Dear John,

I recently got notes from Ralph Berry about our presentation at Florida State. The value we place on “collaboration” was a central topic. Ralph reminded me of the Q&A in which some questioners pointed out that “collaboration” does not have a purely positive connotation. Sometimes “collaborators” are enemies of the cause. There’s a big difference between those who collaborate with “us” and those who collaborate with “them,” but, at least in the fictions that deal with this problem, it’s not always easy to tell who’s who. In Casablanca, for example, Louis collaborates with the Nazis right up to the end when he and Rick begin again, but of course this beautiful new start is possible because he and Rick have been collaborating all along. And although Rick  says he sticks his neck out for no one and seems to be quite a loner, he’s clearly an arch-collaborator, forming ad hoc partnerships and knitting them together so that Ilsa and Lazlo can catch their plane. Collaboration entails an idea of the common good and an epistemological uncertainty about it.

This twofold proposition is encapsulated in the photo we showed during out talk. (I’ve added it here before, but you suggested we table discussion . . . until now!) The image captures a struggle to define the terms of collaboration. Graphic Artist One (Billy) sets collaboration over competition. In denying Billy anonymity, Graphic Artist Two negates his statement by disallowing the standpoint from which he makes it. The idea here is that persons belonging to the 1% have no authority to assert the value collaboration over competition. Such a statement is hypocritical because the 1% benefit from a competitive process that unfairly privileges them above the 99%. Probably there is more going on outside the frame. We are free to imagine the Graphic Artist Two feels an animosity toward Billy that far exceeds, and may be largely unrelated to, their relationships to the distribution of wealth. In any case, it seems that Billy wants to be one of “us,” while Graphic Artist Two insists, no, you are one of “them,” a collaborator with the competitors. This interpretation assumes that “Collaboration!” and “NOT COMPETITION” have the same author. The handwriting looks the same, although the shift to all caps may introduce an ambiguity: a different time of writing or simply a matter of emphasis? The line through “competition” presents a more serious conundrum. Are we to regard it as part of Graphic Artist One’s initial statement–an iconographic negation of competition to underscore the semantic negation of the “not”? Or is this part of Graphic Artist Two’s statement? If the later, we can understand it as a kind of double negative. Graphic Artist Two iconographically invalidates as bad faith Billy’s semantic negation of competition, while leaving the imperative “Collaboration!” untouched. I like this second interpretation. It seems to be of a piece with Graphic Artist Two’s cynicism: a reminder that while collaboration might be valued over competition it cannot be opposed to it, since would-be-collaborators begin from a position in a competitive hierarchy with which they may unwittingly collaborate despite avowals to the contrary. The image-arugment thus encodes the complex proposition that “collaboration” entails an opposition, a “them,” and that the ground for the us-them distinction is inherently unstable. It is easy to break collaborations apart by denying the principle commonality that unites them. It is perhaps equally easy to find alternatively commonalities, grounds for collaboration where none seemed to exist. Which is to say, I suppose, that collaborations exist as they are practiced and not as they are planned or defined.

According to Ralph, our emphasis on “collaboration” sounded a bit like Billy’s when we made a “them” out of defenders of disciplinary objects.  To the extent that these folks are trying to figure out how disciplines work, he pointed out, they could be seen as collaborating with us. He offered Ransom’s “Criticism, Inc.” as a test case. We follow the crowd in presenting Ransom as a mid-century professionalizer who equated English departments with the work of criticism (as opposed to history or appreciation) and the work of criticism with keeping poetry from “being killed by prose.” I continue to find it telling that Ransom defines “criticism” mostly through a set of prohibitions. Be that as it may, I think Ralph’s got a point that no matter how low we estimate Ransom’s approach, it is notably self-conscious in saying what English should be as a professional endeavor. Above all, Ranson’s a reformer:

Professors of literature are learned but not critical men. The professional morale of this part of the university staff is evidently low. It is as if, with conscious or unconscious cunning, they had appropriated every avenue of escape from their responsibility which was decent and official; so that it is easy for one of them without public reproach to spend a lifetime in compiling the data of literature and yet rarely or never commit himself to a literary judgment.

Nevertheless it is from the professors of literature, in this country the professors of English for the most part, that I should hope eventually for the erection of intelligent standards of criticism. It is their business.

Do we collaborate with Ransom in trying to figure out 1) what it means to be an English professor and 2) how this could be made more satisfying work?  I think we might when we use him to call attention to assumptions that continue to inform the practice of the discipline, even if few current practitioners would explicitly avow the whole “Criticism, Inc.” package.

Mark

Dear Mark,

I don’t think that we need to do the realism thing, although you’ve never struck me as a person who was remotely afraid (to the contrary) of deep water. My invocation of realism was, allow me to say this as dismissively as possible, an example. Of, precisely, the challenge of thinking in inter-medial fashion. The only reason for us to care about realism would be if we thought its differences across media would tell us something about the changing inter-medial dynamics.

Some objects wear their mediation more lightly than others. But we cannot imagine that this variance resides anywhere except in the way that media have been institutionalized, can we? I take the (Bazinian?, not exclusively surely) point that there are properties of these objects that affect their mediation, but for our argument those properties must be significant largely for how they shape institutionalization and discipline.

You wrote,

I think our collaboration repeatedly demonstrates that my background in Film and Media Studies gives me something to say about about the problem of meditation that your background in English does not, and vice versa. This productive difference does have something to do with the fact that I’ve watched a lot of films and you’ve read a lot of novels. It ought to be possible to value this difference without perpetually reprising a love-hate relationship with these objects of study.

For other English types, it will be important that I’ve been reading 20th/21st C novels. Victorianists and 18th C scholars of the novel typically care more about mediation than contemporary fiction scholars and modernists do. In my experience the curiosity of the 18th C epistolary novel and Victorian seriality far more emphatically direct scholars to ask about relations among form, object, and media than even the experiments of modernism and postmodernism. Leave the novel for the lands of poetry and drama, you’ll find again this complex relation of form, object, media is rarely ignored. The novel, in short, is the problem, and the high profile of 20th C fiction in particular.

Which, given the still strong market for at least some novels, makes it odd that anyone could forget this point you reference from our work in progress:

This inter-medial encounter ought to remind us further that humanities objects are themselves moving targets produced and reproduced by nonacademic institutions.

Why is this not obvious?

Our account of how the humanities rose in status by retreating into the academy is surely part of the answer.

The fear of being useful is the affective remainder of the power plays associated with Leavis, Crowe, and Ransom, which legitimated criticism by retreating to the academy and, at the same time, complained that academics were not empowered to manage cultural reproduction.

Although I still like this formulation, I’ve been trying this out for a little while now on my colleagues, etc., and I don’t find that use is what galls them. Or so they say. What unsettles them is profit. I’ve been prodding you about this particular matter for a little while but you haven’t taken the bait. We like our objects to be worthless in exchange. Profitability when we refer to it makes a certain opaque point. Sometimes it testifies to significance, but rarely (ever?) analytic significance.

In our work in progress, we recognize the power of but are skeptical towards the Leavis / New Critical retreat into the academy and away from the market. We recognize the power of and tend to like the transdisciplinary efforts of mid-century anti-capitalists cum strange bedfellows Greenberg and Adorno/Horkheimer. I like having it both ways, and we do note that there’s no reason to be caught up in jazz-baiting or kitsch-hating when appreciating Greenberg/Adorno/Horkheimer efforts, as we put it, “to take in the whole picture of culture administration and explain how nominally opposed camps collude to maintain capitalism.” But it’s hard not to notice that Greenberg/Adorno/Horkheimer take different approaches than early century academics like Thrasher et al. who worked with and within the culture industries.

Film and new media scholars will doubtless feel closer to this problem of whether they should work with and within the culture industries than scholars of literature. Literature scholars should not feel so securely distanced from it, however. I think I told you about Amitav Ghosh’s presentation at the Novel conference in which he reminded a room full of academics that many writers write to make a living. There’s no escaping the filthy lucre. How are we to think about the way that humanities academics frame their relationship to it? The zealous engagement with Hollywood that we found so compelling in Grieveson, Wasson, Polan, and Decherney’s work on early film and film study can only appear as anathema today.

John

Dear Mark,

Wielding “fallacious” like the weapon it is, you wrote,

The rhetoric of “relevance” allows readers to imagine that nebulously defined social goods (“meaningful,” “productive,” “rewarding”) can be appraised by means of metrics like time to degree, job placements, and starting salaries. The equation is obviously fallacious. As numerous PhDs, JDs, and MBAs of our acquaintance will testify, one can complete one’s degree on time, immediately find a well paying job, and still not be engaged in activities one regards as particularly “meaningful,” “productive,” and “rewarding.” It has been the job of the humanities to consider such questions of value. They will undo themselves by treating job placement stats as equivalent types of questions. This doesn’t mean that humanities disciplines shouldn’t contemplate a shorter time to degree, just that they have to stick up for the difference between such metrics and questions of social value, lest they lose their professional distinction.

You’re clearly right. I am thinking about time to degree adjustments as a potentially salutary shock that would require us to engage in the kind of curricular overhaul that for whatever reason the crushing job market has demanded. I agree that nothing necessarily follows from it. I love the simplicity of the thought, “flood the market.” It may smack of desperation, in fact it surely does, but it would force so many issues. I realize that this may be a kind of exacerbate the crisis thinking, for better and worse. I may have too much of a soft spot for “jolts,” as you call them.

You also wrote about Menand’s story concerning what happened in the 1970s to the humanities/English,

Note the indicative collapse of the difference between “humanities” and “English.” Note also that disciplinary hyperspecialization increases the number of credentialed professionals while decreasing their market value and interest to undergraduates. We think that–despite the culture wars–this is because English was obsessed with defining its object rather than explaining what its object does. Right? What changes about this picture once other humanities disciplines are admitted to it?

There are two big questions here.

Re: the first, English was and remains obsessed with defining its objects. And yet, I find that this argument or ours is greeted with blank stares or opaque nods of the head. Maybe because some wings of English think they are so over any concern with literary objects, maybe because these matters of what an object is and what it does don’t seem distinct? I think, for instance, about the current wave of interest in realist novels, which comes from different quarters but seems to hinge on the supposed critical potential of this particular breed of print fiction.

Re: the second, Is there a comparable concern with, and can you even say this, realist film? I’m new enough in video game studies not to have a firm grasp on the status of realism in that field (although I do know that nothing says “artsy” like 8-bit graphics).

John

Dear John,

Thanks for identifying Klinenberg’s letter as an occasion to refine our position on disciplinary collaboration, specialization, and the problem of “addressing a public.” That phrase sticks out to me in the quote you pulled–no doubt because of its resonance with Klinenberg’s statement. It strikes me that we more often talk about managing populations than addressing a public. I take our position overall to be that intellectuals do not affect populations primarily by persuading them to think this way or that, but rather by institutionalizing ways of knowing. This involves establishing the terms according to which statements about the public good can be appraised and ratified as much as it does wagering statements in the space of evaluation so established.

I wonder if this can be Klinenberg’s model? It’s difficult to know. The letter does, as you note, invoke the figure of the public intellectual who through plain and persuasive writing might influence a broad audience on matters of shared concern. It also invokes a community of crafty scholars who can be expected to take interest in each others’ work process apart from its results. Are we to think of the public intellectual type as one posture or role the team of crafty scholars might assume? (Perhaps they could designate a star spokesperson or create a virtual avatar.) Or is the public intellectual an ideal type to which every crafty scholar should aspire? I think we could become comfortable affirming the first proposition, but never the second.

As you note, a lot depends on the craftiness at issue, and the picture of the lone scholar laboring in the workshop has got to go.

There are at least two other points in Klinenberg’s letter worth bringing up.

First, this is all really important business: if we are to survive the coming environmental cataclysm and neoliberalism’s savage depredations, we need to get with the program!  Is Public Culture’s idea that intellectuals can intervene on these matters by making more accessible arguments in its pages or by better understanding how they do what they do?  I hope not. To intervene on these questions requires not simply identifying and defending alternatives but actually institutionalizing them, which means learning to work with engineers and policy wonks.

Second, Klinenberg writes:

in the future, as in the past, we will publish analytic images — that is, pictures that help us glimpse the cultural patterns, social structures, and transformations of nature underlying contemporary life. They will include photographs by artists, journalists, and scholars but also images of artworks, film stills, and video footage on our website. These images will surprise not only by revealing times and places rarely seen but also by modeling ways of using our eyes to register deep changes in the social and natural landscape. They will, in short, be pictures to think with.

Good idea! And an occasion to underscore our statement that “while social scientists certainly worry about whether they are talking to themselves, they may be better positioned to make their work relatable because they never equated discipline with the effort to specify a media object.”  Public Culture has been fairly unusual in allowing images to share conceptual space with arguments (as opposed to being objects that prose necessarily interprets). This is not to say that pictures and words analyze in the same way or that it is not worth figuring out how they differ.

Mark

Dear Mark,

In our work in progress, we write:

“[E]engaging in collaboration across institutions is a privilege reserved for upper administration…. It seems clear to us that the solution is not to make our work more popular per se, as commentators across the humanities often claim. Rather, what humanities scholars lack is a means of relating their specialized work to forms of expertise outside the humanities. Although historians and social scientists certainly worry about whether they are talking to themselves, they may be better positioned to make their work relatable because they never equated discipline with the effort to specify a media object. English scholars are just catching up to their social scientific brethren when they exploit the notion of Digital Humanities to conceive of various publics and to consider ways of addressing them. To whit, opening access is important less for how it remakes our standard forms of publication than for how it might make us rethink the relationship between our scholarship and expert writing more generally. This is so whether one considers what happens to expertise and authorship after using ‘crowd review’ of the sort employed by journals like Postmedieval or when aggregating textual and visual projects like those compiled by Media Commons and its sister site #alt Academy, which focuses on alternate careers for humanities scholars.”

Today I ran across this “Editor’s Letter” by Eric Klinenberg, who is taking over the editorial reins at Public Culture, a self-described “interdisciplinary journal of transnational cultural studies” that I happen to like a lot. Among the matters that he promises to take on as editor is precisely the problem of relating expert research to its various publics that we (and obviously not only we) think of as a sizable concern. Here’s his version of the situation:

“Today an abundance of smart and serious research on all of these topics is being done by scholars of culture in a variety of disciplines. Too often, however, this research is published in arcane language that communicates to a narrow set of specialists but not to a broader public, or even to intellectuals in other fields who are exploring similar themes. In recent years, mounting frustration with such highly specialized forms of academic production in the social sciences and humanities has led to calls for more rigorous, publicly engaged scholarship in anthropology, communications, cultural studies, history, literature, political science, and sociology. But we lack a venue that welcomes important contributions on cultural questions from all of these fields, a place where strong writing and clear argumentation are recognized as craft virtues, where the public dissemination of specialized research is an overriding goal. Public Culture aims to fill that void.”

Now, I ask you to bookmark that “mounting frustration” with jargon and highly specialized forms of academic production. Hold that thought as you read the approach he recommends for the journal, namely, interviews with influential scholars:

“Full-length articles based on original research will remain the core of Public Culture, and short, timely essays will continue to run at the front of each issue, in a section that we call the Forum. But, with this issue, we are also introducing new features: Public Culture Interviews will be in-depth discussions with contemporary thinkers who have influenced and inspired us. Typically, we are familiar only with scholarly labor’s final results, published books and articles or occasional lectures. We are all interested in what goes into this final product, which is often the result of many years spent grappling with empirical materials, posing new questions, interpreting existing scholarship, and conversing with colleagues.

Our conversations will call attention to the backstage of intellectual practice. How do scholars search for and identify compelling problems? How do they find their way into and out of complex and difficult material? How do they conceive of their audiences and of their relation to existing disciplines? How do they engage different publics? How do they remain self-critical, open to updating their knowledge, even changing perspectives and ideas? Public Culture Interviews will be open-ended explorations of how intellectual creativity works. We want them to provide insight into each particular subject’s way of working and, in so doing, give us all a chance to reflect on our craft.”

A couple of things leap out at me here.

First, despite “mounting frustration,” there appears to be no problem with specialized research work per se. That can remain untouched. Public Culture will still publish it and scholars will still do it. You don’t have to be Michel Callon to think that maybe there’s more to say on that topic. And probably we should begin with a spirited debate about whether we want to call what we do “our craft.”

Second, professor as auteur? Really? The first interviews are with Mary Poovey and Ian Hacking (the full version of the Hacking interview is behind the pay wall). I think it’s fair to say that we both rely on their work. And I’m not at all adverse to learning about their practice. But in the spirit of our arguments about how important thinking about collaborative practice in the humanities, I am skeptical about whether interviewing famous scholars model gets us very far. When Public Culture starts interviewing research clusters, then I’ll think they are onto something.

Now, an “Editor’s Letter” is pretty much defined as a puff piece, so maybe we shouldn’t take it too seriously. And yet, I found this all a little lamely self-congratulatory.

John