else, but he himself is part of this whole ecosystem of people who are trying to look down at these smaller specializations and get a global view, but people are doing it in different ways that he's doing it in his way.

People who love Twitter and academic gossip are doing it in their way as well. , I think I don't really have that much. Specialized knowledge about how prestige gets produced, but I am interested in how people talk about how Prestige gets produced.

Matt Seybold: I'm trying to think about this. Through the lens of technological revolution and maybe the collision of cultures and structures that happens on the back of that kind of technological change.

There's this moment in your Chronicle piece on the Star system where you have this anecdote about somebody from the English Institute getting excited about the English Institute's

twitter account, getting retweeted by the head writer of the chair. That really captured this collision for me. There is an existing structure that still has a considerable amount of power, but it is also competition with, but oftentimes Eager to co-opt right. an emerging structure that includes things like Twitter and new media. And also maybe skews a little bit younger.

Right?

Another really interesting moment from your piece is Jonathan Remnick using his talk at the English Institute as an opportunity to talk about.

Maybe not exactly academic labor, but the reproduction of the professoriate. And the idea that in order for something like the English Institute to persist, even though it is part of this kind of, Reproduction of elites that is problematic. It has to find a new generation.

And that seems to be one of the things that's really precarious in our moment, right? Very simply, how do we find the next generation of critics? How do we . Mentor them, engage them, provide space for them, employ them. And so I was hoping you'd talk a little bit about how you came to understand that sort of collision of cultures that you capture, I think in a really nuanced way by describing what it's like to be at the English Institute, while at the same time there is this sort of mass market representation of academia.

Katie Kadue: Yeah, I think those are actually related in an interesting way because the reason why the chair creator created the chair was because she didn't get an academic job. And if there were an academic job for her, we might not have this representation of, of academia on Netflix. I there's a kind of cottage industry of critiquing the chair among academics, both in articles, but also just on academic Twitter. There was a lot of excitement about talking about how representation of faculty offices was all wrong and how there weren't adjuncts in the show, and how grad students weren't represented the way that people wanted.

So it's almost like by. Complaining about the lack of fair representation of academia on tv. Really keeping ourselves in work by doing this like media criticism of the profession like so many things on academic Twitter and in meta academic discourse in general.

It feels both like circling the drain in this depressing way, but also . That is just kind of what we do as literary critics. We create language about language. It's a kind of recursive process.

Matt Seybold: I think you're absolutely right that one of the things I remember most about the chair is not necessarily even the show itself, but the way in which it captured the attention, of academic Twitter, of academics more generally, the way it seemed to be part of what was happening in streaming media at the time.

A kind of fication, narrow casting that clearly Netflix had this idea that they could target. target academics and maybe even more specifically, humanities. Academics, and that was a valuable enough demographic, a large enough and valuable enough demographic to make.

At least one season of this show worth their time, right? That they would be able to manufacture enough subscriptions within that demographic make it worth producing the show. And one of the things that really strikes me as you right now we have another show that in many ways resembles the chair.

It might be slightly superior, although I think it has a lot of the same problems. And this is lucky Hank on a m c, but there seems to be almost no hubbub about it on academic Twitter or elsewhere in the professoriate. Right, that are not hyper analyzing it. We are not putting our critical skills to work I wonder why not. What maybe has changed in the 18 to 20 months since your article came out that has maybe shifted our concerns so that the very analogous representation of humanities, academia. has

All the same kind of things that the chair had, right. has a big TV star at the front of it. Good writing. Humor is on a prestige network. But it's not capturing our attention. And I think that says less about the show and maybe more about where how our cares have shifted in that time.

Katie Kadue: Yeah I haven't seen Lucky Hank and I haven't really seen any discourse about it except maybe you were tweeting about how your wife wouldn't watch it with you is that you

Matt Seybold: I said she'd rather read my email than watch that show, which honestly, probably she could have said the same thing about the chair. It's not really a reflection of the a discrepancy in quality, just that for somebody who's not an academic, this kind of television maybe doesn't hold the same appeal.

But yeah,

Katie Kadue: It's interesting too, 'cause my dad, who's not an academic and is dismissive of a lot of academia, he keeps asking me about the chair. Like every week, ever since it came out, he kept asking me, is there gonna be a new season of the chair? And so I think there is a fascination with . English departments, even for non-academics, it's not just academics who are reading these New Yorker articles and New York Times profiles. There is a cultural obsession with what happens in English departments as a kind of synex key for the humanities and for elite education.

Matt Seybold: Why do you think that is? I think that I wanna, yeah, just follow up on that idea that certainly for those of us who are embedded within this profession it's, Seems a little bit over the top, the number of headlines we've had in the last six months that are sort of like, is this the end of the English department?

You know, The death of the humanities, the death of literary studies, the end of criticism. It feels like that kind of almost scare mongering headline has become a genre unto itself in publications like New York Times and the New Yorker. And as you say, that means there's gotta be a market for this , right? That goes beyond just the professionals within those ranks. And so what is the appeal, you think of the sort of concern trolling about the state of the profession and the perpetuation of the profession?

Katie Kadue: Yeah, I wonder if the public fascination, the kind of dismissive, public fascination is the same as the obsessive academic fascination with English departments, which is the precisely the recurs of the discipline that all we do is read books with words in them and make more words about it.

What could be more useless? It's so futile. It's It's like self perpetuating machine that doesn't do anything except just perpetuate itself. that's why I like literature , and that's why I'm fascinated by. Meta discourse about what we do, but I wonder if it also seems to exemplify what's useless in a pejorative sense for people who find it useless in a pejorative sense about the humanities and higher education in general.

That not just that it's useless, but that it's self-referential in a way that feels almost like a parody of uselessness.

Matt Seybold: In a way that almost no other discipline does. The humanities, and I would specifically say English and philosophy are constantly having to, dignify their existence, right? Rationalize their existence.

Explain why these . Things matter. And have come up with a wide variety of kind of talking points, some of which I think are just and legit, and other times are just things that we feel like we need to regurgitate back to our administrators, you know, boards of trustees, to whomever, right? To sort of speak to this audience who has a different set of values.

And we don't have to justify utility to ourselves as much as we do to that imagined audience. one of the things that you mentioned in our correspondence before the conversation was that you'd been thinking about how genre. In some ways is associated with this need to justify one's relevance.

Katie Kadue: I mean, I guess a good, a good example of an article about the method wars is David Knick's article um, the Few Lies in, in E L H, that The method wars in terms of the genre of melodrama. So it really is a kind of genre study of melodrama, even though it's about the method wars.

Going off of, , the idea of melodrama because I do think everyone is interested in genre and in what makes genres feel relevant today or in the past. How we think of our own criticism, our own critical production as operating in certain genres.

And like thinking of ourselves as generic in this way might be a way of getting beyond our specializations while still thinking about how our specializations participate in these larger systems. So yeah, I think we should have have some genre wars, maybe Lyric versus Epic and come back

[“Love For Sale” by Joe Locke]

Matt Seybold: there's a phrase that you use, the bad old days of high theory, it's clearly one way of thinking about what you're doing on the podcast and you sort of draw a genealogy from the battle days of high theory to the method wars.

And then to a kind of post Method War attempt to resuscitate,to revive,something about the bad old days of high theory, right? And so I wanted to ask you bearing in mind that one way of thinking about the bad old days of high theory, Is that the critical norms are in some ways associated with both the creation of the battle days of high theory and the rejection, right?

why do you have this kind of, romantic or nostalgic or a kind of renaissance attitude towards high theory as a thing that belongs in the space that you've created on the podcast.

Kim Adams: So I went to a talk by Jed Esty last night at Brown, and he said that we are currently in an age of, great power rivalries that. Mirrors the great power rivalries of the Cold War that we like there was a post Cold War moment where we thought that there was something like American hegemony and that there was a sort of different model of power operating in the world, and that we have actually begun to return.

Like The, like post 1992 moment doesn't actually look that much from a global standpoint, like our current moment and that we've begun to return to those old days of rivalry, which is what came to mind when you were suggesting the parallel between the battle days of theory and our contemporary moment, right?

there's something to do with a great power mentality, that I think. You're diagnosing as, as returning in this contemporary moment in the particular subject of criticism that you want to discuss here. I'm not so sure that we want to do that. On

Saronik Bosu: HiTheory. I just want to add that when we named the podcast, we were on a very basic level, we were being ironic.

Yeah. Like it's a joke. It's not like this kind of warning to our guests that, you know, don't do actual hysterectomy, but at the same time, we would eschew that kind of romantic attachment.

Matt Seybold: Yeah, okay. I'm just going to push back a tiny bit, right? Okay. Because I am going to note that the papers that you have given recently at MLA and ACLA,

Would appear to be performing a kind of high theory work, or a kind of sincere... Theorization work, That you are simultaneously distributing as podcasts and as panels at Premier Academic Conferences, Or panel papers. And so I do want to think is it possible that , you are now maybe in this, in.

double bind of sorts, where the ironic gesture towards high theory and the genuine or sincere gesture towards that high theory have to be preserved simultaneously.

Kim Adams: Can I ask you for a bit of clarification? So is it, are we. in your reading of our work, which like I'm,I take it as valid because, if we're going to follow Bart, you make the text, not me.

is it because we're referencing people like Bart and Derrida and, Deleuze and Guattari in these papers, or is it because we are doing a work that you see as similar to the work that they did in the 80s?

Matt Seybold: Okay, I think that it's more the Former than the latter, but I would argue that it is hard to do the former without a degree of the latter that as soon as you take for ,your set of illusions,

texts that come out of that genealogy of theory, ? The momentum is towards becoming yourself a theorist. And maybe the media relieves you somewhat of that pressure, is that we get to talk about these things, and we get to talk about them with a degree of kind of caution and tentativeness and a recognition that, that we are not going to, To fully form the kinds of arguments that a Derrida does or a Barth does that we're not going to get to that level of, intensity, Or rigor, although, these are not writers that are without humor or without playfulness by any stretch of the imagination, But that may be existing in the podcast form relieves us of the pressure. To do theory in the most negative, the negative connotations that are often,associated with that, but as soon as you take this as your archive,

like you do to some extent become a theorist because you are keeping those texts, you are keeping those modes of interpretation, you are keeping the prestige that was associated with those battle days, right? You are keeping it in circulation in some form,

Saronik Bosu: I don't want to shy away from what you described as the double bind and that's definitely. And I also don't want to,

ask our listeners to look away from the genealogies, which are obviously there, and,whether or not, or in all of its capacities, but I do think that one of the things that I would say whether or not there is a kind of mark difference between,the post facto analysis of our own work in those papers and the work that we're doing in the.

Podcast themselves. I do think we are trying to hint that there is nothing verified and mysterious about this, and that's not to , take on like this kind of very heavy democratic mantle, we just wanted to,argue that. What happens is this is, my own example that I've talked about before is that, what happens in being homage to a long critical tradition every time a new concept comes along, which is something that.

creates this inertia, which we wanted to counter and I do think,and this is something that like, when we do these very short episodes, when we, ask our guests to define something, I think with a very few exceptions, we have never Come down hard on.

Okay. No, but what is the definition? and what do you mean? except we have always nudged our guests towards things that they enjoyed talking about But then when we were writing these papers and as you know As you said that this is the archive that we were looking at and we were thinking You know, we inevitably went back to the point of our origin, and we are talking about high theory in a forum that is talking about criticism within the institutional setup of these big conferences.

And we thought, do we not say those names? What would that look like? but yeah, I guess there is a kind of duality there. I don't know, Kim, what do you think?

Kim Adams: there are many things I could say. I think the simplest thing to say is that when I got to grad school, what I wanted to do was become Roland Barthes.

that was the plan. but I do think that the great sin of high theory, this is not directly following from what Sharon said, the great sin of the bad old days of high theory was obfuscation. like it was jargon, it was developing this, specialized language, the language of the clergy.

And I actually think that, That happens at that particular historical moment because of an issue that's like what you're pointing to now about the question of the death of the humanities, because there's another argument about the death of the humanities going on at that historical moment, and it's the humanities versus the sciences, and it's about the money and power that they are getting differentially within the university.

and that one of the things that science does, from, say, 1900 , or even 1930 to 1980, is develop a really complex technical jargon. that means that, as Gillian Beer has shown really lovely dramatic, whatever, in a very important book called Darwin's Plots,Literary folks are reading Darwin, right?

Darwin is very accessible, accessible to us now, accessible to his contemporaries who are in different fields in his historical moment. And even if you look at something like the papers in which Einstein proved his theory of, special relativity, like the, early quantum mechanics stuff, like those are decently accessible, it requires a little bit more technical knowledge, but not as much more as reading a paper in particle physics today, right? I think one of the reasons that high theory gets involved in this game of critical obfuscation is because they're battling for prestige within the university system between the sciences at this moment.

And so they're performing a similar gesture. and one of the things that we try really hard to do on high theory, it's like where we get , our standard question format is to undo some of that work of obfuscation.

[“Love For Sale” by Joe Locke]

Matt Seybold: That was Kim Adams and Saronik Bosu. Thank you to all our guests. For more about their work, and this episode’s bibliography, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/HighTheory or subscribe to our newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.Substack.com

Next time, we’ll continue discussing the dueling and perhaps indissoluble labors of professing and criticism. Austerity in the Age of Abundance. 

But as a kind of segway between that episode and this one, I wanted to draw your attention to the essay Kim and Saronik mentioned, “The Shush,” the one that claims that all method wars are in fact resource wars. 

Way back in season three, Kyla Wazana Tompkins, the author of that essay, discussed it with me and Michelle Chihara. I think its a great episode, and one which remains highly relevant. If you need a fix of Criticism Ltd. between now and the next installment, dig it out of our archive. I’ll just leave you with a little taste. Thanks for listening.