Of Melodrama and Academic Discipleship.

Ever since the late 1960s, scholars have faced a troublesome problem: how to judge scholarship and teaching derived from an outlook not their own. When faculty members have convened to examine a doctoral student, screen job applicants, or decide a tenure case, the debate has frequently settled into a contest of formalists judging Marxists judging humanists judging Derrideans, etc. In the past, scholars might have disagreed over first principles of poetry, human nature, tradition, and so on, but they generally shared ideas of what constitutes a good argument, good evidence, and good style. In the 1950s, a myth critic and a New Critic commenced their interpretations with different concepts and goals in mind, but they rarely debated criteria of valid inference, appropriate evidence, and lucid expression. Cleanth Brooks never accused historicist scholars of subscribing to spurious, outmoded conceptions of knowledge. But in the current climate, in which rival commitments run deep into the most basic questions, argumentation itself is up for grabs, justified only according to the frame, the theory, the ideology of those wielding it.

The problem is exacerbated when the material under review adheres to a line of reasoning founded upon a single individual, an authority who presides over the discourse as guide and exemplar. In that case, scholars are compelled to judge the work for its derivations, as a piece of discipleship to be estimated by the standard set by the master. Academics trained to judge works of criticism by their evidence and inferences, or their erudition and eloquence, are caught short when called to appraise this kind of work. Impersonal standards of clarity, validity, and fluency, it is said, do not apply to performances that model those standards on the example of an intellectual figurehead. When non-disciples encounter essays that contain ingenious and labored readings of literature and culture, but which seem to conclude with familiar general principles taken from the master, they hesitate, wondering if that is the point. They are taken aback when they serve on search committees and read cover letters that begin, "I am a feminist-Foucauldian who applies cultural and discourse analysis to nineteenth-century American women writers." They sigh when they observe clever graduate students embracing Lacanian psychoanalysis before having read widely enough to make their commitments informed and flexible. Asked to evaluate master-derived scholarship, members of tenure committees, editors assessing manuscripts for presses, and professors reviewing books for journals must choose either to read the material in the spirit in which it was written--e.g., use Derridean norms for Derridean criticism--or to examine the material on standards of proof and persuasion, which derive from no single master or school of thought. Each option has its pitfalls: the first makes the reviewer himself into a disciple, the second makes the reviewer into an antagonist--at least from the perspective of the one being reviewed.

This is an impasse that hinders academics in their role as referees. In the present state of affairs, in order to approach the particulars of a derivative work, referees are constrained to enter the system of concepts and rhetoric unique to the x-ian mode, accepting a host of premises and phrasings as part of the work's donnee. They must accept a system of beliefs and methods, a style, an idiom of idiosyncratic terms, favored locutions, and novel affects lifted from the master's corpus and assimilated by the devotee as a scholarly practice. To judge a de Manian study of Rilke's poetry, one isn't supposed to quibble with the theory of figural language assumed by the study. Partisans claim that that is unfair to the work being judged. One can only ask whether the study invokes the theory correctly and wields it shrewdly. If they disapprove of the framework, if they reject an axiom in the master's thinking, readers are disqualified from estimating the details of the study, for the details rest so firmly upon the axiom that the entire argument is invalidated. The master's thinking is a decisive threshold, a criterion that divides readers into those who admit the framework and those who interrogate it. For the terms and premises unique to a master-based school of thought are not hypotheses to be tested, opinions to be proffered, or surmises to be considered. They are founding postulates, ready commandments that produce the interpretations that follow. Lacan's epigrams on the gaze beget a reading of Hitchcock's Vertigo. Harold Bloom's conception of poetic influence initiates a series of monographs on Whitman, Williams, Stevens, and Pound. These master postulates are generative, allowing new interpretations to arise and be respected as long as the master's repute remains high.

These frameworks enable interpreters to proceed not only by shaping the outlook of disciples, but also by becoming the subject matter of their readings. Not long after translations of Ecrits, Surveillir et punir, and De la grammatologie arrived in the United States, numerous books expounding the dense positions of these theories followed, and with great success. Jonathan Culler's On Deconstruction (1982) made its way onto dozens of graduate seminar reading lists, and Jane Gallop's Reading Lacan (1985) received an Honorable Mention in the MLA Lowell Award contest. Recent expositions of the masters have grown more stylized in their treatment, and more focussed upon the person--for example, David Halperin's Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (1995), Slavoj Zizek's collection Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (1992), and John Caputo's The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (1997). These expert studies make the master into a topic unto himself. With the master as a field of inquiry, commentators remain disciples even when they adopt an analytical stance toward the master's vision. Though analysis would seem to undermine the founding act of discipleship--identification with the master as an ego ideal--in fact, the critical distance is erased by the commentator's absorption in the master's thought. When Lacan is criticized for emphasizing a masculinist perspective, the mistake is not simply a generic patriarchal bias, but Lacan's patriarchal bias. Arguments against the definition of a text as an unstable play of semantic/semiotic differences attack the Derridean definition of the text as such. Judgment applies not to a concept or argument by itself, but as conceived by the master and contextualized in his corpus. The master is the fount of knowledge and error, the centerpiece of interpretation to be explored by sophisticates and disseminated to initiates.

This is not to say that Lacan et al. are nothing more than pretexts for interpretation. In general, disciples approach the master's work with earnest gravity, and believe he has hit upon a truth too important not to be reiterated. When Joseph Allen Boone begins his study of modernism and sexuality with the assertion, "Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality has schooled contemporary intellectuals into an awareness of the extent to which sexuality is a function of power," one realizes that there is no doubting the speculations in Foucault's little volume.(1) Boone embraces Foucault's terms and thematics so enthusiastically that without them his book Libidinal Currents would not just be different--it would not exist at all. In Telling Time, Carol Jacobs opens a chapter on de Man with "There is no way to say adequately what the significance of de Man might be."(2) The sentence strikes people who do not inhabit a world in which de Man's significance is crucial as odd, but it does serve an inaugural purpose. Though Jacobs's book includes chapters on Rilke, Wordsworth, and others, it deploys a language of temporality, belatedness, structure, and text throughout, indicating that de Man is not only a subject of the book, but a model for its delivery. Finally, a diacritics essay by Eleanor Kaufman called "Falling from the Sky: Trauma in Perec's W and Caruth's Unclaimed Experience" reveals the inaugural capacity of master frameworks with a bluff declaration: "Before complicating this picture and arguing that falling is not necessarily as traumatic as it might seem, I will elaborate a traumatic reading of W as seen through the lens of Cathy Caruth's analysis of trauma in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History."(3) Without Caruth's trauma analysis, Kaufman cannot even begin. Even though Caruth is not the direct object of the interpretation, she provides the "lens" through which the actual object, Perec's novel, comes into focus.

Within these assertions by Boone, Jacobs, and Kaufman lies a methodological fact about discipleship as it works in academic settings: the master is prized not only because he harbors the truth, but because he facilitates interpretative labor. Conceiving a system or method with its own idiosyncratic vocabulary and habits of inference, the master provides the interpreter with something to argue, with a new approach to old materials, with an adaptive conceptual machinery that reconfigures fields of study. Master frameworks surround objects that seem to have been exhausted of insight after years of explication by trained inquirers and invigorate them, open them to discovery by a new generation of exegetes. By 1990, Henry James had undergone hundreds of sophisticated theoretical analyses focussed on issues of representation, authorship, and consciousness, cutting-edge commentaries that left rising scholars groping for fresh theses. But with the advent of an "epistemology of the closet," incipient James critics suddenly possessed a viewpoint of their own, an angle of vision radical not just in its politics, but in its break from older epistemologies. Aspiring Jamesians exploring the thematics of homosocial desire needed to pay no attention to Wayne Booth or Lawrence Holland. The working assumptions and concepts of the old and the new were so different as to render the outlooks incommensurable.

Derrida and other masters granted individuals an identity as professional readers. This is what distinguishes present-day academic discipleship in the humanities from other forms of discipleship, for example, that of religious sects. Here, identity formation coincides with professional formation. The master's word may mean little outside the university walls, but within academe a subordinate intellectual identity is commonplace and accepted. Whereas forty years ago a scholar who was influenced by The Verbal Icon would never refer to himself as a Wimsatt-ian, today a scholar wears such personal badges with a fair degree of solemnity. For an essay to be labeled "Lacanian" causes no harm. The label categorizes the argument into an acknowledged mode of interpretation, with its own concepts and habits of inference. Because the master enjoys prestige in the academic marketplace, the essay gains an automatic legitimacy. The label "This is a Lacanian interpretation of ..." signifies that the author has studied in the School of Lacan and learned to enact his or her own Lacanian productions. The claim of derivation serves as a union card or entry fee into the forum of humanities research.