Lure of the List
The Chronicle: 5/26/2006: The Lure of the List: In this article, Lindsay Waters writes when confronted with list of top theorists published by Critical Inquiry "...my heart sank when I saw that the premier egghead journal of the land, Critical Inquiry, published an essay last winter that purported to rank the greatest literary theorists in its pages (and, by implication, the world). Why, at a time when we distrust megacorporations and any word from high, when we know it only makes sense to suspect the fix is in with any such lists unless they are produced by a klutz like Posner or a clown like Letterman would the leading specialized journal in the humanities toss very likely bogus social-science tools into its hitherto beautifully humming engine?"
Richard Burt sent this to a group of us, setting off an interesting discussion all by itself. Waters' narrative of CI's rise and fall into middlebrowdom is certainly in need of some revision, but Roger Whitson wrote that this is merely another symptom of the creeping logic of the academic culture industry's mimesis of culture industry.
Waters writes at the end, "The learned duplicate unthinkingly the worst behavior of society as a whole, celebrating the celebrities, not even pausing to think about the fruit wasting on the vine, whose cultivation might have benefited us all."
If Waters is deploring the lack of diversity in thinking, I agree with him wholeheartedly, but star system thinking is not an individual phenomenon, it is an institutional one, and all the "mistrust" of megacorporations (like Harvard at whose Press Waters is employed) will not generate meaningful critique of the rationalization of aura and charisma. So if Waters was saying that he thought Critical Inquiry types were too smart for "top ten" lists, then we all need to think again about how this kitschification of thinking, the generalization of "ready made" judgments of value have become ubiquitous.
Unfortunately, you need a password to reach the chronicle article. If you can't get the whole thing, I'll be happy to send it to you if you send me an email.
Richard Burt sent this to a group of us, setting off an interesting discussion all by itself. Waters' narrative of CI's rise and fall into middlebrowdom is certainly in need of some revision, but Roger Whitson wrote that this is merely another symptom of the creeping logic of the academic culture industry's mimesis of culture industry.
Waters writes at the end, "The learned duplicate unthinkingly the worst behavior of society as a whole, celebrating the celebrities, not even pausing to think about the fruit wasting on the vine, whose cultivation might have benefited us all."
If Waters is deploring the lack of diversity in thinking, I agree with him wholeheartedly, but star system thinking is not an individual phenomenon, it is an institutional one, and all the "mistrust" of megacorporations (like Harvard at whose Press Waters is employed) will not generate meaningful critique of the rationalization of aura and charisma. So if Waters was saying that he thought Critical Inquiry types were too smart for "top ten" lists, then we all need to think again about how this kitschification of thinking, the generalization of "ready made" judgments of value have become ubiquitous.
Unfortunately, you need a password to reach the chronicle article. If you can't get the whole thing, I'll be happy to send it to you if you send me an email.
2 Comments:
Could you post "the list?"
I'll try to post it tomorrow, but here is the Waters quote where he lists the lists, and cites the cited,
"Jacques Derrida (177), Sigmund Freud (174), Michel Foucault (160), Walter Benjamin (147). Then we drop down below 100 citations: Roland Barthes (92), Jacques Lacan (80), Fredric Jameson (79), Edward Said (77). Harvard philosopher Stanley Cavell ranks at No. 12, tied with Friedrich Nietzsche with 57 citations. The majority of the rest of our most-cited theorists huddle together with more modest numbers to their names. Harvard lit crit Homi K. Bhabha (an editor of CI) ties with Aristotle at No. 27, each with 38 cites; Harvard's Greenblatt ties with MIT's Noam Chomsky at No. 80, with 17 cites; Henry Louis Gates Jr. (again Harvard) ties with Friedrich Kittler, a media theorist from Germany, for 57, with 24 cites. Barbara E. Johnson (Harvard) is named but unranked with 12 cites."
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