Restoring Intellectual Coherence Edward W. Said.

Surely the increasing use, and economic abuse, of part-time adjunct, yearly contract, and graduate student employees by university administrators is taking on extraordinary dimensions. The MLA has played an important role in raising awareness and seeking remedies for this situation in coordinating activities with other professional associations and in publicizing as well as trying to reverse the lamentable results of the trend. Each of our students and mostly younger colleagues is vulnerable to this downgrading and downsizing mode, which is often justified by administrators as making the institution "leaner." What isn't often enough stressed is that while humanists are turned into part time wage earners a deepening alliance between the research university (its management programs, science departments, boards of trustees, etc.) and the corporate world has developed. As Masao Miyoshi puts it in a powerful new paper on the multi-university "as a site [increasingly] dedicated to corporate R&D," there is a remarkable quiescence among humanists and social scientists as they watch the transformation of the university into a place where defense industries, biomedical conglomerates, and agribusinesses gain strength at the expense of the more traditional intellectual disciplines. At the same time, in what appears to be an unrelated development the media have turned their attention to disputes within prominent literature departments in English and other languages disputes that threaten the existence of such departments all over the country. The New York Times a few months ago highlighted the factionalism and misfortunes of the Duke University English department (Scott), but it is true, I think, that several other departments across the country are going through the same travail. It is too often the case that as the opportunities for young scholars and teachers either dry up or are converted into exploitative, poorly paid menial service jobs, senior professors who have the luxury to be locked in factional strife are unable to vote coherently on Junior faculty appointments, tenure eases, and curricular needs. This situation plainly hasn't caused the crisis in scholarly employment but it certainly hasn't helped. I am convinced that we need to turn our attention seriously to the intellectual pass we have come to that accompanies the diminished employment opportunities for academic humanists. When reputable, distinguished departments of literature can no longer function without terrible, paralyzing disagreement on the smallest as well as the largest issues, something is quite wrong. There is first of all the slow disappearance of literature itself from the graduate and in some places even the undergraduate curriculum and with it the occlusion of history as something produced in the secular world by women and men. Even the greatest, most apparently solitary of aesthetic achievements are embroiled in social relationships and the ongoing creation of human history. All manner of fragmented, jargonized subjects of discussion now flourish in an ahistorical limbo. They are not completely anthropological or sociological or philosophical or psychological although they seem to carry some of the marks of all those disciplines. In some, perhaps many institutions the broad historical or call it chronological knowledge of literature that used to be expected and required is no longer even available to students, much less taught and emphasized. And for some time now, the very object of former scrutiny. the literary work, has been all but eliminated. I don't want to revive the

invidious distinction between "primary" and "secondary" work; rather I want to note the indifference to literary texts that has emerged inside a number of departments certifying students to be experts in English, French, and German literatures but actually giving them more Habermas, Derrida, and Hegel to read than Joyce, Flaubert, and Schiller. To this dislocation there has been a predictable response from some quarters -- back to the canon, as if the only answer to genuine intellectual puzzlement, genuine change in the nature of knowledge is a Luddite refusal to deal with anything that isn't "traditional" or "what we've always done. Mostly this regression hasn't really meant much more intellectually than rhetorical gesture, that is, avoiding jargon (a good thing to avoid in any case) and being determinedly bellelettristic in approach. But that too, I would argue has left the larger issue of the place and role of the humanities pretty much unattended and unaddressed. While I wouldn't go so far as to say that the university -- members of the MLA and the MLA itself being unthinkable without the university in all its genres -- is in ruins, it is true that the university's general role as a provider of knowledge, in the largest sense of that phrase is undergoing alarming and possibly irreparable change. Miyoshi charges that the university is now up for sale and that administrators think far more of its potential for profit than they do of its educational mission. At the same time the change in paradigm from totality to the concept of "difference" underwent a further transformation into globalized, transnational, and multicultural particularities. This transformation, Miyoshi concludes, leads to the rejection of universality, collectivity, reference, and agency in favor of difference, particularity, incommensurability and structure," thereby stripping knowledge of history as well as of social and cultural relations. Hence "marginalization" and erasure. However we must grant that theory itself, to say nothing of actual literary practice has gone through great developments in our time, which it would be foolish simply to ignore or condemn wholesale. In the past, all the great scholars, critics, practitioners, and interpreters of literature were somehow in touch with what was new in their time, and most were open to what discoveries in knowledge and method were being made. This openness, however, never lessened the obligation to be discriminating and skeptical in what they saw before them, and we must have the same positive and yet carefully evaluative attitude toward the new in our own time. But what is upon us now is a new fragmentation, an often reckless abandonment of what could be a common intellectual pursuit in favor of highly specialized, exclusivist, and rebarbative approaches that destroy and undercut the historical as well as social bases of the humanities. Such a downgrading of the humanities, evident in the job crisis and in the diminishment and incoherence of literature departments as a result of the fragmentation brought on by sectarianism (identity politics, technical jargon, de-emphasizing the historical approach) perfectly suits the new idea of the "corporate multiversity" that Miyoshi diagnoses so ably. What is puzzling is why we want to do this to ourselves, why we can't take seriously our intellectual role as interpreters and producers of historically grounded knowledge that others (mostly those who view us with antipathy) see in us. What the media has picked up semiinadvertently is the connection between the downgrading of the university's humanities wing and the mood of the sectarian selfbanalization that many of us are passing through. I think what is required now is not a reinvigorated professiona1ism but a reinforced sense of intellectual responsibility --

responsibility to what in fact we ought to do, namely the interpretation, analysis, and serious consideration of literature in its historical and social environment. Perhaps this entails rethinking the whole concept of the literary work, and even that of national literature (although the reemergence of a sometimes murderous ethnic nationalism suggests that the national idea has been strengthened outside the academy). The challenges to patriarchical and Eurocentric thought have been salutary indeed, so it isn't at all a matter of returning to the gentlemen's-club approach. But there is an important affirmation to be made in endorsing the intellectual mission of the humanities without becoming either demogogic or hortatory. As humanists we have a significant place in the society, a place that it would be simply idiotic to abandon. WORKS CITED Miyoshi, Masao. "Ivory Tower in Escrow." Unpublished essay, 1998. Scott, Janny. "Discord Turns Academe's Hot Team Cold." New York Times 21 Nov. 1998, late ed.: A1+.