Self-study

Let me begin with two anecdotes.

I.  While I was working on my dissertation, I helped coordinate the English Department's mock oral examination committee.  One student was doing a list devoted to modern Jewish writers.  As it so happened, finding someone who specialized in modern Jewish writers was not as easy as one might desire.  There was a graduate student who was writing a dissertation involving modern Jewish writers--but he was unavailable.  The modern Anglo-Americanists looked polite, but baffled.  Finally, in some desperation, I started querying the other Jewish graduate students in the department, in the faint hope of finding somebody who had at least read part of the list.  No luck.  Not that I could complain, since I'd never been able to work up any enthusiasm for the major contemporary Jewish writers (e.g., Ozick, Roth). 

II.  A former colleague, an early modernist, once spent some class time defining predestination.  After class, she was approached by several concerned church-going students, who explained to her that no Christian believed in such a thing.  That sound you hear? It's John Calvin, rolling over in his grave.

These anecdotes sprang to mind after reading this thread at Alas, A Blog on women's studies.  We've already had one blogospheric round about women's studies, and I don't mean to start yet another one; in any event, like a few of the posters in the Alas thread, I'm mainly concerned by the sloppy "interdisciplinarity" that characterizes the worst examples of anything that calls itself "Studies."  Both students and practitioners can wind up with an odds-n'-ends toolkit of theories and methods, none of which necessarily handshake.  To work, interdisciplinarity requires mastery of multiple disciplines--not discipline ragout.  But that issue is not really to the point here.

Whatever else is wrong with "studies," though, I don't think that one can use the equivalent of a narcissism charge in order to dismiss them--although I also admit that "why study yourself?" used to be my initial response.  One of the comments in the "Alas" thread adduces the example of a non-Jew taking Jewish studies courses, so (speaking as a Jew) let's take on the case of Jews in Jewish studies courses.  The claim that Jews who take Jewish studies courses are therefore studying "themselves" seems to presume that, by virtue of being Jews, we already have some privileged relationship to our cultural history.  I'm a Jew; therefore, to study Jewish history, theology, and so forth would mean simply reflecting on what I already know or, at least, ought to know--or so the logic seems to go.  But, in fact, members of religious/gender/ethnic/sexual/whatever groups have no privileged knowledge about "themselves," and often remarkably little historical awareness.  (This is perhaps why I've never understood the appeal of standpoint theory.)  Most of us know little or nothing of our history and beliefs as trained academics understand them.  Certainly, there are "in things"--Jewish in-jokes, for example--that I might get and a Christian might not, just as I know the basics of various Jewish traditions by virtue of informal exposure.  What I have, in other words, is a kind of lived or practical knowledge of Judaism, which allows me to function in various contexts (a seder, a Reconstructionist or Reform synagogue, etc.).  But this knowledge is localized and fragmentary; I know far more about Protestant theology than I do about the rabbinical tradition, and I most definitely know far more about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British history than I do about any sort of Jewish history (although I do have a reasonable working knowledge of Anglo-Jewish history, for scholarly reasons). 

I cannot say that I've found "myself" mirrored back to me on those occasions when I've read Jewish history, and my Christian students who have studied the history of religion report that the experience can be more alienating than self-affirming.  It's not that "X studies" are never self-reflexive or narcissistic, because they most certainly can be--simply that a) the validity of this accusation cannot be assumed prior to the evidence from any particular course or program, and b) we cannot adduce narcissism as an argument against studying one's own culture/whatever of origin, because an accident of birth is not the same thing as knowledge. 

Comments

[Tim Peoples]

I agree, largely because my own experience of studying Catholic writers meshes with yours. I know an awful lot about Catholicism, but my academic study of the subject is rarely self-reflexive; if anything, I find situations and ideas opposed to my way of thinking. Also, my knowledge is not of history or literature--it's of doctrines and spiritualities. Also, I am much more drawn to anti-Catholic writers (in the academic sense) than to Catholic writers (whom I read to supplement my spirituality). To illustrate: I cannot claim a favorite Catholic author (although Flannery O'Conner comes close), but I definitely have a favorite anti-Catholic author--Milton. So, for me anyway, "Catholic Studies" (in general) would be informative rather than self-reflexive.

[Jonathan Dresner]

Well, to be fair, an awful lot of "studies" fields are predicated, at least in part and in their earlier incarnations, on the idea that the objects of study know themselves inherently and perfectly, and it is the duty of the scholars of such to transmit such knowledge to the obtuse "majority." That's why it seems so odd to have a Jew in a Jewish studies course, etc....

On the other hand, to be fair, I think there is a place for "studies" which does not require a unique methodology: I'm thinking, in this case, of Area Studies as a model, where the intersection of multiple disciplines does not necessarily produce interdisciplinarity but does contribute to greater depth and breadth of understanding of a culture and region as a subject (and object). Women's Studies and Ethnic Studies would both benefit, I believe, from a more relaxed approach: it would make it easier to separate the ideological origins of these fields from the disciplinarily sound studies done in these fields.

[A. Cephalous]

RE: Studies

I also once believed that the problem with most "studies" is that they dovetail--or, more accurately--were designed to dovetail with an identitarian politics. There's no essential connection between them, but very rarely does one find a Jewish Studies program where percentage of Jewish the faculty and students doesn't approach 100. Because of the overlap of Women's Studies and BGL/Queer Studies you'll often find the appearance of heterogeneity (Could I choose a more inappropriate word?), but a quick glance behind the curtain reveals that the majority of the men in a joint WS/BGL/Queer Studies program are, in fact, gay. There are exceptions, of course, but they're looked at with same cock-eye that greets white professors in or affiliated with African-American studies departments.

RE: Methodologies

Methodological inconsistency damns most of the work that comes from the "studies." (With the exception of work that comes from Ph.D.s from Stanford. The English Department at Stanford demands a methodological rigor that mine, to my shame, opposes.) "Studies" people seem incapable of recognizing the frequent logical inconsistencies between the methodologies they've appropriated; or they don't have the training required to properly interpret the result. More often than not, the problem stems from the literary scholar who never passed Statistics 101 citing the results of a quantitative sociologist.

But my general problem with "studies" is that theory shores up the deficits in credentials. So someone who's read Freud considers him/herself a "psychoanalytic critic" reads the work of a trained psychoanalyst, say Franz Fanon, and draws conclusions from Fanon's work that anyone who'd been trained as a psychoanalyst would dismiss out-of-hand. Problem is, none of the scholars who will peer-review this psychoanalytic critics' work are trained psychoanalysts, so the problem's compounded: the work acquires a professional stamp of approval that the person who wrote and the people who reviewed it lack the requisite training to give.

Another example: I'm currently working on the impact of evolutionary theory on turn-of-the-century American literature. I've spent two years producing little writing because I had to immerse myself in "contemporary" evolutionary theory (circa 1900) before I could put pen to paper. I labored. I talked to the people in the philosophy of science department. I sat in on introductory classes in my school's graduate-level Ecology and Evolutionary Biology classes so I'd be able to recognize a scientifically-sound (albeit obsolete) theory from one that seemed, to my untrained eyes, scientifically-sound but wasn't. Guess what happened when I presented my chapter at a graduate student colloquiam. Lacan and Derrida already explained this, wouldn't you know. Foucault too. My fellow graduate students didn't have the slightest idea what they were talking about, but they were adamant about it.

I'm not throwing a pity-party here, I only want to point out the "studies'" tendency to produce scholars who believe themselves qualified to speak on any subject, training be damned.

[Jonathan]

I can't speak to what occurred in your colloquium, of course, but it seems likely that the objectors were not drawn solely from *studies ranks, I'd guess.

But I'm with you for the rest. I seriously considered assigning Gould's O and P in a freshman writing class last semester, so damn interesting do I find the subject. (That was in addition to his SET and Thompson's oGaF, of course.)

Another of way of thinking about might be that, like pi, Derrida and Lacan are transcendent thinkers whose work contains all knowledge, provided you know how to read them right. In a certain sense, this is correct.

[Miriam]

Looking at this post, I suspect that I sound more pro-"studies" than I actually am--in other words, I agree with A. Cephalous about methodological hubris. Which is why I keep denying that I'm a historian, apparently without success. (Incidentally, is A. Cephalous a UCI type? I don't mean to "out" you as such, but you posted a comment to The Valve that mentioned Homer Brown anecdotalizing. I took the Reformation & 18th C. survey with him about--eek!--14 or 15 years ago.)

[A. Cephalous]

Jonathan,

I'd rather not participate in the theory wars in this venue--mostly because I come here to avoid the skirmishes that pepper my daily life--but I don't think Derrida and Lacan resemble pi. Pi is a mathematical constant; Lacan's validity is predicated entirely on how much stock you put in his Freudian assumptions. The majority of contemporary neuroscientists, neurobiologists, and psychologists (i.e. the ones trained outside English departments) have a low opinion of Freud because his theories are untestable, unrepeatable, and highly interpretive. Granted, I admire Freud's intelligence, and one of my guilty pleasures is reading him, as there are few critics who can match his interpretive insights blow for blow...but I don't treat what he says with the mathematical certainly you imply I should. Lacan's smart, I grant you that, but his conclusions are about as far from mathematical certainty as is possible and still be engaged in a scholarly pursuit.

Derrida, well, I won't dismiss him out of hand. Studying Derrida was integral to my intellectual development--and, once I started grad. school, the seminars I took with him and the honest, intelligent, and incisive feedback he gave me encouraged me to continue my post-graduate career when other factors screamed at me to stop--but I'm not even sure he'd grant himself the fiat power you're attributing to him. What I respect most about him as an intellectual is--was, I keep on forgetting to use the past tense--his intellectual plasticity and his willingness to change his mind even when he'd be contradicting fifteen of his books currently in print.

Plus, I studied with Derrida too long to ever group him with Lacan. He hated Lacan. Had Derrida grown up somewhere Gleaming the Cube was a cultural referent, he'd have called Lacan a poser, er, poseur.

P.S. I hope you don't think I'm being uncivil. I have strong feelings about this, but I'm trying to communicate them productively. If I slip into a spiteful tone, just know that you're not the target. I've been wrestling with these issues for the better part of the past five years, and I'm trying to come at them freshly. If I fail, the fault's mine.

[A. Cephalous]

Miriam,

RE: Outing me

Between the Homer Brown reference and my latest response to this thread, I don't think you have to worry about outing me.

"Hi, my name is A. Cephalous, and I used to be theoretical."

RE: Not being a historian

I agree that literary scholars often don't do the archival work of professional historians, but there's a way in which we don't need to. I assume that you'd agree with me when I say that, as a literary scholar, I'm interested in historical trends impactive enough to resonate with the culture at large. For example, because I'm interested in the effect of evolutionisms on American literature, I don't need to find out, say, how many people were killed in the San Fransisco earthquake of 1906. A friend of mine, however, is interested in exactly that question, and is bouncing from archive to archive trying to find an accurate number (the bain of his existence is "fire at City Hall," apparently a very, very common occurance in and around SF at the turn-of-the-century). I'm interested in reading all the local papers, many of which can be found in electronic databases, and the ones that can't are available on microfilm; I don't need to be a historian to be a responsible historicist. I'm interested in tackling historical questions about cultural trends, but I'm very careful about not stepping outside my ken. The last thing I (and, I presume, you) want to be is a professional dilettante.

[Jonathan]

I'm a little surprised that you didn't get that I was bullshitting there.

My dissertation advisor, Norm Holland, has written a lot about how Freud's ideas have fared scientifically. It's something that people tend not to know the relevant facts about, I've found.

[A. Cephalous]

Jonathan,

I apologize for not recognizing your bullshit there...the sad thing is, I hear very similar things every single time I walk into the office I share with four Lacanians and two relentless deconstructionists...and they're not bullshitting. Ironic that years spent in the theory trenches will cause one both to value a sense of humor above all else and rob one of the ability to recognize it in others. I apologize, sincerely, for mistaking your satire for a concrete statement about the nature of the universe; I hope you can forgive me, now that you know I work in a department where, until very, very recently, what you consider satire was considerd scholarship by a host of faculty.

[j. w. spencer]

Little Professor, I am disappointed that you aren't "able to work up much enthusiasm" for Cynthia Ozick. She's a Victorian writer. Heir to the Glimmering World is wonderful and v. Victorian, a disgruntled governess story. Alas, you're missing so much.