From Alan Liu, University of California at Santa Barbara
RE: Mellor-Matlak Anthology
On Tuesday, 27 Feb 1996, Kenneth Johnston wrote:
[A]nthologies and all literary history involves selectivity. My starting question is to ask them, "What is the name of the literary/cultural period we are currently living in?" Ken Johnston
Ken, where does your opening question go? I'm intrigued by it as a pedagogical opening gambit.
The question does foreground the fact that our puzzlement over inclusion of materials is also fundamentally a question about teaching "period" courses at all in the present age of multi-textual and -contextual recovery. Comparisons between education and corporations have been much on my mind of late (I'm reading in all the business-oriented books on restructuring, reengineering, downsizing, the "learning organization," etc., to see what they have to say about "knowledge"). So I'll risk one comparison that predicts how a solution to our collective educational problem will have to go to suit the dominant ethos of our "postindustrial" time (whether we should go that way is another story). The comparison goes like this. Once Ford, Chrysler, etc., took several years to design each new generation of car models; then the model line was rolled out with fanfare as a paradigm shift. The whole industry went over to that paradigm, and huge inventories of all-alike parts and body frames built up around that model. But with the triumph of all the mytho-Japanese concepts that now reign in the literature of corporate correctness—"just-in-time" manufacture, "flexible manufacture," "continuous or total quality improvement," "mass customization" (i.e., custom models for everyone), "quick response," etc.—now those same companies are paring down their model turnaround time to months. Each new model is not a paradigm shift but an incremental shift ("continuous improvement"), and customer-ordered "mass-customization" is a desideratum. You see where I am going. Once we educators had a machine for instruction we called a "period." The design of that period took generations and led to standard paradigms around which heavy investments in inventory collected (e.g., textbooks). Now, if we go with the spirit of the times, we'll be turning out incrementally-different models of "Romanticism" every semester. Or rather, we'll be turning out mass customized models every semester (slightly different readers or selections in each course). For that matter, perhaps "semester" or even "quarter" is too long a time-span for the just-in-time era. The logical end of this prediction is that we'll be turning out micro-models of Romanticism every week. (Thus there might not be a course on "Romanticism." Instead there might be a succession of modules titled, "Week on Wordsworth," "Week on Keats," "Week on M. Shelley," etc.)
If you think I'm kidding about the education/corporatist comparison, take a look at the Continuous Quality Improvement list dedicated to bringing CQI to higher education. They have a web archive at http://www.webcom.com/rrpubs/coll/cqi/index.html (particularly amusing is the article on the "Resistance of Faculty").(5)
I recognize aspects of my prediction in the course I have scheduled for next fall, even though I originally conceived of it as a way to go "meta" on the issue. The course is on "Canon Revision: History, Theory, Practice." There are a few weeks on canon formation in the 18th and 19th centuries (plus assorted recent works on canon, pro and con). Then the students break up into teams (did I mention that "team-working" is integral to the postindustrial vision?) each given the task of designing either a course (undergrads) or anthology (grads) in an area of interest. For example, I expect there will at least be an Americanist team and a Romanticist team (and probably others). They do the research in the field, they look at other courses and anthologies, they produce annotated bibliographies, they write sample introductions or headnotes or critical material for particular authors, then they put up the results on the web—sort of like those "dream cars" that the creative designers at the auto companies sketch every year.
I've never done a riskier course, in the sense that I'll be walking over vast terrains of personal ignorance hoping to hold together an enterprise that may not work at all. (There's something to be said, after all, for tried-and-true paradigms.)
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From Robert Corbett, University of Washington
RE: Mellor-Matlak Anthology
I know Alan is not kidding about the parallels between educational and corporate practice, although it seems to me that the process of canon (de)formation might well be compared to processes of commodification. Our ever more refined sense of what the student-consumer wants might be compared to the kind of commodification exemplified by Seattle entrepreneurs that is driving at least the service sector. What Seattle excels in is marketing choice. This comes from the abilities of various Puget Sound companies (Bill Gates, Starbucks, SubPop) to make what once was alternative to the mainstream a viable mass-market commodity. San Francisco may have invented cafe culture for America, but a Seattle business managed to turn it into a repeatable commodity. Unlike the products of a less consumerist mass economy of previous decades, these companies market difference rather than similarity, ratifying your perspicacity as a consumer rather than your allegiance to a brand. (To what extent does Gates belong here? Chaos as the guiding mode of management style, as eulogized by Tom Peters [is this someone you are reading, Alan?] takes place in the very corporations that are exploring synergy through ever more grandiose mergers!) Thus, in English departments, we now market choices in canons, rather than one Canon.
While the strategy of letting a hundred flowers bloom is certainly more interesting than having a preset canon that will always make everyone unhappy (and only Harold Bloom will be able to remember what it is), the proliferation of non-canonical authors and new canons for them still participates in the logic of late capitalism in an unabashed manner. I am sure that Alan is being just a bit ironic in the parallels that he is drawing to his educational practice and corporate theory, but it seems (call me a radical Arnoldian, if you like) that we need to oppose or at least question "getting and spending" in some real way if we are to responsibly occupy a position in an English department. This means offering the idea that commodification cannot be seen as an end in itself, but that it is a process that we must resist as well as embrace (I fear we have no choice but to embrace it as some level). Going "meta" on the canon issue may be the only responsible way to do it. At least that offers a space for asking why have canons at all. Yet I read and write as a confirmed romantic, and in two years time, I hope to have a piece of writing which adds yet another definition of that most amorphous term, and to me, holding onto such a period term implies the presence of a canon, however shadowy, in my own discourse. I suppose nothing could be more romantic than trying to escape the very shadow you are trying to catch . . . .
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From Alan Liu, University of California at Santa Barbara
RE: Response to Steven J. Willet, "Canons and Commodification"
I had intended to respond first to Robert Corbett's excellent posting. But when I came across this also intriguing posting from Steven Willett I couldn't resist:
On Friday, 1 Mar 1996, Steven J. Willett wrote:
I don't know how far Prof. Liu may want to press the analogy of canon revision to commodification, but however far he does, it is vitiated by a serious logical flaw.
I'd press my analogy pretty far. But Steven's objection is solid (and it is) only to the extent that my original message analogizing the systems of canon revision and postindustrial production/distribution can be read as about "commodification" (which is not, if I remember correctly, my term). In fact, a vast part of contemporary commerce is not focused exclusively on the producer/consumer interface where the commodity exists. Much of the new corporate way, for example is about broadening the concept of producer-consumer to apply to the whole chain of suppliers and clients (both intra- and extra-corporation). Thus in the most nouveau corporations the engineering team is considered a "customer" of the design team (which has to "sell" its product to engineering and manufacturing). The upshot of this is that the foundational "commodity"-purchase decisions are made well upstream of where the end-user consumer gets to make a choice. (Example: we all can choose which computer we buy, but we have almost no input as regards which processor chips [Intel or other] are in those computers because that decision is being made well upstream by the computer-makers who are the customers of the chip-makers.) Application: undergraduates indeed have little consumer-choice in regard to Romanticism courses. The real choice is being made upstream: graduate students have more choice (they can and often do choose to work with other professors or specialize in other areas); and, even further upstream, professional colleagues are the decision-making "consumers" of the kind of work one does (the research half of which probably does have a bearing on the choices one makes, where allowed, in the classroom). In my personal experience, I have yet to encounter a university system (but I have only been at universities as opposed to colleges) where undergraduate student course evaluations have been a decisive factor in tenure or promotion reviews (except insofar as they confirm other factors either positively or negatively). The real feedback is on one's research (judged upstream by colleagues); and one's courses are merely a reflection or facilitator of that research.
[Steven Willett again:] (2) It is equally illogical to say that a student who selects an elective is, within the pedagogical environment of the class, a consumer in the sense that he can critique the teacher, the teacher's methodology, the readings or the other students' opinions and thereby modify the course content to his satisfaction. Consumption on this model becomes a process of individualized modification operating within a cooperative matrix.
I'm in agreement with Steven (though I have recently encountered many more students who have foundational objections; you should see what happens, for example, if you set up an e-mail discussion group for a course). But I'm not sure how this indictment of the non-choice and non-critique of the student distinguishes the student from the consumer wandering through the mall or watching T.V. (the classic sites of consumption critique).
[Steven Willett:] The application of commodification theory to mass consumer culture has a certain appeal, as the graduate presentations at last summer's NASSR show, and may even be a useful critical gambit. I can't see how it has any place as a description of what obtains in the average university classroom. A better analogy for the common relationship between teachers and students, if one really needs analogies to understand teaching, might be consular imperium.
Again, I don't think commodification is the issue. I'm at least Romantic enough not to be that cynical about our course/canon selections (as you are also, clearly). This doesn't mean, however, that commerce is not involved. Nor does it mean that we need apologize for commerce, which broadly considered (I've said this in print somewhere, with allusion to Kurt Heinzelman's work) is probably the most powerful form of imagination or speculation we know.
[Steven Willett:] All the charming talk about con-and-intertextuality, commodification, metanarratives and interpretive hermeneutics—to keep the catalogue within manageable limits—cannot supplant the primary decision that "this" is something worthy to teach and essential for learners to experience.
What does "worth" mean here?
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From Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara
[from] RE: Canons, Bloom, Aronowitz, and DiFazio
On Thursday, 29 Feb 1996, Robert Corbett wrote:
. . . .
[T]he proliferation of non-canonical authors and new canons for them still participates in the logic of late capitalism in an unabashed manner. I am sure that Alan is being just a bit ironic in the parallels that he is drawing to his educational practice and corporate theory, but it seems (call me a radical Arnoldian, if you like) that we need to oppose or at least question "getting and spending" in some real way if we are to responsibly occupy a position in an English department. This means offering the idea that commodification cannot be seen as an end in itself, but that it is a process that we must resist as well as embrace (I fear we have no choice but to embrace it as some level). Going "meta" on the canon issue may be the only responsible way to do it. At least that offers a space for asking why have canons at all. Yet I read and write as a confirmed romantic, and in two years time, I hope to have a piece of writing which adds yet another definition of that most amorphous term, and to me, holding onto such a period term implies the presence of a canon, however shadowy, in my own discourse. I suppose nothing could be more romantic than trying to escape the very shadow you are trying to catch . . . .
The Continuous Quality Improvement (in higher education) list, as I mentioned, has articles on "resistance" to the mapping of the new corporatism over the academy. I think most of us in the academy who are (embarrassing to admit) latent Arnoldians and therefore latent Wordsworthians are on the same page on this issue—though, as you know, efforts to come up with an effective formulation of "resistance," "opposition," "subversion," "critique," etc., are now a tradition unto themselves.
My exchange with Steven Willett suggests that it may be looking too far afield to compare what we do to car-making if we want to get a solid purchase on the question in the context of the particular institutional-economics of the current academy (with its special variants on downsizing, restructuring, deskilling, etc.). In this vein, I recommend the chapter on "A Taxonomy of Teacher Work" in Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio's _The Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work_ (U. Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 226-63. This seems to be on of the most honest, detailed, and relentless accountings possible of what academic employment is like in the current U.S. educational system across the board from "first" to "second" and "third-tier" institutions—including uncomfortable statistics on who coming out of one kind of institution can get hired by institutions on other tiers. Aronowitz and DiFazio work in the larger context of the issue of systemic downsizing in many sectors of work, and they have a thesis to grind. But I couldn't find any obvious place in the gritty-realist chapter on the academy that rang false or seemed thesis-driven (though I have no experience with all the varieties of teaching jobs they describe).
Reading their chapter makes me think to ask this uncomfortable variant of my question about how canon revision serves or resists the new world order (in the specific context of our academic order): does canon revision of the sort we are discussing on this list make more sense for certain kinds of institutions than others (e.g., research universities as opposed to community colleges)? Who, differentially, is canon revision serving?
P.S. Aronowitz and DiFazio's ultimate thesis makes me very uneasy. Basically (as I understand it), they argue that systemic downsizing driven by global competition means a permanent demobilization and deskilling of the labor force as technology takes over. There will be no jobs in the future (graduate students on this list: cover your ears). Therefore, the solution is to reform social consciousness so that having a job will not be so important (to our identity, to our welfare, etc.). (Their specific proposals seem to project a kind of caricatural ultra-Euro-welfare state.) No jobs: not a problem. No jobs: the solution!
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