"But that Speaking Makes it So"
THE ROLE OF NARRATIVE IN THE FORMATION OF COMMUNITY
by Kristopher Nelson
©1996-2007 Kristopher Nelson
A Senior Thesis for the Comparative History of Ideas Honors
Program, presented to Dr. James Clowes on the 4th of August of 1996, in
partial fulfillment of the requirements for a B.A. with College Honors
in Comparative History of Ideas.
I · THE BEGINNING OF THE
STORY
II · TOWARDS A NARRATIVE
THEORY OF THE GIFT
Stories and Maps
Community Maps and Community
Texts
The Gift
The Perfect Gift
"Webs of Significance"
The "Potlatch": Community Through
Gift
Wrapping up the Gift
III · ON NARRATIVE
IV · OF THE COMPARATIVE
HISTORY OF IDEAS PROGRAM
V · PRACTICE IN THEORY:
BUILDING A PEDAGOGICAL FOUNDATION
VI · THEORY IN PRACTICE:
THE CURRENT STATE OF THE CHID PROGRAM
VII · SPEAKING OF THE
CANON: A NARRATIVE OF COMMUNITY
VIII · TOWARDS CLOSURE:
READING/WRITING THE FUTURE OF CHID
WORKS CITED (INCOMPLETE)
I · The Beginning
of the Story
Believing, with Max Weber, that man [and, presumably,
woman] is an animal suspended in webs of significance [s/]he [her/]himself
has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be
therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive
one in search of meaning.
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of
Cultures, 5
The Comparative History of Ideas Program—or CHID, as it is
more affectionately known—is an interdisciplinary program founded around
notions of student-centered, problem-based education, as well as critical
thinking. It has attempted, with varying degrees of success, to produce
a coherent curriculum in the absence of broad faculty or administrative
consensus. Instead of creating integral cohesion between individual classes,
the program has sought to develop a dialogic narrative structure—an individual
"myth" which contains the common elements necessary for community—around
a disparate series of classes offered by a variety of departments. The
difficulties of this dialogic narrative are multiple: avoiding reification,
stasis, and hierarchically-based imposition, while at the same time allowing
for a common narrative amongst a community of individualistic students,
and dealing with a university structure which encourages stratification,
accountability, and general "rules."
The Comparative History of Ideas Program is structured
around groups of classes from other departments which students can select.
The intent is to provide a structured series of challenging classes in
order to meet university requirements while also allowing maximum student
flexibility. Within this loose structure there is room for a great deal
of choice, and students typically pursue a path which is highly individualistic.
It is often possible to complete most of a CHID degree without ever taking
a single class with another CHID student. Thus, the difficulties for a
program which seeks to create a community atmosphere in this situation
are apparent: just how does one create unity from all these individuals?
For me the solution to this difficulty is narrative. Shared,
community-focused stories generate and maintain community. As I would like
to see a stronger sense of community both within the Comparative History
of Ideas Program and in the world in general, my concern in this thesis
is with community and narrative. More specifically, I am interested in
the intersection of community, pedagogy, and history in the Comparative
History of Ideas Program at the University of Washington. This intersection
revolves for me around an educational narrative which emphasizes the "gift"
aspects of the university, an orientation which positions students as active
members of a scholarly community. I believe it is through a retelling,
a narrative (re)construction of the world, that this gift oriented community
may come to be. Overall, I view narrative as the underlying thread which
knits together our worlds, and I use a narrative exploration of the Comparative
History of Ideas Program, gift, pedagogy, the literary canon, and even
Dante’s Purgatorio in order to demonstrate the ways in which a narrative
exploration can productively mediate tensions and contradictions across
both theoretical and temporal limits. In each case, I seek to further extend
my theories of narrative in connection with a particular issue; in addition,
my history of the Comparative Ideas Program provides one example a practical
application of narrative to issues of community.
Of course, community is not something that can necessarily
be observed and measured; it is instead a sense of connection which is
felt emotionally. One can rationally describe the complex series of processes
which serve to generate and maintain community—gift exchange, sacrifice,
common interests, common concerns—but ultimately, community is more than
its component pieces. One cannot form a community on purely rational grounds,
though one may rationally construct a situation from which community emerges.
Communities are formed from individuals, and notions of individuality and
communality are thus inextricably intertwined. Though we often position
them as exclusive opposites, their interlocking natures necessarily preclude
any kind of absolute separation. But it is true that movement towards individuation
is a movement away from community and that the formation of community necessarily
blurs the boundaries between individuals.
The world-views of individuals and the shared world-views
of groups of individuals, as inextricably bound together as the individuals
and communities themselves, provide actions and events with significance.
These world-views, which in this thesis I variously liken to maps, texts,
stories, and especially narratives—a map being analogous to a narrative
at a particular point in time—are an integral part of what it means to
be a human member of a community. In addition, the construction and subsequent
reconstruction of either whole world-views or parts of world-views is continual,
and this process contributes to the dynamic nature of existence.
II · Towards a
Narrative Theory of the Gift
Gifts bespeak relationships.
Lewis Hyde, The Gift, 69
One of the specific narrative methods of establishing community,
of creating and maintaining shared world-views, is gift exchange. In contrast
to the exchange of commodities, the exchange of gifts establishes enduring
connections between people. "It is the cardinal difference between gift
and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two
people, while the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection" (Hyde
56). A gift, then, presented and represented within a narrative framework,
works to establish a community within which more gifts are given and more
narratives (re)constructed. It is this very circularity—for the "gift not
only moves, it moves in a circle" (Hyde 11)—of enduring gift relationships
which serves so well to generate and maintain community.
This circular path of gift to narrative to community and
around again is my subject in this section, for it is in this narrative
path that gift becomes a powerful force for establishing and continuing
connections between people. This section thus provides an illustration
of a narrative approach, as well as establishing a foundation for later
exploration. First, in order to provide a framework for exploring gift,
narrative, and community, I will discuss various theories of the gift.
I will then begin my own investigation with the contradictions inherent
in the idea of the perfect gift, and the way narrative can mediate these
contradictions. Finally, I believe that narrative is a powerful force for
dealing with contradictions without necessarily resolving them, and by
investigating the uses of narrative in Native American potlatches, I will
demonstrate the ways in which a narrative exploration can serve as a productive
mediator across both theoretical and temporal boundaries. Overall, my point
is to explore narrative in relation to the gift and community, and to build
a foundation for further narrative exploration. But before that, I will
begin my foundational discussion with
Stories and Maps
because "… without stories there is no articulation of
experience. … Stories give shape to lives. As people grow up, reach plateaus,
or face crises, they often turn to stories to show them how to take the
next step" (Christ 1). Through narrative we create a framework or map to
represent the world and ourselves: "stories create a sense of self and
world," write Stephen Crites and Michael Novak (Christ 3). "It is by being
assigned to stories," Louis O. Mink writes, "that they [facts] become intelligible
and increase understanding by going beyond ‘What?’ and ‘When?’ to ‘How?’
and ‘Why?’" (546). Narratives help define and guide the way people act
and interact. As Carol P. Christ writes:
When meeting new friends or lovers people reenact
the ritual of telling stories. Why? Because they sense that the meaning
of their lives is revealed in the stories they tell …. People reveal themselves
in telling stories.
But stories also reveal the powers that provide orientation
in people’s lives. When people talk about books or movies that touched
them, about people they have loved or wanted to emulate, they speak of
that elusive sense of meaning, power, and value that roots their mundane
stories in something deeper. This depth dimension of stories is crucial,
for without it lives would seem empty, meaningless. (2)
"[M]an—let me offer you a definition—is the story telling
animal," writes Graham Swift, "Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind
not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting markerbuoys
and trail-signs of stories" (Swift 63). Thus, story-telling—"narrative
(re)construction"—is an important element in our lives. It provides a sense
of internal meaning as well as a means of representing ourselves and our
actions to others.
But a story or narrative is not merely a personal construction.
Rather, an individual is bound up in a series of symbolic or mythic representations—"man
is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun" (Geertz
5)—which serve to generate and maintain meaning. Together, these symbols
and myths provide the structure for our world-views. They constitute a
cohesive narrative of existence, a kind mental map (or text) which functions,
in much the same way as a geographic map, as a guide to the terrain of
life. From them we generate ideas, interact with people, deal with new
situations, and perform other activities we would be unable to do without
a framework in which to make decisions. But inevitably, the categorization
which is involved in the process of map-formation leaves distortions or
even blank spaces in the map, giant regions of unexplored or inaccurate
territory.
And indeed, the world is not merely physical terrain approximated
by a map and it is not merely represented through story. It is, in an important
sense, constituted by maps and stories. We are so bound within our contexts,
our mental maps, that we are unable to access any "true reality." As Terry
Eagleton writes, "There are no ‘brute’ facts, independent of human meanings;
there are no facts that we do not know about" (86). There is thus no means
of separating our representations from that which they represent. Literature,
like all discursive forms, is not just about our world, it is our world.
Our world comes to be through language; the here-and-now is a narrative
construct. Our worlds are thus constructed and reconstructed through narrative.
Events may transpire beyond a narrative frame—we may physically fall off
a cliff, for example—but this event is integrally connected to narrative
in at least two ways. First, our falling off the cliff involves an historical
context: we were out walking, found a cliff, went too near, and were blown
off by a gust of wind. Falling off a cliff is not an isolated incident,
in other words, but is rather connected to a series of other events. These
connections constitute one narrative of the event, and are created as events
transpire, and then often recreated by us subsequently. And our recreation
of events is rarely identical from one moment to the next. Second, the
repercussions beyond the event are narrative constructs as well: our friend
who sees us fall tells a story, one which may change depending on who she
tells; our own story (if we survive) is radically different. So, this second
narrative construct is necessarily post-event: it is a representation.
Our ability to tell stories about—to reconstruct—past
events which emphasize certain aspects of the action and de-emphasize others—or
which even add or remove elements—is a powerful one. This narrative reconstruction
of historical events permits us to deal with ambiguity and potentially
distressing aspects of an exchange (or other interactions or just other
events). In the case of the gift, we can ignore—though not necessarily
completely and absolutely forget as Jacques Derrida would have us do to
achieve the perfect gift ("Gift" 14)—those elements of the exchange which
do not serve our purposes and retell others in our own terms. This is a
powerful tool, for it allows us, for example, both to emphasize the connectivity
of a gift (if that is what we want) or de-emphasize it. Thus, I may seek
to de-emphasize the commodity aspects of the gift of a meal (by keeping
the check face-down, for example) in order to emphasize my role as a friend
and consequently bolster community. On the other hand, I may sometimes
wish to emphasize the commodity elements of a gift: there are times, for
example, when I may feel that a gift will be perceived as too "forward,"
especially if it appears expensive (and thus a gift of more of my "being,"
at least in capitalist America), and I may add something like, "It was
on sale" in explanation. This lessens the impact of the gift and diminishes
its "weight," thus reducing connection which the gift-giving generates.
It doesn’t destroy it—it just emphasizes the commodity aspect, which in
turn emphasizes our roles as individuals and lessens the communitarian
elements of the gift exchange. Our reconstruction, whether of a gift exchange
or of a fall from a cliff, allows us to maneuver through our complex society
and to exercise some control over the meanings of our actions.
But note that this reconstruction is not necessarily total.
I may or may not believe the reconstructed story of the gift exchange or
the fall myself. I may even tell different stories to different people
(even if I try to always tell the "truth"), depending on what I am trying
to accomplish in a certain situation. I may not even be aware of what I
am doing—one often does these things on "feel," choosing intuitively, without
conscious thought, which elements to emphasize in which cases. There is
little firm ground to stand on here, for it is difficult to capture the
"truth" in these cases of reconstruction, especially since we tell ourselves
stories about history as well as other people. Comprehension and understanding,
prerequisites for judgments about truth, seem to hinge on finding stable
content to examine. But is there a stable place "outside" all this narrative
which allows us to judge accuracy and truth? I do not think there is one
that we can inhabit: any place of stability is itself a construction of
our minds and of language. Our stories shift; our memories are certainly
not fixed. "Our minds are porous with forgetfulness," writes Jorge Luis
Borges in his short story "The Aleph" (73). And our interpretation of events,
even if the events do not change in our memory, may change drastically
with new information and in new situations.
Community Maps and Community Texts
The same map and text analogy functions for groups as
well as individuals: symbolic representations of reality, established for
the sake of group cohesion and then translatable into group action, are
inherently limited. Maps, like texts, are interpretable within the framework
of a community. But, to draw on the work of Stanley Fish, this isn’t a
text in the sense meant by E.D. Hirsch and others: it isn’t "an entity
which always remains the same from one moment to the next" (Hirsch 46).
However, continues Fish, this is a text "if one means by text the structure
of meanings that is obvious and inescapable from whatever interpretive
assumptions happen to be in force" (Fish vii). That is, the text which
forms a group map—in other words, a culture—is not an entity which is always
static, but it nevertheless exists as a presence in our worlds. But the
"text" which constitutes a culture is even more fluid than the written
text which is a book. This brings up an important point: an interpretation
of a map is itself a map, and can be analyzed and treated as such. There
is no fixed point at which interpretation ends.
But like an individual map, group maps are extremely important
for coherent group action and for achieving that almost intangible goal
of "a sense of community." A sense of community is an aesthetic feeling
of belonging to a larger whole; a community is a group of individuals with
that sense. One powerful method of establishing this sense is ritual: rituals
"produce cultural [that is, communitarian] meaning by using symbols and
symbolic behavior" (Podolefsky and Brown 252). In other words, rituals
operate to generate and maintain shared stories. Often revolving around
"stages in an ongoing process" and operating to "define a time or a place
that is in some sense nonordinary" (252), rituals unite groups around common
themes, common symbols, and common actions. Within these "nonordinary"
spaces, ritual "allows for nonordinary behavior" (252). Ritual activity
is not simply religious: even attending classes can become a ritual activity,
as can final exams, and even regular discussions. Ritual can thus be used
to generate and maintain maps. Thus, traditional notions, such as divisions
between "Blacks" and "Whites" or "Serbs and Croats," may be useful fictions—rituals
which establish a "map"—to create and maintain a sense of community. But
this raises a question: does forming a community necessarily establish
this kind of deeply-felt "us versus them" mentality? Or is it possible
to establish fictions of community which can serve to flexibly define a
group, definitions which can shift to allow members to join in pursuit
of a common goal without necessarily positing an oppositional element,
without creating a firmly entrenched "Other"? The difficulty for both individual
and group maps arises from the tendency of symbolic representations—and
thus group boundaries—to become reified, assumed, and therefore inflexible.
The Gift
"A gift, when it moves across the boundary, either stops
being a gift or else abolishes the boundary" (Hyde 61). This capacity of
gift exchange for erasing boundaries between individuals, for creating
as well as maintaining group identities, is a powerful and life-affirming
one. But gift is a neglected form of exchange in American society, for
we are a society which glorifies individualism and freedom. As a result,
gifts have taken second place to commodities, which "are associated with
alienation and freedom" (Hyde 67). "In commodity exchange it’s as if the
buyer and the seller were both in plastic bags; there’s none of the contact
of gift exchange" (Hyde 10). At the same time, however, many Americans
are also concerned with creating cohesive communities, and the pursuit
of these two values, so often perceived as incompatible, creates tension
and conflict.
Marcel Mauss’ essay The Gift, the foundation of
many later gift analyses, focuses on the gift in "archaic" societies
in which, according to Mauss, group cohesion is maintained through gift
exchange. "A gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction,"
writes Mary Douglas in her foreword to The Gift (Mauss vii). Every
gift creates a connection between people. That which is given contains
a part of the giver: "Souls are mixed with things; things with souls" (Mauss
20). In effect, Mauss maintains, the person who accepts the present holds
a part of the donor, forming a link between them. Ultimately, there are
"three related obligations: the obligation to give, the obligation to accept,
and the obligation to reciprocate" (Hyde xv). Every gift involves the expectation
of a return gift and thus starts a pattern of giving without end. Once
involved in the gift exchange, people are inextricably linked by common
ties of reciprocity.
These ties of reciprocity generate and maintain community,
but do so without ignoring the individual. From the evidence in Mauss’
account, the emphasis in the system of gift exchange is on each person,
because it is the individual’s actions that determine the flow of gifts,
not arbitrary laws that force action. There is, however, a certain obligatory
element in the exchange: it is not possible to remain a part of these "archaic"
societies without participating. As Mauss writes, "The obligation to reciprocate
worthily is imperative" (42). Nevertheless, the stress is on the individual,
not on abstract notions of commerce and exchange. The very personal nature
of the gift exchange, when practiced by a group of people, succeeds in
forming ties between them, and thus the personal produces the communal.
According to Mauss, modern Western societies still retain
remnants of a former system of gift exchange: "The morality and practice
of exchanges in societies immediately preceding our own still retains important
principles" of a gift economy (47). Our lives and our morality still retain
the ideas of the gift, in which liberty and obligation commingle (65).
"Things sold still have a soul" (66) despite the distinction our laws draw
"between real rights and personal rights, things and persons" (47). In
Provence, France, according to Mauss, everybody still brings an egg and
other symbolic presents when a child is born (66). And during the Christmas
season, there is still an expectation of reciprocity of cards and gifts.
These and other examples, Mauss points out, illustrate that modern Western
society still retains a system of gift exchange, if only in a haphazard
and often unrecognized form.
Like Mauss, Lewis Hyde, in The Gift: Imagination and
the Erotic Life of Property, seeks to reinvigorate the often neglected
gift exchange within contemporary Western society. For him, gifts are the
stuff of a positive sense of community, for "when gifts circulate within
a group, their commerce leaves a series of interconnected relationships
in its wake" (xiv). For Hyde, commodity exchange is "associated with alienation
and freedom," while gifts are "associated with community and with being
obliged to others" (67). He associates the gift with eros and the
commodity with logos. "Logos-trade draws the boundary, eros-trade
erases it" (61). The circulation of gifts "establishes a feeling-bond between
two people" (56). Gifts, to Hyde, are transformative: accepting a gift
involves integrating a new element into one’s self, as the gift carries
a fragment of an identity from giver to receiver (45). It is the living
aspects of gifts, the carrying of a transformative identity from giver
to receiver, which is crucial, for "it is not when a part of the self is
inhibited and restrained, but when a part of the self is given away, that
community appears" (92). He also recognizes that sometimes the connections
established by gifts are unwanted: "Because gifts do have the power to
join people together, there are many gifts that must be refused" (70).
There are a number of interlinking elements which invest
gift exchange with the power to transform and connect people. Two of these
are faithfulness and gratitude. "Faithfulness," writes Georg Simmel, "might
be called the inertia of the soul. It keeps the soul on the path on which
it started, even if the original occasion that led it onto it no longer
exists" (380). Faithfulness allows for already established relationships
to continue, even after the initial impetus to their formation has passed.
Thus the existence of a drive towards faithfulness in individuals means
that people will tend to continue what has already begun, and that gift
relationships will tend to endure once started. For this reason, accepting
a gift, and thus establishing a relationship, is a decision which exceeds
the temporal limits of the immediate gift exchange. It means at least accepting
the possibility of a long-term relationship.
Similarly, gratitude also tends to bind people together
beyond the immediate exchange. Simmel writes, "Gratitude, as it were, is
the moral memory of mankind" (388). It is not discharged merely by returning
a gift, but instead remains. Indeed, a gift relationship is characterized
by a generalized sense of gratitude in which both partners feel grateful
towards one another. In this way, like faithfulness, gratitude helps to
continue relationships which have already begun: "It is an ideal bridge
which the soul comes across again and again, so to speak, and which, upon
provocations too slight to throw a new bridge to the other person,
it uses to come closer to him" (388). For Simmel, faithfulness and gratitude
are secondary modes. They operate only after relationships have begun,
only after initial contact has been made. In this sense, they are both
supplementary modes.
But the power of gifts is not derived exclusively from
individual subjective causes, but also from interpersonal and cultural
factors. Gifts inhabit the realm of the social, in which actions and events
assume meaning in the context of larger social relations. "Gifts," writes
Barry Schwartz, "are one of the ways that pictures others have of us in
their minds are transmitted" (175). In sum, "gift-giving socializes and
serves as a generator of identity (176). To draw on Mauss, they are a "total
social phenomenon," encompassing religion, morality, the family, the economy,
and more (Mauss 3). And gifts are exchanged between individuals with an
historical relationship, both in the sense that the exchange itself has
taken place through time and in the sense that it is historically situated
in a cultural milieu rich in symbolic meaning. Our personal and communal
ideas, rituals, values, and norms interact to produce a complex interplay
of events which constitute any gift situation.
The Perfect Gift
The ideology of the "perfect gift," described by James
Carrier in his article "Gifts in a World of Commodities: The Ideology of
the Perfect Gift in American Society," serves as a myth in American culture
which reconciles—or at least mystifies and conceals—the tension between
gift and commodity, community and individual. "The first element of the
ideology is that the perfect gift is priceless, that its material expression
is immaterial. … The second element of the ideology is that the perfect
gift is free, unconstrained and unconstraining" (Carrier 23). Carrier writes,
This is a powerful ideology, one that is able
to disembody objects, divest them of their material aspect and transmute
them into pure, spontaneous expressions of being and love. Not only can
it do away with the significance of the material nature of gifts, it can
create a wholly new form of relationship, in which people can be related
but independent, joined but separate, linked fundamentally but in no way
bound or restricted by each other. We give the thing which is not, and
so are joined but free. (Carrier 23)
Derrida writes that a true gift is the impossible, that less-than-perfect
gifts participate in the economic circles and thus always return something,
making them thus less than pure (Derrida 7). And yet we in America, at
least, continue to believe in Carrier’s "perfect gift," a gift divorced
from the material world, given with no expectation of return. And we still
give, and talk about giving, "gifts." So what are these things we pass
between ourselves, then? What are these items which are not "pure" and
yet still resist a characterization as commodity, as simply and only things?
How can we believe in the pure, ideal, perfect gift, and yet still give
these things which are not perfect gifts and yet which we still call gifts?
And how can we reconcile, or at least deal with, our apparently conflicting
desires for independence and community?
We resolve this paradox—"[t]his contradiction between
objects as commodities and objects as gifts [which] defines a contradiction"
(Carrier 24)—by (re)constructing a narrative of an exchange in order to
emphasize positive aspects and de-emphasize negative aspects of the event.
As a result, we can construct a situation which serves an intended purpose—whether
it be to emphasize or de-emphasize connection or individuality—without
necessarily "actually" giving such a gift. We can choose to view our childhood
with our parents, for example, as a gift which can never be fully repaid,
or we can instead construe it as "merely our due." It many ways it doesn’t
matter how our childhood "actually" was—though of course this plays a role
in how we choose to construe it. What matters instead is how we describe
and position our childhood within the narratives of our lives. Or, as another
example, when I give a gift I may emphasize the amount of time I took carefully
matching the gift to the recipient. I may also put a great deal of time
into arranging the circumstances of the exchange–a surprise party, for
example—in order to emphasize that this is a personal gift and not just
a thing from the shop down the street. Carrier believes that Americans,
faced with the contradiction of giving things which were originally purchased
as commodities, often "act to appropriate the commodity, to stamp it with
their identity and so convert it into a possession" (Carrier 25). We may
thus thoughtfully attempt to match gift to recipient, look for "unique
gifts," and carefully wrap a present in order to "help make objects more
suited for use in gift relations" (Carrier 25).
Essentially, we resolve the paradox through symbolic manipulation.
It is a kind of "méconnaissance" or "misrecognition" (Bourdieu
5), though rarely complete. Most often, we construct a narrative of gift
exchange which masks the impure, commodified aspect of our gifts. Thus,
for example, when a friend and I were in a restaurant treating another
friend to a birthday meal, we covered the cash we had placed on the table,
rather than having it lie in view. The money aspect felt wrong and the
wrongness made us uncomfortable. After the fact, we choose to remember
the gift of food and not the money which went into the purchase of that
food. We are aware that this was in one sense a commodity exchange, and
yet the story we tell ourselves and others about the event is that we "treated"
our friend to lunch. We gave her a meal for her birthday.
And yet we still often say that we "bought" the meal—a
clear indication of commodity exchange. We may even say that we "bought
it for her." While we insulate ourselves from the actual exchange of commodities,
we do not completely divorce ourselves from it. Indeed, at least in capitalist
American culture, it is generally impossible to divorce ourselves from
the commodity aspects of the gift, because it is nearly impossible to give
a gift which was not, at one time, purchased. There is thus, in the end,
a blurry line between commodity exchange and gift exchange. That is, since
we can talk about gifts in terms of commodities without destroying their
gift nature—even if it makes us uncomfortable in some ways—then there is
clearly a certain overlap between the two. Like the difference between
the individual and the community, a commodity and a gift are not absolutely
separate. Each is inextricably bound up with the other.
These two factors (narrative reconstruction and the imperfect
dichotomy between gift and commodity) are major factors in any exchange.
We both conceal from ourselves and others the commodity aspect of our gifts—by
hiding the money, by not letting the gift-recipient see the amount of the
check, by emphasizing the gift aspect in conversation—and reveal our comfort
with (or at least resignation to) certain accepted norms of commodification
of the gift through our actions and words.
"Webs of Significance"
In any society, generally accepted norms are violated.
"It is important," write Judson Mills and Margaret Clark, "to remember
that the fact that violations of norms occur does not disprove the existence
of the norms" (39). They continue:
Norms guide behavior by specifying the kinds
of responses that are expected and acceptable in particular situations,
but to have any meaning norms must be defined separately from the behavior
that actually occurs. Otherwise the norms could not be distinguished from
the behavior. (39)
These norms are not merely generated and held within the
individuals or within the particular relationship, but "are shared more
generally by other persons" (39). Though norms are not necessarily rigid,
they, alongside other aspects of culture, impact both the interactions
and the players in the relationship. They provide the cultural fabric—the
"webs of significance" (Geertz 5)—which give meaning to actions and events.
These "webs of significance" also provide a fertile field
for the manipulation of symbolic meaning—and, in turn, the interpretation
of that manipulation. This construction of signification occurs on several
levels, some of which operate as the action is being performed and some
of which operate after the action has been completed. The narrative of
the action as it occurs—in other words, the perception of the event as
it is occurring in the present moment—rather than afterwards, is a narrative
construction. After the event has already occurred—that is, after we "have
followed" it (to draw on Mink’s article "History and Fiction as Modes of
Comprehension")—we must reconstruct or represent it. A gift,
for example, is thus presented; afterwards, we represent the event
to ourselves and others.
In either case, there is more to an action than the action
itself. The "thin description" (Geertz 7) is "what actually happened"—the
thinnest description is the most "factual," the most "objective," and it
eventually thins out to such an infinitesimal size that nothing is left.
Perfect objectivity, perfect factuality, describes nothing—is nothing.
A "thin description" may say: "He gave a white rose to Morgan." A "thicker
description" might say: "He, out of a desire to clarify his relationship
with Morgan, gave her a white rose, signifying a desire only for friendship
and not for romance, but Morgan misinterpreted the gesture, because any
rose meant love to her, and thus continued to court him." Taking it to
the extreme, the "thickest description" would theoretically involve infinite
levels of signification, each sign telescoping into other signs in a dense
and impossibly complex structure which would, in the end, convey nothing.
But in-between these extremes are multiple folds of significant meanings.
Geertz, drawing on Gilbert Ryle, writes:
But the point is that between what Ryle calls
the "thin description" … and the "thick description" … lies the subject
of ethnography: a stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures in terms
of which … [actions] are produced, perceived, and interpreted, and without
which they would not … in fact exist, no matter what anyone did or didn’t
do …. (7)
It is within this "stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures"
that a person acts, and in which a gift and a gift-event create, maintain,
and participate in cultural and personal meanings.
This symbolic world through which a person moves is not
an atemporal thing. A person’s perspective on the world, though perceivable
from the outside as a static "map," is more accurately analogous to a dynamic
narrative. Narratives, unlike maps, necessarily involve a temporal element,
for one of the defining features of a story is necessity of following it
as it unfolds (Mink 545). Thus, while maps are a useful analogy to world
views, they are a necessarily limited one. Pierre Bourdieu writes:
It is significant that "culture" is sometimes
described as a map; it is the analogy which occurs to an outsider
who has to find his way around in a foreign landscape and who compensates
for his lack of practical mastery, the prerogative of the native, by the
use of a model of all possible routes. (2)
Forgetting the temporal element in cultural models is to
be trapped by what Bourdieu terms "objectivist" knowledge (3). To
view the world as a narrative is to reintroduce this temporal element:
exchange becomes an event situated within a cohesive narrative, and acts
become not isolated but connected.
The "Potlatch": Community Through
Gift
A situation of exchange is thus not simply an event which
occurs, but is also (or is only, since we lack the ability to escape language
and to access "what really happened") a narrative about that event. But
what is it that we are seeking to construct? Why do gift narratives tend
to establish community while commodity narratives do not? "To begin with,"
writes Hyde, "the giving of a gift tends to establish a relationship between
the parties involved" (Hyde xiv), while commodity exchange is "correctly
associated with the fragmentation of community and the suppression of liveliness,
fertility, and social feeling" (Hyde 38). He continues: "It is the cardinal
difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes
a feeling-bond between two people, while the sale of a commodity leaves
no necessary connection" (Hyde 56).
This use of gift structures to create community is strikingly
evident in the accounts of Northwest Coast "potlatches." "The Northwest
Coast potlatch," writes Sergai Kan, "particularly its Southern Kwakiutl
version, has been a favorite subject of debate in North American anthropology"
("Tlingit potlatch" 192). The potlatch ritual, according to those in the
Boasian tradition, is generally agreed to be (192)
an ostentatious and dramatic distribution of
property by the holder of a fixed, ranked and named social position, to
other position holders. The purpose is to validate the hereditary claim
to the position and to live up to it by maintaining its relative glory
and rank against the rivalrous claims of the others. (Codere 63)
According to Kan, "[t]hese scholars identified the crucial
role of the potlatch in the sociocultural order ‘as a formal procedure
for social integration, its prime purpose being to identify publicly the
membership of the group and to define the social status of the membership’"
(192; Drucker and Heizer 8). These definitions generally apply to most
Northwest Coast potlatches, according to Kan, but they also leave out some
significant aspects (192).
A more symbolic approach to interpreting potlatch, originally
favored by Mauss, deals with ‘potlatch as a "total social phenomenon,"
which is simultaneously ‘religious,’ ‘mythological,’ ‘economic,’ ‘jural,’
and so forth" ("Tlingit potlatch" 193). Continuing in this symbolic vein,
which has come to be strongly associated with "Geertzian ‘symbolic anthropology,’"
are other writers who deal with the symbolism of such things as food, religion,
names, gifts, and so on, as well as the interconnections between these
things ("Tlingit potlatch" 193). One of the connecting elements which helps
join the potlatch with "the total system of exchange between participating
hosts and guests" ("Words" 47) is narrative—or "oratory" in Kan’s terminology.
But potlatches are complex, and resist generalization
to singular readings, "narrative" or otherwise. Both Kan and Jay Miller
criticize many current models of potlatch as "reductionist" (Miller 38)
for focusing only on a small number of aspects "of this multifaceted phenomenon"
("Tlingit potlatch" 194). However, as my focus in this thesis necessarily
limits my ability to deal with the totality of potlatch, I will rely on
others to discuss it in full, and instead will concentrate on the aspects
of potlatch which emphasize its ability to generate community through gift
and gift narrative.
One example of a potlatch which manifests all three of
these aspects—gift, narrative, and community—occurred in 1987: the Tsimshian
people of the village Kitsumkalum in British Columbia, Canada, conducted
a "pole raising," in which the raising of two totem poles—"a massive undertaking"
(McDonald 103)—coincided with a potlatch-style feast, which James McDonald
identifies with the native term "yaakw." "One of the most general
intentions for the ceremony," writes McDonald, "was to give expression
to the meaning of being Tsimshian" (105)—in other words, to create community
around a notion of Tsimshian identity.
In this effort, narrative becomes the mediating element
which catalyzes the transition from a simple gift exchange to the formation
of community. The general ceremony of the pole raising followed traditional
patterns, but also integrated new elements which helped to deal with the
contemporary situation in which the Tsimshian’s found themselves (they
are located in the modern industrialized nation of Canada, for instance).
This ceremony, complete with a "master of ceremonies" (109) who served
as the narrator, is an excellent example of a narrative construction which
worked to transform the gifts and other rituals within the process into
a lasting sense of community.
The entire ceremony itself was a structured gift situation,
though gift was not its only aspect. The first part of the ritual was the
pole raising, which planners "decided to make as spectacular as possible
by raising both poles simultaneously and having a large feast" (108). One
important aspect of gift situations is their personal nature, and this
was apparent early on, as invitations were given to many people personally,
often in a "formal and ceremonial manner" (108). The presence of guests—their
return gift, in a sense, for this honorable recognition by Kitsumkalum—serves
to sanctify a claim, if they do not dispute it (108). During the pole raising
ceremony, volunteers from among the assembled guests were asked to serve
as pole carriers to move the poles to the correct location, and "their
names were recorded on paper by the event co-ordinator in order to thank
them later" (108). During critical stages of the ceremony, the master of
ceremonies paused events in order to explain the significance of certain
actions. For example, as the poles were being raised, the procedure paused
in order "to allow the guests to hear the history of the community and
of the poles, to understand the significance of the pole raising, and to
voice any objections" (108).
After the poles were finally raised, invited guests moved
to a new location, and the feast began. In addition to providing food for
the guests—itself a kind of repayment for their attendance and recognition
of the event—Kitsumkalum distributed a large pile of gifts to the guests
"as a way of ‘paying’ the audience for witnessing the ceremonies and, thereby,
for validating the themes" of the entire event (111). This notion of "paying"
was intended as a translation of potlatch notions into contemporary language,
for the contributors had no considerations of "‘[b]reaking even’ in potlatch
terms" (111). Instead, the gifts "were made very much along the lines of
what Adams called ‘investments in community relationships’" (111; Adams
4). The distribution of the gifts "recognized certain social categories"
(112)—McDonald identifies four: "important people and others, men and women"
(112)—and thus served to reinforce these social categories, as well as
the connections between giver and receiver.
Overall, the potlatch and pole raising "was a case, not
only of people acting within structured situations, but of people structuring
the situations in which to act" (117). The construction of the potlatch
narrative—the "cultural discourse" which generated the ritual—
regularized the community’s cultural dispositions
by shifting and harmonizing the cultural context of people’s assumptions
and practices, at least in so far as feasting was concerned, and by re-contextualizing
social issues with Tsimshian values. As this process proceeded, meeting
after meeting, the structure of the situation and of peoples’ actions became
more confidently ‘Tsimshian.’ Simultaneously, the discussions both shaped
Kitsumkalum’s social world and produced an immediate adherence to that
world by those discussing it and, by extension, because of the structure
of the central [planning] committee, the community. (118)
But this process of construction did not stop with the completion
of the potlatch itself. McDonald writes, drawing on Bourdieu, that the
"correspondence between Tsimshian values and contemporary issues was not
yet sufficiently ‘natural’ for it to sink into the realm of self-evident
experiences which are taken for granted as assumptions that need not be
discussed" (118). The ceremony, "was recreated over and over in memory
and conversation" as the community attempted to integrate the values of
the potlatch with the values of the dominant Canadian culture. This narrative
reconstruction became "another step in the continual process that reproduces
Kitsumkalum’s social and cultural world" (118).
Wrapping up the Gift
Whether it is in the Western tradition of the United States
or the uneasy joining of native culture with Canadian tradition in British
Columbia, in Mauss’ "archaic societies," or even in the university environment,
gift exchange is a powerful force for generating and maintaining community.
But our commodity-oriented, individualistic society is in danger of severely
neglecting those aspects of the gift which can contribute to a positive
sense of community. If we are to generate and maintain a life-affirming
society which values both the individual and the community, how can we
mediate the contradictions and tensions which exist between and within
commodities and gifts? I believe it is through narrative, through the common
stories we tell about our world, through mass media and personal interaction,
that we can reclaim the "gift" aspects of our culture.
Understanding and reclaiming the gift is possible only
through story. Viewed in terms of an atemporal, objectified event, there
is no apparent reason why, as Hyde says, "Gifts bespeak relationships"
(69). In order to achieve an understanding of why a gift leads to the development
of community, one must focus on the narrative of a gift exchange, the temporal
movement through time which connects the action of yesterday with the response
of today. It is narrative which lends the cohesion to gift relationships,
for it is narrative which makes a gift a gift, because a gift narrative
emphasizes connectedness rather than disassociation. There is not necessarily
any inherent difference between gift and commodity, "but that speaking
makes it so." And this is the power, and the danger, of narrative: the
power to form, manipulate, and destroy relationships and connections between
people. It is a power which the people of Kitsumkalum manipulated to reinvigorate
and "decolonialize" their culture, and it is a power which my friend and
I manipulated when we covered the check to emphasize the gift aspect of
the birthday-meal.
III · On Narrative
Narrative is powerful force. The way in which one constructs
something, envisions it, describes it, or tells about it has a large impact
on its function and effect within one’s culture. For instance, recognizing
that in the South Pacific cultures investigated by Mauss in The Gift,
presents are treated as living things, despite appearing to most Americans
and Europeans as simply inert objects, Hyde writes, "The distinction—alive/inert—is
not always useful, in fact, because even when a gift is not alive it is
treated as if it were, and whatever we treat as living begins to take on
life" (25). In other words, constructing a narrative or world-view in which
gifts are alive results in a world in which gifts function, for all intents
and purposes, as if they really are alive: "everything happens as if" they
are actually living things.
But the power of narrative is not limited to gift exchange,
for narrative is how we ourselves come to be as subjects in a culture,
for "the subject itself is the effect of a production, caught in the mutually
constitutive web of social practices, discourses and subjectivity; its
reality is the tissue of social relations" (Henriques 117). In this model,
Bronwyn Davies writes, "we can only ever speak ourselves or be spoken into
existence within the terms of available discourses" (42). Stories, in her
description of poststructuralist thought, "are the means by which events
are interpreted, made tellable, or even livable. All stories are understood
as fictions, such fictions providing the substance of lived reality" (43).
Thus, like an exchange of gifts, a novel, or even the
literary canon, community is always a fictional construct. It doesn’t exist
as a separate entity "but that speaking makes it so." The creation of a
narrative—the telling of a story—is a means of smoothing out the rough
edges of existence, a means of transforming raw experience into the webs
of significance which constitute culture. Indeed, narrative is such a basic
component of culture, of humanity, that we never actually have access to
"raw experience." Nothing exists for us "but that speaking makes it so,"
and it is this speaking which provides the coherent meaning in our lives,
rather than leaving them a series of discontinuous, unrelated events.
This smoothing out of existence into a "comprehensible"
(Mink 548-549) whole is evident, to utilize a literary example of narrative’s
ability to establish a "fiction of flow," in Dante Alighieri’s Purgatorio.
Throughout the work, Dante the Pilgrim—as distinguished from Dante the
Poet—encounters change, but only some of this change is disruptive. Thus,
at the beginning of Canto ix, before his encounter with the Angel, Dante
the Pilgrim’s narrative pattern becomes incoherent and disrupted and he
is forced to reconstruct, with the help of Virgil, a comprehensible narrative
sequence in order to regain control. From Dante’s perspective, he falls
asleep in the company of Virgil and three others in a flowering glen: "I,
by Adam’s weight of flesh defeated, / was overcome by sleep, and sank to
rest / across the grass on which we five were seated" (ix, 10-12). He then
dreams of a golden eagle which descends from Heaven and then carries him
"up as high as the Sphere of Fire" (ix, 30). When he awakens, scorched
by the imaginary blaze, he is first dazed and then filled with confusion:
"I sat up with a start; and as sleep fled / out of my face, I turned the
deathly white / of one whose blood is turned to ice by dread" (ix, 40-42).
His world has shifted dramatically and incomprehensibly; he lacks a narrative
which allows for an explanation. His dream provides a kind of narrative,
but it is not the kind of narrative upon which he is used to relying. It
does not provide a rational explanation for his transport, for this experience
of dream-envisioned travel is not, in his experience, a usual event. It
is left to Virgil—whom John Ciardi terms "Human Reason" (Ciardi 64)—to
produce a narrative around which Dante the Pilgrim can reconstruct a series
of reasonable events. Virgil explains that Lucia, "a Lady" (ix, 55), came
while Dante slept and carried him, with Virgil following, to the Gate of
Purgatory (ix, 52-63). This account provides Dante the Pilgrim with a rational
explanation which he readily latches onto, though it is completely unverified
beyond itself: it is pure narrative. But the change within Dante is drastic:
"As one who finds his doubt dispelled, sheds fear / and feels it change
into a new confidence / as bit by bit he sees truth shine clear— / so did
I change" (ix, 63-66).
From our perspective as readers, this narrative (re)construction
is even more complex, for we are guided by the narrative provided by Dante
the Poet, which is seamless and comprehensible, while at the same time
following Dante the Pilgrim through his confusion and incomprehension:
for us as well it is (generally) not normal for movement to occur through
dreams, but our distance from the event and the smooth narrative provided
by Dante the Poet insulates us from disruption. As a result, we get to
see both the dream of the Pilgrim and the reconstruction by Virgil as reasonable
events, because in both cases we are provided with a smooth, comprehensible
narrative by the Poet. There is never a time when we, as readers, must
ourselves—except vicariously, through the Pilgrim—reconstruct a narrative.
The narrative reconstruction, from Dante the Pilgrim’s
perspective, allows events to seem stable and comprehensible, even if they
were once perceived as irrationally disrupted. Even if the later Dante
is truly unable to experience the world in the same terms as the earlier
Dante, the experience does not feel incommensurable and dichotomous for
him after the reconstruction. That is, a fiction of flow has been established
which follows a comprehensible narrative series. From the outside, we may
feel that there is a radical dichotomy, but from within, the reconstructed
fictional narrative masks this. But it is even more complicated, for, as
readers, we draw our perceptions from Dante the Poet’s narrative, which
always flows unbroken. Unlike Dante the Pilgrim, we never experience the
disruption, we only witness it.
This points to the difficulty when examining any historical
account of ever escaping comprehensible narratives. Is it ever possible
to escape narrative reconstruction and to inhabit disruption? Comprehension
and understanding seem to hinge on finding stable content to examine. But
is there such a stable place "outside" of all this narrative which allows
us to judge, for example, whether something is incommensurable or not?
Or does our very construction of a narrative of incommensurability generate
continuity and thus destroy any access to "true" incommensurability? Will
we thus always see history in our own image—or at least in our own terms?
But it is this very difficulty of escaping into disruption
which provides narrative with much of its power, for even as we are unable
to escape from narrative, we are always able to tell a new story (though
of course we do not always have full control over it). Narrative thus allows
for flexibility. And because one may both construct and reconstruct an
event through narrative, one may utilize story as a mediating element between
seemingly oppositional elements. Writing of the Holocaust and narrative,
James Young says,
It is almost as if violent events—perceived as
aberrations or ruptures in the cultural continuum—demand their retelling,
their narration, back into traditions and structures they would otherwise
defy. For upon entering narrative, violent events necessarily reenter the
continuum, are totalized by it, and thus seem to lose their "violent" quality.
(15)
"Articulation allows a slight gap to open between the feeling
and the self, and that gap permits the freedom of both," writes Hyde, and
this gap allows us the ability to live and grow in a world which rarely
matches our expectations. Because of the gap, which comes to be through
an articulation of actions into a narrative, tensions, such as those between
gifts and commodities, can be mediated. Narrative thus allows, for example,
the gift, which then never needs to be "perfect," to contribute to community.
It also allows us to escape the constricting confines of gifts by emphasizing
the commodity aspects of an exchange. We can manipulate a narrative of
exchange in order to either increase or decrease our connections with others.
Pursuing this notion, we can, for example, manipulate our narrative of
education to shift its focus from commodity to gift.
For, writes Ruby Rohlich in an email on a Women’s Studies
discussion list called WMST-L, "The point is, a college education is now
costing students and their parents so much money that it has become commodified."
This commodification has become increasingly apparent at the University
of Washington, where a business model of education has gained a significant
following: students (customers) pay the University (the company) to receive
a degree (the product) based on the teaching (also the product) of professors
(senior employees) and Teaching Assistants (junior employees and customers
themselves). One thus hears calls for "cost-cutting" and "re-engineering"
the university and so on. Such a "school as factory" view leans toward
a model of teaching which emphasizes lecture and "practical" majors which
produce "productive" citizens, such as engineering, medicine, and so on.
At its extreme, this leads to a view of students as empty vessels to be
filled with the superior knowledge of professors—preferably in as short
a time as possible, so as to maximize their productive capacities.
But such a commodity-oriented approach neglects the communitarian,
gift-related elements which are also present in the university, and which
many students desire. Even as they struggle to "get their money’s worth"
from the university, students complain of "feeling like a number," lost
in the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the university. Much of this comes from
a neglect of community, from a narrative of the university which describes
students in terms of commodities, as depersonalized agents in a depersonalized
and depersonalizing exchange of lifeless things.
To recreate the university in a new image requires us
to tell a new story. In this case, an alternative narrative is clearly
possible, and elements of such a narrative are already in place in the
university system. Such things as grants and scholarships clearly inhabit
the realm of the gift, though they are often positioned in terms of "investment"—an
attempt to move them out of the realm of the gift and into the realm of
commodities. The structure of the university is also conducive to repositioning
in terms of gift, for the tuition students pay is never transmitted directly
from student to teacher, but instead travels circuitously through the bureaucracy.
Such a system of "hidden" payment could easily permit the "misrecognition"
of the monetary aspects of education, allowing students and faculty alike
to see themselves as positioned in terms of gift, with faculty giving their
time, energy, and knowledge and students returning likewise. But such a
gift orientation necessarily requires students to return gifts other than
commodities, and thus leads to pedagogical implications, for students who
return the gift of academic inquiry to their teachers must necessarily
be viewed and treated as valuable members of a scholarly community.
Recognizing that a narrative retelling provides a powerful
force for creating images, for investing things with validity and force,
it is possible now to move to create an historical narrative of the Comparative
History of Ideas Program. Such a narrative can emphasize the community
orientation of the program in the past, and provide the present and future
participants with a story which provides meaning to their efforts within
the program. In essence, this story is my return gift to the program for
what I have learned through it; it is an attempt, in other words, to continue
the circulation of the gift. So, having thus recognized the power of narrative,
its ability to create and recreate reality, we can now attempt to practice
the theories of this thesis and thus to tell a foundation narrative
IV · Of the Comparative
History of Ideas Program
which began originally in 1977 with a grant from the National
Endowment for the Humanities. Originally formed along with two other interdisciplinary
"comparative" programs, the Comparative History of Religion and the Comparative
History of Art, CHID has gone through a number of changes since its inception.
According to the first proposal to establish CHID as a
degree-granting program, entitled "Request for a New Degree Program," its
beginnings lay in a five-year, $800,000 grant from the National Endowment
for the Humanities (NEH). Planning, however, had begun three years before
that in a "subcommittee of the Humanities Council of the College of Arts
and Sciences [at the University of Washington]" ("Request" 5). The intent
of the grant request "was to reinvigorate undergraduate education in the
liberal arts and the humanities" (5). NEH and the Humanities Council desired
"a rigorously sound program which would draw on the particular strengths
of the existing faculty" (5). The new program, designed specifically for
the NEH grant, fulfilled a perceived need in the humanities to "reintroduce
more structured and interesting educational opportunities" in response
to the lessening of requirements during the 1960s (5). CHID was designed
not as a "return to the outdated structures of the 1950s," but rather as
a partial solution to the problem of "less structured and less focused"
degree programs in which "the coherence and value of a particular student’s
B.A. depends far more on the advising sytem [sic] and the student’s whims
than it does on programmatic requirements" (5).
Apart from this "Request for a New Degree Program," it
is apparent from correspondence filed in the CHID office that Professor
of History Rodney Kilcup served as the original chair of the program, until
his replacement in 1979 by Hal Opperman, Professor of Art History, due
to Professor Kilcup’s unsuccessful tenure review. The new chair soon began
the process of reorganization in the wake of Kilcup’s departure, attempting,
he writes, "To restructure the core courses in CHID so that the program
will not be so completely dependent on one course and one person [namely,
Prof. Kilcup and his HIST 207 class]."
In addition to recovering from the loss of Kilcup, Opperman
began the process of restructuring the program in order to eventually invest
it with separate degree-granting status. Up to this point, the program
had been housed under General Studies, a broad and diffuse administrative
home which provided little sense of belonging: "the General Studies degree
is too broad and provides too little identity for the program," believed
those involved in CHID. Opperman’s efforts at restructuring followed in
the wake of Kilcup’s earlier unsuccessful efforts to achieve degree-granting
status. After two review meetings of Kilcup’s proposal, the Curricular
Review Committee, chaired by Dr. Kermit L. Garlid, Professor of Engineering,
had recommended that the University of Washington not create a new Bachelor
of Arts program in the Comparative History of Ideas. Instead, the committee
decided to "encourage the College of Arts and Sciences to explore alternative
ways of providing such a program as an option in an existing degree granting
unit." Their primary objections to the program were threefold. First, due
to Kilcup’s planned departure from the university in June of 1979, the
committee worried about the "[a]dvising and administration of the program,"
thinking that "[w]ithout the strong support of an existing department,
it may not be easy to find the kind of leadership that will be required"
for success. Second, they were "surprised to find that there were no such
courses [in science or social science] required in the curriculum, given"
their impact on "mankind in the last two centuries." Third, "the lack of
a core curriculum" of classes required of everyone was worrisome, as they
had "reservations about allowing students as much leeway as they would
have in choosing courses."
Kilcup’s original proposal for the creation of a new degree
program in Comparative History of Ideas, which the Review Committee chose
to reject, contains a number of elements common to later incarnations of
the program. The original purpose articulated by the proposal is much the
same as the current one: "to provide undergraduates with a broad and yet
focused education in the liberal arts and to strengthen general instruction
in the humanities at the University of Washington" ("Request" 1). In the
words of the proposal,
The CHID Program provides a structured and coherent
way to investigate the history and nature of intellectual life, a form
of study which focuses on important issues which are often neglected because
they fall on the border-lines of the specific domains of the established
academic departments. The new program brings together faculty from a variety
of departments who find intellectual history a significant kind of study
in and of itself and who also find it important for scholarhsip [sic] within
their own departmental field. By establishing an integrating focus for
scholars with different professional training but similar questions and
concerns the program contributes to the enrichment of humanistic studies
on this campus.
Hal Opperman’s correspondence of June 9th, 1980 suggests
the state of the program at that time. He writes, "The program in the Comparative
History of Ideas is developing nicely" ("Report on 1979-80" 1). His "conservative
estimate" was that CHID currently had twenty active majors, five of which
would graduate shortly. His difficulty maintaining records, reminiscent
of problems the CHID office staff faces today, stemmed primarily from "the
fact that many of our students do not actually declare CHID until late
in their careers, and that several are also majoring in other programs
where their primary records are maintained" (1). His difficulties, however,
were also unique: "the previous chairman ran the program strictly from
his own office and discouraged the maintenance of student records with
the General Studies program, even to the point of taking with him all completed
senior theses" (1).
Opperman’s report to the Humanities Program on June 15,
1981, provides another glimpse at the state of the program: with twenty
identified majors, "it is running at least as smoothly as a year ago with
about the same strengths and weaknesses" ("Annual report" 1). At this time,
the senior thesis requirement consisted of ten credits, five of CHID 491
and five of GEN ST 493, a situation that was causing "considerable confusion
and unnecessary worry for students" (1). It was at this time as well that
Professors Leroy Searle of English and Douglas Collins of Romance Languages
and Literature were asked to join the Faculty Executive Committee.
In this same report Opperman comments on the need for
a central identity for CHID students. He believed the program would be
much stronger and healthier "if something a bit more generous in the way
of resources were provided" (1). He writes, "The main problem is a lack
of central identity (which is, of course, a problem with any truly interdisciplinary
program)" (1). Students instead see the program as a "conglomeration of
scattered contacts" (1). This is also the first year that examples of community-building
appear in the records: a "Spring Quarter Get-Together" on Thursday, from
3:30-5:00pm in B-313 Padelford Hall, which at that time was the Honors
Lounge. It wasn’t a rousing success: "about eight students attended" of
the twenty-five total identified in the program. Opperman proposed several
ideas for remedying the problem. The first involved placing all administrative
duties in the hands of one staff person. Second, he felt that it was important
that the efforts of the chair be rewarded more obviously. Third, he felt
that grouping several small but successful interdisciplinary and comparative
programs into a single administrative unit would be valuable. And finally,
he felt that "a way must be found of bringing program faculty and students
together" (2). That is, he sought a means of building community. One of
his suggested approaches was to create "regular evening meetings twice
a quarter to hear papers or discuss topics" (2). In other words, he wished
to establish a kind of ritual event in which shared experiences—shared
narratives—could lead to common understandings and connections between
students and faculty.
Dr. Kurt Mueller-Vollmer’s "Report on the Humanities Program
at the University of Washington" provides another glimpse at the developing
program. Mueller-Vollmer was an outside consultant brought to the University
of Washington to report on the development of humanities programs such
as CHID. He had also served as an outside consultant at CHID’s inception
in 1977, so he was familiar with the program and its goals. One of his
major themes revolved around the importance of a "sense of coherency and
identity among the students and faculty involved in the program" (Mueller-Vollmer
3). He felt that the work of Opperman had succeeded in enhancing "the sense
of identity among its participants" (3). He suggested, however, several
additional steps towards improving community. The first was providing the
chair with a small office to provide a central home for administrative
concerns. Second, he felt a student lounge would provide a place "where
they [students] could meet and establish contact with each other" (3).
Noting that, at the time, the colloquium (then labeled CHID 490) was required
of students in their senior year, he recognized that many CHID students
lacked contact with other students in the major until then, and suggested
that informal proseminars, regular meetings, or discussions would help
to create connections within the program.
Opperman’s report of February 19, 1982, suggests that
this was a pivotal time for the still-young program. Most obviously, this
was the last year of the NEH grant money, and thus the last year in which
funding for the program was assured. In addition, the administration planned
to end General Studies, which provided the base for CHID’s degree, as it
had not yet succeeded in becoming an independent degree-granting program.
Finally, Opperman’s three-year term as chair was coming to an end and a
replacement needed to be found. The solution to these various problems
played a major role in determining the future directions of the program.
Finding a home was the first task, and the CHID Program
was in luck: Comparative Literature was willing to house the program, and
the CHID Faculty Committee accepted the offer. An alternative possibility
was to consolidate with the Honors Program, but this was rejected primarily
because of curriculum incompatibilities. CHID thus became a track within
the Department of Comparative Literature. Other changes were in order as
well: Dr. John Toews, an intellectual historian who arrived at the University
of Washington in September of 1979 from Columbia University, became the
new chair, replacing Opperman. The faculty committee felt too, in recognition
of student desires, that the senior thesis should be an optional component
and that the colloquium should be moved to the junior year. All these changes
persist to the present time.
The move to Comparative Literature marks the beginnings
of the program’s existence in its current form. Classes and degree-requirements
have remained much the same since that time, and Toews remains as the current
chair. But this is not to imply that the time between incorporating with
Comparative Literature and finally becoming an autonomous degree-granting
program was bereft of movement and change. For example, John Toews ended
his three-year term as chair in 1985, and Jeffrey Peck of Germanics and
Comparative Literature assumed the role. By 1987, Toews had become the
chair once again. And in 1984 Toews was awarded a fellowship by the John
D. and Catherine MacArthur Foundation, a prestigious award that contributed
to Toews’ ability to nurture the program.
With the incorporation of Jim Clowes, then a graduate
student in the History Department, as an organizational force, the CHID
Program took on a new member who would play an instrumental role. In approximately
1991 Clowes became the de facto Program Director, though it was
not until 1994 that he received official recognition. Working with Toews
and the other members of the faculty committee, he began to shift the emphasis
on program development away from creating formal structures and began instead
to focus on informal community-building activities. It was this focus,
believes Clowes today, that was crucial to the growth of the program.
In 1991 a visible monument to the efforts of both faculty
and students emerged: a student-driven proposal to reorganize the program
along new lines. Though it reflected the informal development which preceded
it more than breaking new ground, "A Proposal for Program Development in
the Comparative History of Ideas," nominally developed by the CHID Student
Association, a group of students within the Comparative History of Ideas
Program, nevertheless became the blueprint for the subsequent development
of the Program. In it, the student group sought to provide:
1. Increased structure that would provide opportunities
for student interaction, both academically and socially, yet would not
infringe on the freedom embodied within the Program.
2. Added assistance and impetus both academically and
administratively.
3. A greater awareness of the Program among students and
Faculty at the University of Washington and beyond. ("Proposal" ii)
In rest of this section, I will trace the impact of the ideas
put forth in this proposal, examining how each of them was originally envisioned,
as well as the status of each of them today. My purpose throughout this
section is to demonstrate the explanatory power of tracing a narrative
route of the development of ideas—of writing a history of CHID. In the
end, I hope that my narrative will demonstrate in practice the ideas of
this thesis: namely, that through narrative one can draw a community together,
and that a narrative which emphasizes gift over commodity can be especially
effective at generating community. That is, I hope that my (admittedly
limited) history of the Comparative History of Ideas Program will serve
to bolster the already existing community within the program, something
that has been a goal since its early days. The student proposal puts it
in terms of "student interaction" (ii), but the desire is the same: the
creation of community.
In addition to three broad goals, the proposal also suggests
five main curriculum changes, most of which subsequently became part of
the program. First, they sought to "establish an introductory CHID class"
to serve "as an introduction to interdisciplinary studies" (1). This class,
originally listed as CHID 200, is now CHID 110: "The Question of Human
Nature."
"In the spring of 1992," writes Clowes, "I met with twelve
students in a seminar to create a new course" ("Consideration" 1). From
this seminar developed CHID 110, a class designed to introduce newer students
to the approaches utilized in the Comparative History of Ideas Program,
especially the notions of "context" and the ways in which "every person
is shaped by his own particular environment" (2). The goal of CHID 110
was to consider the context in which ideas developed and actions were performed
and to focus on the ways in which a person’s world view, or "map," is formed
from their context. "[O]ne map is not necessarily better than another,"
writes Clowes, "but rather is useful in certain situations and hopelessly
flawed in others" (3). Finally, even as the course sought to develop tools
of analysis and critical thinking for approaching the world and oneself,
it also sought an escape from the eventual conclusions of an analysis of
context: "Isn’t everything made relative by its context?" commented one
student. Recognizing this dilemma, Clowes introduced to CHID 110 the notion
of "foundational myths" (7):
By "myth" I mean a story that serves as a core
of the world view of a person or of a people. These myths then are used
as the foundation in system building, [and] a logical system can be built
around them. If one forgets—or denies their existence[—]then the assumption
that one is "without illusion" only serves to protect the myth. Analysis
then serves only to bolster and protect its assumptions. For one who denies
the importance of analysis the outcome is similar—a complete dependence
on one’s forming myth. On the other hand—if one is intent on always "demythologizing"[—]then
one faces the alternate danger of having no foundation—no organizing frame."
(7)
Too much focus on "foundational myths," Clowes tells me,
leads to a place analogous to fascism: "a non-critical adherence to a faith
position ... leads to the tyranny of those original
assumptions or ‘myths.’ " On the other hand, I would add, too much analysis
tends towards nihilism. The key is to establish instead a balanced dialectic
between analysis and myth-making which utilizes both to check the extremes
of each.
Since its initial codification in the student seminar,
this introductory class has become a regular event in the CHID Program,
and is the primary CHID class taught during each Autumn Quarter. It has
served well as an introduction to the program and a large number of new
CHID students first encounter the program through the class. Equally, however,
the class serves as a reminder that not everyone is interested in a critical
interdisciplinary approach, for a number of students react strongly against
the class every year. Interestingly, though, a portion of these students
who react negatively to the class eventually change their minds and join
the program.
The CHID Student Association’s proposal also recognized
that Clowes was the only staff member at the time whose job was devoted
specifically to CHID. Knowing that the program had grown to ninety-nine
students, an unwieldy number for such a limited staff commitment, the proposal
called for adding additional personnel and more clearly defining Clowes’
role within the program. In addition, they recommended that CHID share
office space with the Honors Program, a recommendation that eventually
came to pass after CHID’s move out of the Comparative Literature Department.
Finally, in the tradition of earlier commentators such
as Opperman, the proposal recognized the difficulties of fostering social
interaction in an interdisciplinary program which did "not offer regular
courses where students’ paths" could "intersect," they felt that there
was "a need for additional opportunities to meet other CHID students outside
of classes" ("Proposal" 7). They recommended establishing a student lounge
to be shared with the Honors Program, as well as regular events that would
bring students together, as a means of fostering community within the program.
All of these ideas within this student-driven proposal—indeed,
even the existence of the proposal itself—reflect a major pedagogical orientation
within the CHID program which believes in the abilities of undergraduate
students to participate as valuable members of the academic community.
Such a pedagogical orientation reinvests aspects of the gift into the teaching
approach, emphasizing the ability of students to contribute to the learning
of their teachers, and consequently allowing for the creation of community
both within the classroom environment and without. CHID’s focus on critical
thinking is one element of a "liberatory pedagogy"—my language draws on
the work of educational theorist Paulo Friere—which allows for the de-commodification
of the classroom and the subsequent development of a community of equals.
The pedagogical approach of the program draws strongly on a number of educational
theories which stress critical thinking, a pursuit which, even as it moves
to allow space for community, also tends towards analysis and the breaking
down of community. The program as a whole, like CHID 110’s drive to incorporate
both myth and analysis, thus seeks to mediate the tensions between an emphasis
on criticism and a focus on community.
V · Practice in
Theory: Building a Pedagogical Foundation
The goals of the Comparative History of Ideas Program—self-reflexive
critique, openness to multiple perspectives, respect for differing viewpoints,
and student-centered, problem-based education—are usually applied to individual
students. They same approaches can, however, be expanded and enlarged to
create a self-reflexive group as well as individual identity—in
a classroom, for example. But this project appears much more complex than
an individual approach and looks to be fraught with the dangers of group
dynamics: power relationships, individual personalities, as well as overlapping
and perhaps conflictual group membership. The difficulty for an individual
to achieve a flexible yet firm foundation for action becomes greater when
a group of individuals must work together to form such a foundation in
common. But, like other distinctions, such as those between inside and
outside the university, or the personal and the political, a dichotomy
between self and other, individual and group, becomes problematic on many
levels. An individual identity is bound up in a never-ending series of
constructed social relations, and it thus becomes infinitely difficult
to distinguish individual ideas from social ones.
The ability to establish boundaries which are firm yet
flexible requires the ability to analyze structures and to see their limitations,
as well as the ability to accept the limits of analysis. The ability to
pursue both analysis and aesthetics is not a talent that generally emerges
without nurturing: it requires a focused attempt to think through issues,
an attempt which the Comparative History of Ideas attempts to foster. CHID’s
desire to cultivate a critical approach to the world has led the program
to embrace "theory"—a rather controversial approach to teaching, especially
in the undergraduate classroom. Many thinkers bemoan the presence of theory
in the classroom, viewing theory as somehow divorced from reality, and
insisting on the necessity of, at least at first, reading a text or learning
new material without a theoretical perspective. That is, many believe,
for example, that theory is either playing a role in destroying "traditional
values" or that it has little practical application at all, except to confuse
the "real issues." In any case, they wish to shield younger students from
the supposedly stifling effects of theory.
Theory supposedly creates an environment which damages
the ability of students to experience the text or to learn new material.
It is esoteric "noise" which pollutes the virginous young student. This
lingering perception—often disguised, equivocated, and modified—remains
among a number of people, both "traditional" and not: theory, for them,
is divorced from reality and merely serves to foster in students a jaded
rejection of truth and an apathetic refusal to pursue the good. Thus E.D.
Hirsch and Allan Bloom join some feminist writers in decrying an emphasis
on theory in the classroom. But theory has been there all along—there are
merely more theories being more widely discussed today. The "state of theory"
(Richter 3) in which we now find ourselves is (like "politicization") an
acknowledgment of difference, a reflection of the increased plurality of
our universities, and especially a recognition of and a clue to the changing
power relationships within the university and, by extension, since the
university is part of the larger society, of society as a whole.
It is thus questionable whether the increasing tendency
to question truth ("whose truth?") and the good ("good for whom?") is the
result of theoretical writings, which are, after all, frequently
abstruse and cryptic, aimed as they are at a specialized academic audience.
It is entirely possible, and even likely given the increasingly complex
world we live in, that theory is reflecting the world and not the
other way around. But I think that there is a more complex relationship
than mere reflection. The process is not just one of "economic-substructure-determines-social-superstructure,"
to borrow the terminology of Karl Marx. It moves beyond this to a more
complex interaction between all the elements of a society: politics, raw
materials, literature, relations of production, and so on. Our beliefs
and theories both influence and are influenced by our economic situation;
indeed, they are all bound up in a complex relational web without a center-point.
Neither the chicken nor the egg comes first: the interlocking chain is
infinite.
Theory is not just the concern of academics writing impenetrable
prose in specialized journals. Theory is everywhere and in everyone. "We
are all always already theorists" ([Kecht] McCormick 114). Whenever I make
a judgment, I am making a theoretical decision: to like a work of
literature, for instance, is to make a decision informed by a variety of
theoretical frameworks, whether I am aware of them or not. Even the organization
of the university into departments—or the U.S. government into states—reflects
a theoretical position. As Gerald Graff writes in "Taking Cover in Coverage":
In deciding to call ourselves departments of
English, French, and German—rather than of literature, cultural studies,
or something else—and in subdividing these national units into periods
and genres, we have already made significant theoretical choices. But we
do not see these choices as choices, much less as theoretical ones, because
the categories that mark them—English, eighteenth-century, poetry, novel—operate
as administrative conveniences and eventually as facts of nature that we
can take for granted. ([Cain] "Coverage" 6).
One of the key points here is that, while we are all theorists,
the theories we operate by are so taken for granted that we are usually
not aware of them. Our discourse becomes theoretical only when we
begin to examine the theories and assumptions which undergird our judgments,
categorizations, and structures: theory is "a name for the questions which
necessarily arise when principles and concepts once taken for granted have
become matters of controversy" ([Kecht 114]Criticism 9). "There
is nothing mysterious about it," writes David Richter. He continues:
Two teenagers arguing about whether one of their
teachers is open-minded or wishy-washy, or about whether it is a band’s
material or performance technique that makes it so great, can quickly get
to the edge of some region of theory, where fundamental questions about
values and quality, means and ends, public and private experience are raised.
(8)
We fall into a "state of theory" (3) only when this theoretical
discourse rises to such a degree that no one can safely ignore the theoretical
underpinnings of their judgments.
The academy today, and perhaps especially the Comparative
History of Ideas Program, seems firmly in the grip of Richter’s "state
of theory." According to the widely-told story, this is in marked contrast
to times past when the more homogenous university environment allowed for
greater common understanding and shared assumptions. But whatever the situation
in the past, some writers have resisted this current state of theory, while
others have embraced it. Gerald Graff, drawing heavily on Marxist educational
theorist Paulo Friere in his book Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching
the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education, "emphasizes the need
to make the conflicts that have racked and riven higher education the basis
for a coherent curriculum" (Cain ix). For Graff, the conflicts within the
academy appear unsolvable and the state of theory therefore permanent:
[Graff] stresses that reform will not be achieved
by demanding that it serve one faction in the culture wars at the expense
of others. … As James Davison Hunter has noted, "the battles in the ivory
tower" are connected to battles about traditions and beliefs in the culture
as a whole. The representatives of each side fervently insist that they
alone uphold the true principles that others have betrayed or surrendered
in favor of political agendas. The debate, Hunter observes, thus "has an
interminable character" (220). (Cain x-xi)
Graff’s idea is to transform the struggle from a divisive
debate to the core of a new curriculum, one "built upon the values of strong
democracy and open, informed exchange" (Cain xi).
Such a curriculum must be theoretically aware and thus
self-critical, both key elements in CHID’s educational approach. Part of
the importance in this for Graff is that the method avoids the "banking
concept of education [which is] an act of depositing in which students
are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor…" ([Slattery 199]Friere
64). Friere "contends that those committed to empowerment and liberation
must reject" this concept (Slattery 199). The "banking" model of education
"suggests that there is a body of material ‘out there’; it is known to
the teacher and unknown to the student; it can be taught and presumably
‘mastered’" ([Kecht]McCormick 115). Friere and Graff both advocate what
Friere terms "problem-posing education": "problem posing education, responding
to the essence of consciousness (intentionality), rejects communiqués
and embodies communication. Liberating education consists in acts of cognition,
not transferals of information" ([Slatt 199]Friere 66). This is a more
"dialogic" classroom, where "[t]he teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches,
but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students" ([Kecht 115]Friere
67).
Others disagree about basing the curriculum around conflict,
arguing instead that a common currency of "cultural literacy" is necessary
for our society to function effectively as a community. Thus, Allan Bloom
in The Closing of the American Mind has advocated teaching the "Great
Books" and, similarly, E.D. Hirsch in Cultural Literacy has advocated
the maintenance of "mainstream" cultural references in the name of shared
cultural norms ([Kecht]Schilb 48). Hirsch’s book even includes an appendix
entitled "What Literate Americans Know," which contains 60-some pages illustrating
"the character and range of the knowledge literate Americans tend to share"
(Hirsch 146). In justification of this, Hirsch writes, "Only by accumulating
shared symbols, and the shared information that the symbols represent,
can we learn to communicate effectively with one another in our national
community" (Hirsch xvii).
In a course investigating these writers and their relationship
to their opponents, John Schilb found many of his students in agreement
with Bloom and Hirsch:
…they embraced the osmotic theory of education,
assuming students can and should acquire knowledge merely from exposure
to certain hallowed texts. They agreed with Bloom that students must simply
let the "Great Books" speak to them, as if various mediating forces did
not affect how various readers construe texts. They assented to Hirsch’s
"building block" model of the mind, wherein the learner merely accumulates
one item of culture after another… (Schilb 48)
These anti-theoretical models generally deprecate theory
in favor of "exposure to certain hallowed texts" (48), concealing the theoretical
underpinnings that informs their perspective and neglecting the degree
of difference within the classroom and larger society in favor of a homogenized,
"certified" (49), and presumably depoliticized and unproblematic transmittal
of knowledge from teacher to student.
The lack of pedagogical reflection in this anti-theory
perspective bothers Schilb, who believes it neglects to consider the ways
in which "different students actually learn" (48). Though Hirsch takes
note of the increasing fragmentation of American society and proposes a
model of "cultural literacy" as the solution, he fails to consider how
this very heterogeneity impacts the learning processes of students. The
"Great Books" are neither transhistorical nor transcultural, as anthropologist
Laura Bohannan discovered when she attempted to explain Shakespeare’s Hamlet
to the Tiv in West Africa. Before setting out, she had protested that "human
nature is pretty much the same the whole world over; at least the general
plot of the greater tragedies would always be clear—everywhere…" ([Podolefsky]Bohannan
139). But by the end of her narrative both we—and she—have discovered that
the Tiv have a very different interpretation of the story. They "become
convinced," for example, "that Cladius and Gertrude had behaved in the
best possible manner," thus negating one of the main elements of the story.
Indeed, by the end, the Tiv elders have completely reinterpreted the story
from their perspective, and tell Bohannan:
Sometime … you must tell us some more stories
of your country. We, who are elders, will instruct you in their true meaning,
so that when you return to your own land your elders will see that you
have not been sitting in the bush, but among those who know things and
who have taught you wisdom. (144)
While this is a rather extreme example, it does illustrate
some of the difficulties of allowing the texts to "speak for themselves"
in a diverse society. As the CHID Program emphasizes, one simply cannot
assume the existence of commonality, nor can one simply expect community
to form automatically around the "Great Books" of Western civilization.
Community formation has entered a "state of theory." As Graff writes in
"Disliking Books at an Early Age," he lacked the skill to find meaning
within texts or to discuss them with others. Becoming theoretically aware
was, for him, the route to an appreciation of literature and finally membership
in the academic community.
The traditional approach in which "a good book ‘essentially
teaches itself’" ([Richter]"Disliking" 41), neglects what to Graff "seems
so obvious as to be hardly worth restating": "In teaching any text, one
necessarily teaches an interpretation of it" (42). For Graff,
Much of the appeal of Allan Bloom’s The Closing
of the American Mind lies in its eloquent restatement of the standard
story, with its reassuringly simple view of reading and teaching: "a liberal
education means reading certain generally recognized classic texts, just
reading them, letting them dictate what the questions are and the method
of approaching them—not forcing them into categories we make up, not treating
them as historical products, but trying to read them as their authors wished
them to be read." (41)
In response, the question raised by Graff is simple: if "anyone
ever ‘just’ reads a book the way Bloom describes" (41)? His answer is clearly
"no." Instead, every reader—and every teacher, and every student—inevitably
brings with them interpretive strategies and a theoretical background,
whether they are aware of them or not. No one "just" reads. And "[i]t follows
that what literature teachers teach is not literature but criticism, or
literature as it is filtered through a grid of analysis, interpretation,
and theory" (42). From the pedagogical perspective of the Comparative History
of Ideas Program, it is clear that in order to participate in the literary
discourse, which is inevitably a theoretical discourse even at the most
basic levels, students must learn "intellectualspeak" (42). "Intellectualspeak"
is the "foreign languages of intellectual culture" ("Voices" 25), a language
of literature many students have no familiarity with, whether it is used
by Allan Bloom or Jacques Derrida. To rely on a kind of "osmosis" ("Disliking"
42) instead of teaching theorizing is to neglect the real needs of real
students. Nevertheless, the goals of Hirsch and Bloom are communitarian:
essentially, the establishment of a common currency of "cultural literacy"
in which everyone shares.
This is in marked contrast to much postmodern theory,
which, instead of creating similarities, revels in difference. Its generally
articulated goal of subverting "dominant paradigms" and revealing the bases
of power is in marked contrast to the goals of humanists such as Bloom
and Hirsch. Marxist theorist Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, however, in "Theory as
Resistance" indicts much poststructuralist theory for its maintenance of
the status quo, arguing that its methods of pastiche, deconstruction, and
laughter serve to augment and disguise the established political structures
rather than to subvert it. For Zavarzadeh, "[p]oststructuralist pedagogy/theory
… is the most recent updating of the processes and discourses through which
the dominant ideology is reproduced" ([Kecht]Zavarzadeh 29). Like "familiar
humanist pedagogy," "poststructuralist pedagogy removes the ‘walls’ (the
traces of the political) [from the classroom] by offering textuality as
a panhistorical truth, which is considered to be beyond ideology just as
is the ‘truth’ produced in humanist versions of bourgeois pedagogy" (29).
While it offers the ability to read the classroom itself as a text, most
poststructuralist theory does not do so. Instead it positions meaning and
knowledge "as a self-referential web of textuality," denying the "reality
of the power/knowledge complex" (Kecht 13). This produces the appearance
of disinterested knowledge free from the cultural, historical, and political
situatedness in which instruction takes place (13). Schilb, too, indicts
much poststructuralist theory for failing "to probe how traditional teaching
constructs the student as subject" (Schilb 50). Zavarzadeh’s proposal
of a "radical pedagogy" (Kecht 12), presented in opposition to poststructural
teaching methods and other forms of "hegemonic pedagogy" (Kecht 12), is
clearly in line with many other educational theorists. It posits a necessary
relation between the classroom and the world, positioning students, teachers,
and the classroom itself within that world, and enabling students to "recognize
their power to criticize and even resist hegemonic codes" (Kecht 13).
One of the main problems with poststructuralists’ approaches
to the classroom for both Zavarzadeh and Schilb is their continuance of
the authorial voice within the classroom, a continuance CHID is often at
pains to avoid. Zavarzadeh critiques the theoretical play with textuality
which ignores the interplay of gender, race, and class within the classroom.
In addition, Schilb identifies hierarchical teaching methods which impose
theoretical frameworks upon the students. However emancipatory the content
of poststructuralist positions, the method of imparting them returns
to a traditional format with the teacher as the centered authority in the
classroom. For example, critiquing Jasper Neel’s essay "Plot, Character,
or Theme? Lear and the Teacher," Schilb writes,
Because "students" are mentioned only as the
passive objects of "forcing," and because the essay has barely referred
beforehand to what they might do in the classroom, Neel implies
that the teacher is the sole initiator of learning, being the disseminator
of a particular critical methodology. (Schilb 62)
He continues in his own article "Poststructuralism, Politics,
and Pedagogy" to critique a number of other poststructuralists for similar
pedagogical styles, despite their avowed interest in exposing structures
of power and allowing multiple interpretations of texts. The disconnection
between theory and practice seems rampant.
Theoretical discourse in poststructuralism here stops
when it comes to pedagogical practice. That is, these poststructuralist
authors, while they may quibble over issues of textual interpretation to
the extent that little can be taken for granted, are not quibbling over
issues of pedagogical practice. Writers such as Zavarzadeh, Schilb, and
Graff, however, are seeking to extend theoretical discourse to embrace
pedagogy ,and I believe this extension is at the heart of the Comparative
History of Ideas Program, which always seeks to ask critique pedagogy even
as it necessarily utilizes various pedagogical approaches. As a result,
assumptions about the authority of a teacher are no longer taken for granted.
The method employed, not merely the content taught, have entered a "state
of theory" and become open for debate. No longer is it possible for a teacher
to unquestionably impose authority upon a group of students; the possibility
now exists for situations in which the teacher becomes decentered and community
formation becomes a matter of group consensus—group story telling—rather
than a matter of imposition. The process has always been complex, but without
a theoretical interrogation, the dynamics of the process would remain unquestioned
and unexamined.
While productive and liberating in a number of ways, theoretical
discourse makes the formation of community problematic. Since community-formation
generally relies upon shared myth—common goals, feelings, culture—what
does one do when education’s goal revolves around questioning foundational
assumptions? How can a group create their own story and choose to believe
in it, especially when they are trained to question everything? It becomes
easy to deconstruct mythical notions to the point of their destruction,
a cultural fragmentation keenly felt by conservative writers such as Hirsch.
Many postmodern writers embrace this fragmentation on an individual level,
but they often neglect the difficulties of forming a community around a
critical myth trained continually upon itself.
Theories of feminist pedagogy attempt to deal with this
situation collaboratively, as a community, rather than emphasizing the
disconnected and independent subject constructed by more "phallocentric"
theories which emphasize rationality and objectivity. Though the theories
differ, Frances Maher summarizes some of their main elements in "Classroom
Pedagogy and the New Scholarship on Women," writing that
a pedagogy appropriate for voicing and exploring
the hitherto unexpressed perspectives of women must be collaborative, cooperative,
and interactive. It draws on a rich tradition going back to Paulo Friere,
John Dewey, and even Socrates, of involving students in constructing and
evaluating their own education. It assumes that each student has legitimate
rights and potential contributions to the subject-matter. Its goal is to
enable students to draw on their personal and intellectual experiences
to build a satisfying version of the subject, one that they can use productively
in their own lives. Its techniques involve students in the assessment and
production, as well as the absorption of the material. The teacher is a
major contributor, a creator of structure and a delineator of ideals, but
not the sole authority. ([Kecht 51]30)
Theorists of feminist pedagogy share Friere’s condemnation
of the "banking model of education," emphasizing "how such practices often
reproduce patterns of domination, even when the content is supposed to
liberate" ([Kecht]Schilb 52). In this alternative to conservative approaches
emphasizing "Great Books" and leftist ones which set out to remedy the
social blindness of their students, "students do not revel in sheer relativism
(the conservatives’ fear) or false consciousness (the leftists’ fear)"
(52). In the approach Maher calls for, students and teachers collaborate
both to investigate the subject matter and to assess the "conditions and
procedures of their inquiry—struggling to understand what makes for truly
democratic relations of knowledge, praxis, and power not only in the classroom
but in the larger world" (52). In feminist pedagogy, the classroom is not
completely fractured into discrete individuals, despite its critical focus,
but is rather a place of communal investigation and shared experience.
For Graff, whose "conflictual" pedagogy shares many of
the elements of feminist pedagogy, the only route to coherence and thus
to community is to concentrate on curriculum and not classrooms.
That is, in order to avoid a fractured situation in which expectations
and assumptions differ from class to class, it is necessary to focus curriculum
around shared goals. The "shared myth" of "teaching the conflicts" thus
becomes a community-forming activity in which students can begin to feel
a part of the academic community.
Drawing on Piage’s structure of developmental stages through
which a student passes, I would extend his 3-tiered divisions to encompass
these theories. Instead of a hierarchical series of developmental stages,
however, I view the divisions in terms of a Hegelian dialectic, in which
community and heterogeneity, content and form, interrelate within and between
pedagogical theories. Nevertheless, I would identify the first stage, in
which the emphasis is upon the student as a "vessel" needing to be filled
with content, with Hirsch and Bloom’s notion of achieving a common culture
through discrete blocks of knowledge. The second stage finds students in
the throughs of relativity: every idea is seen as equally valid, and there
is no method of distinguishing between them. I would identify this with
the poststructuralist approaches to pedagogy critiqued by Zavarzadeh and
Schilb, which focus on form over content and which delight in deconstructing
schema. This approach rejects community in favor of unending heterogeneity.
Finally, the third stage of development for Piage is one in which students
can see the validity in multiple perspectives but are still able to distinguish
between them and to apply the most appropriate one to the most appropriate
case. For me, this is the synthesis of the two previous stages, and I identify
it with the emphasis in feminist pedagogy upon community-oriented evaluating
of the content taught. That is, it is not merely a question of the professor
deciding what is important, but instead involves the participation of the
entire classroom. Feminist pedagogy recognizes both the importance of content
and the situatedness of that content. Graff’s conflict pedagogy, with its
recognition of disagreement without a dissolution into extreme relativity
and emphasis upon coherent curriculum, also seems to fit this stage.
VI · Theory in
Practice: The Current State of the CHID Program
Because a coherent curriculum is difficult to achieve
in the absence of large-scale faculty and administrative consensus, the
CHID Program has focused on creating a structured approach to disparate
classes that masquerades as a coherent curriculum. But while Graff wishes
to have instructors working to explicitly generate connections, in the
model followed by the CHID Program, it is students, working either alone
or in conjunction with advisers and other students, who generate a cohesive
narrative about their school experiences. While the program was originally
structured to provide a partial solution to the problem of "less structured
and less focused" degree programs in which "the coherence and value of
a particular student’s B.A. depends far more on the advising sytem [sic]
and the student’s whims than it does on programmatic requirements" ("Request"
5), with the passage of time CHID as come to strongly rely on the dedication
of individual students and their advisers to provide structure, rather
than on the explicit structuring of the program itself.
Thus, the approach to creating a cohesive CHID curriculum
in bound up with issues of community, for it is generally through interactions
with others that CHID students perceive their education as "holding together"
as a whole. Of course, many CHID students reject the community-oriented
approach and choose to work alone, and a number of these students succeed
to create coherence for themselves. But numerous students within the CHID
Program, especially those who have not become involved with other CHID
students, express a sense of disconnection, often feeling as if they are
simply fulfilling requirements by attending classes instead of growing,
achieving, and excelling.
The Comparative History of Ideas Office plays a major
role in facilitating community within the program, as well as encouraging
students to create a coherent curriculum for themselves. The office serves
a central locus of identity for the program, allowing students to easily
connect with the CHID administration by simply dropping by. Indeed, a major
goal of the program is to facilitate "simply dropping by" and in other
ways to avoid the hierarchical structures of a traditional department through
a number of means, such as using Peer Advisers, providing numerous open
hours for students to be advised without an appointment, publishing a quarterly
newsletter which seeks to keep majors informed of developments within the
program, and encouraging students to become actively involved in the program.
Peer Advisers are a key component in the program’s attempts
to establish connections between students and the administration of the
program. By utilizing majors within the program as staff who run the program,
there is a much greater sense that students have a major voice in the direction
of the program. In addition, because these student advisers are peers of
the students within the program, and not tenured academics or permanent
staff, they are much less intimidating and much more open to student-driven
change. That is, both because they are on the same level as other majors
and because they do not have as much time committed to their job at the
university, being temporary residents only, it is much easier for them
to change them way things are done. In many ways the office is reinvented
every time a new Peer Adviser joins the group, because little is formalized
within the office; much depends upon the particular desires and strengths
of particular Peer Advisers. Of course, this can also be a burden, for
the flexibility offered by temporary student workers also allows for the
possibility of forgetting ways of approaching problems that work. If the
office is reinvented and reinvigorated every time a new Peer Adviser becomes
involved, then that means that both what works well and what doesn’t work
well are affected. Thus, this attempt to create a structured yet flexible
community is both strengthened and weakened by its volatile and ever-shifting
composition.
In many ways, the Peer Advisers, as well as the other
members of the CHID staff, seek to create a common narrative about the
program to bind its members together and make them feel a part of a larger
whole. For exactly this reason, new majors are required to follow several
steps before becoming CHID majors. These formalized steps serve both the
practical purpose of making sure all required paperwork is in order, as
well as the more amorphous purpose of providing a kind of mini-initiation
ritual for new majors. One of these steps is a reflection paper, in which
students write about their previous educational experiences and their goals
for the future; essentially, they are creating a short narrative to provide
themselves with a grounding as they enter the program. Most important for
new majors, however, is their "intake interview" with a CHID adviser. This
initial advising session is intended especially for the creation of a cohesive
educational narrative. Students meet with an adviser and discuss their
reflections paper, as well as what classes might meet their goals, which
instructors share similar interests, and so on. The point is to provide
the student with an individualized structure to lend coherence to their
time as a student in the program.
Currently, and even more so in the past, the largest denomination
of "common currency"—Hirsch’s "cultural literacy"—of the CHID program is
generated through the Junior Colloquium. CHID 390: "The Interpretation
of Texts and Cultures" provides many students with their first in-depth
encounter with other CHID students. As a result, CHID students tend to
"emerge" as active members of the program only after they have taken the
course. Many also feel that the books and concepts dealt with in the class
provide the foundation for many of their future intellectual pursuits.
In many ways, CHID 390 provides the "foundational myths" of the CHID program,
though these myths are presented less as a story and more as a series of
tools and approaches to problems. In the terms of this thesis, however,
the class—including the books, the intellectual tools, and especially the
dialogue with other students and faculty—nevertheless currently constitutes
the basic narrative which holds the CHID community together. Paige Schilt,
a former CHID student, writes:
I think the common experience of the colloquium
was immensely important [for creating community within CHID]. Having a
large group of students who have all read certain core texts facilitates
conversation. I guess the colloquium would also be my answer to what I
really liked about CHID. I return to certain texts I read in CHID 390 quite
frequently. My master’s report was about the use of ethnographic conversations
in recent documentary films about black gay men ... but I returned to the
James Clifford reading, for example, to write it." (Schilt 13? June 96)
The tools and approaches fostered by the CHID are strongly
theoretical, drawing heavily on postmodern approaches, but unlike the theories
critiqued by Zavarzadeh and Schilb, always with an emphasis on students
as active and important participants in the generation of meaning within
the classroom and the program as a whole. Concretely, the Peer Advisers
as well as the Peer Facilitators who serve as "undergraduate TAs" in the
classrooms of several CHID classes serve to validate this belief in the
abilities of undergraduates, as does the emphasis on discussion and group
activities. CHID both plays with theory and seriously considers the implications
of, for example, race, class, and gender in the world, the classroom, and
the individual.
Thus, for example, CHID 390 is generally led by a graduate
student affiliated with the program or by a professor. It is not really
"taught" because there is little specific content that is necessary to
learn: facts, dates, and names are not of great importance, except as necessary
to explore a theoretical issue. But while the class is determinedly theoretical,
the issues investigated—the representation of people and cultures—are not
merely theoretical mind-games. The class helps students reflect critically
about themselves and about the world around them, to avoid merely taking
facts and beliefs for granted, and to always question "truth." Inevitably,
the class reaches a point of nihilism, as students realize that there is
no concrete foundation, no objective basis for their beliefs. The next
step within the class is to move beyond this recognition to an acceptance
of subjectivity. In the end, the goal is to permit students to see themselves
as members of a community of shared meaning and not as individuals operating
in a world of objective truth. But this goal is necessarily both political
and personal, and is itself a subjective approach. Part of the program
is inevitably the questioning of the foundations of the program itself,
and thus this goal of the program and of the class is always subject to
change and critique, especially because many students resist the implicit
power-relation in the classroom. Despite the efforts of the program to
lessen the difference, a teacher still gives a grade to students. But every
class is different and every student finds different meaning (or no meaning
at all) in the class and in the program as a whole.
One foundational concern of the program, a concern which
guides this thesis, as well as much of CHID 390 and thus the development
of students within the program, is an interest in notions of "the Other":
with inclusion and exclusion, the construction of representations, aesthetics,
and, always, power. This interest inevitably leads students outside of
the "ivory tower" of the university and towards the broader issues of society
in general. One locus of such issues is the debate over the literary canon,
and this debate participates heavily in the concerns of the program and
this thesis, especially the intersection and contention of power and aesthetics.
VII · Speaking
of the Canon: A Narrative of Community
The debate over the Western literary canon—that list of
commonly accepted works judged as "classics" and deemed worthy to be taught
in classrooms—is a debate which participates in larger debates within the
university and the general society of which the university is a part. It
is a debate which is intimately concerned with inclusion and exclusion,
marginality and centrality, tradition and change, and other broad issues
of American society. For example, is the United States a world power because
its approach to the world is simply better than those of other nations,
or have we merely managed to amass the biggest guns? Have all the presidents
of the United States been men because men are better able to run a country,
or has a system of power operated to privilege men at the expense of women?
Analogously, have the texts which constitute the canon come to be there
through innate characteristics which make them aesthetically superior,
or are they in the canon because of a system of power-relations which has
placed them there?
All of these questions are closely connected with notions
of community. Indeed, the literary canon is a kind of community, a textual
community whose tides and storms are in many ways analogous to the movements
within a human community. The community of texts which constitutes the
canon is interwoven with the community of scholars who study them, the
larger communities of general readers, and the even larger, even more general
national and international communities which form the context in which
works are read and evaluated. Thus, these multiple interacting and often
inseparable communities are concerned with the same questions of aesthetics
and power which concern the textual community. And if, as I argue, narrative
constitutes the world of both people and books, then the connection between
the literary canon and society becomes even greater, for both come to be
through similar narrative moves. So does one become a member, human or
literary, of a community—a place I defined earlier in terms of its members
experiencing an "aesthetic feeling of belonging to a larger whole"—for
aesthetic reasons or for reasons of power? That is, does one simply "click"
because of certain personality characteristics, for example, or does one
become a community member because one is, say, a wealthy business executive?
And is it even possible to firmly distinguish between the two?
In this section, then, I am concerned with this question
of aesthetics versus power. But I am especially interested in avoiding
a privileging of either term: I believe that the answer lies in neither
aesthetics nor in power exclusively, but rather in a combination of power
and aesthetics which undermines the construction of any dichotomy between
them. Referring primarily to Virgil Nemoianu’s article "Literary Canons
and Social Value Options," I am seeking to reinvigorate the role of the
aesthetic in the narrative of the Western canon itself, rather than focusing
on the aesthetic qualities of its members. Throughout this paper I will
be concerned with the importance of story, of narrative, and will be paying
special attention to its role in creating and maintaining the Western literary
canon, as well as its impact on community in general.
Our narrative of the canon is complex, encompassing three
main elements: first, the story of the history of the canon, the rise and
fall of various works within it, the "continuous slow movement inside it"
(Nemoianu 222), and even our understanding of the etymology of the word
"canon" itself; second, our more temporally constricted understanding of
the current state of the canon, of the particular works within it now "that
are chosen to be taught in class" (219), of the New Critical-style decontextualized
elements within the texts, and so on; and third, the system of power relations
"in which transferred values are pitted against each other" (219). The
third element of power is the one that many other contemporary theorists
view as determining both the first and second elements, which Nemoianu
refers to as canonical and curricular, respectively. (Both elements are
often collapsed into the single term "canon" by many writers.) Introducing
long-term temporality into the canon serves as useful contextualizing,
providing us with a sense that what is accepted as canonical is not static,
but rather subject to a "continuous slow movement." But we even speak of
the more temporally-restricted sense of the canon—Nemoianu’s "curriculum"—as
proceeding through time: despite the New Critical desire to detemporalize
a work, we still justify the inclusion of works because of the history
of their acceptance and on the basis of tradition. If we truly judged all
works’ entrance to a timeless canon (not unchanging, but rather detemporalized
and without the element of historical process) strictly by the textual
workings within them—and if these inner textual working were truly devoid
of intertextuality—then we would never know what to read, could never read
other critical responses, because these would always reintroduce outside
elements and thus would always reintroduce time. Since this is never done
and is in truth never possible to do, if only because the language of a
text always hints at a world beyond its covers, we instead view the canon
as a narrative, even when we pretend (through another narrative move) not
to do so.
In other words, the literary canon is a narrative construction.
It is not a static phenomenon. It is created, generated, and maintained
through story, and this story proceeds through time, always shifting, always
in flux. Nemoianu writes, "The most striking thing—and, for resolute anticanonical
activists, the most troubling—is that at the very center of the canon there
seems to be, despite tidal changes, Brownian motilities, and quicksilver
rearrangements, a certain constancy (225)." That to Nemoianu and other
critics such as Harold Bloom there appears to be continuity is due to the
ability of narrative to smooth out discontinuity, to mold the shape of
change to a recognizable rhythm. As Nemoianu recognizes in "Literary Canons
and Social Value Options," discontinuity in the canon is just as apparent
as continuity. He mentions the debate over the status of vernacular authors
and its eventual playing out over time: "the classics lost ground (slowly),
while the ‘moderns’ gained ground and standing (at a fast rate)" (218).
In addition, writers such as John Milton have undergone periodic attacks
on their canonicity and others such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow have
actually slipped away from canonical status. This visible discontinuity,
change, and flux is also due to narrative, for even as narrative acts to
smooth the appearance of change, it also preserves it by maintaining the
temporal aspects of events. It is when the canon is viewed atemporally
and ahistorically that it becomes either monolithic beast or comforting
universal.
A similar effect is visible in communities of persons—there
appears, for example, to be a certain constancy to our notions of "Black"
and "White," "Asian" and "Caucasian." And we speak confidently about "Frenchness"
and "Englishness," but all of these notions are narrative constructions
that have shifted through time: slowly churning at certain points in history,
rapidly appearing and disappearing at others. And our history of these
events has itself shifted, for we have not always told the same story about
the same events: Christopher Columbus has shifted for many from heroic
navigator to despised conqueror. But our narrative of human communities,
like our narrative of the canon, also represents, and even focuses upon,
times of rapid change: wars and plagues for example. Thus, like our historical
narrative of the literary canon, our historical narrative of human communities
contains both discontinuity and continuity, and both of these elements
are maintained through story.
Nemoianu, recognizing both the continuity and discontinuity
in the canon, nevertheless senses a "small number of stubbornly recurrent
authors" at the "very center of the canon" (225). He asks, "Why is this
center relatively stable or why does it seem difficult to displace?" (225).
One answer is: because of the tendency of narrative towards reification.
While narrative provides for flexibility and ambiguity—we can always tell
a different story and we can thus always rewrite history—when a narrative
is shared by a group, the group tends to conserve elements. One must gain
the consent of more than a single member of a group to create change. Effecting
change is thus a complex process, as Nemoianu again recognizes: it is not
simply a matter of political power, for while attempts were made in the
Soviet Union to ban certain authors, for example, they nevertheless retained
their canonical status. But it is not necessarily a merely democratic matter
to the exclusion of power—or, perhaps more accurately, democracy is all
about power, as various groups and individuals struggle and contest to
determine what will become of the group as a whole. Nemoianu is right to
dispel the "straw man" of power-conspiracists: "secret huddles of fat,
cigar puffing-capitalists, … the sly sycophantic wordsmith sniffing out
the preferences of the mighty and quickly concocting the desired objects"
(229). But "dispel[ling] these little fantasies by looking at the facts
around us" (229) and instead positing a democratic nomination of works
in which "literate humans recognize themselves more often and better than
in all others" (225), neglects the more subtle relations of power evident
in, for example, universalizing quests (speaking of all "literate humans,"
for example).
This desire to discover the universal in the canonical
is apparent as well in Harold Bloom, who writes,
Shakespeare for hundreds of millions who are
not white Europeans is a signifier for their own pathos, their own sense
of identity with the characters that Shakespeare fleshed out by his language.
For them his universality is not historical but fundamental; he puts their
lives upon his stage. (38)
But such a formulation neglects the problems inherent in
Bloom’s speaking for "hundreds of millions who are not white Europeans."
It is not much of a stretch to view this statement in postcolonial terms
and then to wonder if these people who are "not white Europeans" (which
in itself sets white Europeans at the center of the discourse) are perhaps
concerned with Shakespeare because his is the voice of the colonizing culture.
Perhaps his voice must be engaged with in order to deal successfully with
the dominant European colonizer. It is thus only the colonially transformed
selves of these "non white Europeans" which recognize Shakespeare’s "universality."
And when E.D. Hirsch speaks of the importance of the canon for maintaining
"cultural literacy," it almost begs the questions: whose culture is being
maintained and at whose expense? These questions lead one inexorably towards
a sense, reminiscent of Michel Foucault, that power relations reign supreme.
Indeed, many contemporary theorists, such as Richard Ohmann,
Gerald L. Bruns, and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, would position power as
the primary determinant of aesthetic sensibility. For them, we never read
nor appreciate a work outside of a power relation which has "always already"
determined our aesthetic taste. Ohmann writes that "aesthetic value arises
from class conflict" (Ohmann 219). For Smith,
The recurrent impulse or effort to define aesthetic
value by contradistinction to all forms of utility or as the negation of
all other namable sources of interest or forms of value—hedonic, practical,
sentimental, ornamental, historical, ideological, and so forth—is, in effect,
to define it out of existence; for when all such particular utilities,
interests, and sources of value have been subtracted, nothing remains.
(Smith 14)
In the end, books—literary, historical, or simply "practical,"
like a manual for a car—are always read in a context rife with the traces
of worldly power. These contemporary theorists thus create a dichotomy
between power and the aesthetic in an attempt to reveal the often unacknowledged
role of power, while at the same time attempting to subvert the limitations
of the dichotomy by emphasizing the penetration of power into the aesthetic.
But this penetration is not unreciprocated, for the aesthetic
too is woven into the realm of power and into analysis. Our very understanding
of power relations is in terms of historical narrative, which is itself
integrally bound into the aesthetic. History is a story that appeals to
our emotions and to our intuition. It is these almost undefinable elements
of story, of narrative, which constitute the aesthetic. Because of its
ineffability, the aesthetic is resistant to analysis. To focus on power
is often to neglect the aesthetic elements in the narrative of the canon
itself as well as the aesthetic force of the works within it, for the stories
we tell ourselves about events, the narratives we construct, are creations
of both analysis and poetry, power and aesthetics. To investigate power
and to see its ever-present influence even in the aesthetic realm is an
exercise in analysis which serves a useful purpose: it reveals many of
the underlying reasons for events and for personal and political relations.
Our sense of the aesthetic is, after all, historically determined and temporally
limited, and through an analysis of power relations we may well come to
an historical understanding of why a work has become canonical, who benefits
by its status, how hegemonic relations are maintained, and so on. But the
aesthetic—the literary, the poetic, the beautiful—exists outside of this
analysis. Of course, the term "aesthetic" is a problematic one, subject
to lengthy critical debate, contrary definitions, and unclear usage. But
this is exactly what, for me, characterizes it. For Immanuel Kant the beautiful
thing is outside utility; for Kenneth Burke, it is the deviant. For me,
it is that which appeals to our emotional selves and gives a richer, intuitive
understanding of the world which, while yielding to analysis, nevertheless
forever escapes it.
A focus upon the analysis of power in the production of
the literary canon thus neglects the degree to which the canon narrative
is an aesthetic phenomenon. But avoiding an analysis of power equally neglects
the difficulty apparent in the current canon: namely, its exclusion of
marginalized group such as African-Americans and women. The commonly accepted
list of canonical works, while subject to variation, is overwhelmingly,
though not exclusively, composed of works by white males operating in the
Western tradition. A glance through the list of fifty-seven works dealt
with by the Modern Language Association’s Approaches to Teaching World
Literature series (1996), which seeks to collect teaching methods of
commonly taught texts, is revealing: ten are about women authors and five
or so deal with non-Western themes. Merely counting works in this series
neglects the complexity of the canon, but is nevertheless indicative of
the general trend.
The attacks of the traditional canon have often started
from exactly this beginning point, with many theorists calling for an opening
of the canon to marginalized groups—that is, groups other than white European
males. They argue that opening the canon is necessary because the current
canon is unfairly exclusionary. Established through the power of white
European males, its continued existence serves to maintain the dominance
of this privileged group while excluding others. Lillian S. Robinson, for
example, "argues that the dominant culture’s supposedly neutral aesthetic
values are framed in ways that make it difficult or impossible for disadvantaged
groups to enter the canon" (Richter 115). Her solution "is to work toward
getting literature by women and minorities admitted into ‘the’ canon by
systematically contesting the cultural biases of the values upon which
the current canon rests" (115). On the other hand, such defenders of the
canon as Allan Bloom and E.D. Hirsch, following in the footsteps of Matthew
Arnold, see the canon as the exemplum of the best that has ever been written,
and argue for the value of tradition as a force maintaining a common thread
of "cultural literacy."
The canon does provide a center, a grounding point, a
central core of shared knowledge which can indeed (and sometimes does)
establish a kind of normative "cultural literacy," for it is true that
"at the very center of the canon there seems to be … a small number of
stubbornly recurrent authors and works" (Nemoianu 225). But whose knowledge
and whose culture is thus normalized and shared? As James A. Winders asks,
"What should be taught (and how)? Should the claims of a (particularly
Western, largely white male) canon be vigorously reasserted?" (4). And
even as the canon serves as a center point, is there really a center of
culture to occupy? And, since any notion of centrality necessarily excludes
those things which are not central—the in-group and the out-group—what
happens to those books and those groups which then become marginalized?
In the end, there is never any true center to a culture—the
entire construction is so interwoven and so self-referential that beginnings,
endings, margins and centers, are places which are impossible to finally
nail down. They do not, finally, exist, for when we look closely, the stitching
that holds them in place comes unraveled before our analytic eye. The only
recourse has been a "series of substitutions of center for center, as a
linked chains of determinations of the center" ("Structure" 1117). That
is, we have created "different forms or names" (1118) for the center in
order to conceal from ourselves that it is merely a fictional construct.
Once this was recognized, Jacques Derrida continues,
it was necessary to begin thinking that there
was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a present-being,
that the center had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus, but
a function, a sort of nonlocus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions
come into play. … This was the moment when … everything became discourse—provided
we can agree on this word—that is to say, a system in which the central
signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely
present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental
signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely.
(1118)
But despite the lack of a true center, of a "transcendental
signifier," we can still create fictional ones. We can establish fictions
of centrality which then exclude and include certain books, certain ideas,
certain people. In other words, in spite of Derridean "rupture" (1118),
"everything happens as if" these centers and margins actually exist (indeed,
the notion of rupture itself requires the idea of a center).
The way in which one constructs something, envisions it,
describes it, or tells about it has a large impact on its function and
effect within one’s culture. "Literature may well be called an institution,"
writes Nemoianu, "but surely not in the same sense in which we call the
House of Commons an institution. Yet explicit and crystallized structures
are called into life precisely through the opposition against an assumed
institutional status" (215). Constructing a narrative or world-view in
which a canon exists results in a world in which a canon really does exist.
In a sense, by attacking the canon of accepted works, critics have created
the canon, created the center and the margins, and marginalized works.
There is not necessarily any inherent difference between center and margin,
"but that speaking makes it so." But equally, such articulation allows
for the freedom of both center and margin, the freedom to write and rewrite
the canon.
But this "freedom" is intimately bound to issues of power.
For example, one can imagine the reading of a text as analogous to an encounter
with another, previously "undiscovered," group, as in Christopher Columbus’
"discovery" of the natives of the Americas. From the European perspective,
the Americas and their inhabitants did not exist until Columbus; in this
sense, Columbus "discovered" them. On the other hand, from the perspective
of the Native Americans, it is a laughable thought to have been "discovered."
The "readings" of this new group by Europeans were as determined by the
Europeans’ historical background as a reading of any book. The Native Americans
were (and are) in much more rapid flux than most texts, capable of actively
transforming themselves to influence European perceptions. But books too
are in flux, both because the language within them changes (because our
language for reading them changes) and because the context in which they
are presented changes. The key difference in fluidity is the ability of
either book or culture to function as a subject in the eyes of the perceiving
subject. When a book or a culture is objectified, it becomes a much more
static phenomenon, prone to reification (the "Noble Savage," canonicity)
and deprived of its ability to transform itself. It tends instead to be
controlled by others. The traditional Western literary canon—and Western
culture as a whole— is thus an example of a (not completely) reified fiction
of centrality.
"Literary canons," Nemoianu argues, "remain always as
if" (217). In addition, the texts which are the substance of the literary
canon are as slippery as the canon itself, for they too exist only "as
if." Our readings of a particular text, far from eliciting the universal
elements of what it means to be human, are instead the historically bound
readings of a particular reader in a particular place and time. Indeed,
the very existence of a text is doubtful, for without a reader to translate
the symbols of a text into meaningful associations, a translation that
is never the same from one place and time to the next, a text is nonexistent
from the perspective of a reader. As Nemoianu argues, this state of indeterminance
characteristic of literature is somewhat different from the state of the
Catholic religious canon, for the Catholic canon is, in some senses, unarguable.
There is a clear power group which maintains and controls it: the Catholic
Church. While parts may be added or taken away, what is currently a part
of it is (at least apparently) clearly evident. But the similarities between
the literary canon and the Catholic canon are even more striking, for both
are fictional (this is not meant to be collapsed into "falsity") and are
established and maintained through a narrative framework. Each always remain
"as if."
The key difference is in terms of worldly power: ecclesiastical
canonicity has been the focus of a much greater power struggle that literary
canonicity. Thus Nemoianu is able to argue that "the stakes of a truly
canonical dispute" are very high (217). If literature has in the past been
a whirlpool of debate around which only weak currents of power have flowed,
then it is obvious that "all the ‘canonical’ disputes in literature" should
merely "have added mere coloring and nuance to a history that was advancing
in any case" (218). If power is located elsewhere, then the stories of
literary struggle will have little impact, and history will apparently
continue "advancing in any case." But as power shifts, as literature becomes
a locus of power relations, then the debate will begin to have higher stakes.
Traditionalists are perhaps right to believe that changing the canon threatens
the very existence of American society as we know it, for the canon
today has become a site of contending power.
Regardless of the level of power, it is narrative which
establishes the mythical framework in which a work becomes, and continues
to be, canonical. The canon is a myth because it is generated through story
and is powerful and appealing at an almost unconscious level. We may "simply"
feel that a work belongs and we may even rage against theory for arguing
or modifying our feeling. But our feeling emerges through theory, itself
a myth, a story, a narrative, and thus our rage is against becoming conscious
of a process we feel is simply natural. (We are "always already" immersed
in the stories we tell. We can never escape to a "true reality.")
Two issues now emerge. One, because the canon is a human
construct composed of human constructs, it is a fluid thing. It is thus
obvious that medieval reading lists should appear so odd to us today—it
is not to say that they did not possess a group of works they considered
canonical nor that we do not as well, but merely to suggest that the canon
is not static. It is always in flux. Second, works are not naturally admitted
to the canon. Instead, we admit works—or even "rediscover" works—based
on categories we define. It seems natural to us that the Aeneid,
for example, is rich in textual possibilities; but, after all, we as a
society have been conditioned to search for textual possibilities in ways
that are adapted to it. That is, describing the Aeneid as textually
rich is peculiarly circular: it is richly textured because it defines what
it means to be so, and it defines what it is to be a rich text because
it is such a text. As readers heir to the Western culture of which Virgil’s
Aeneid is a part, we have been conditioned to approach texts in
ways which are similar to—though never identical to, and often radically
different from—others in our culture. But if we decided that works should
be read based on different criteria, or that textual richness was apparent
in a different fashion, then there is no objective reason why we should
ignore James Michener’s books.
But I have collapsed the complexity of the process of
canon construction and reconstruction by saying that "we admit works based
on categories we define." Who is this "we"? What is a "work"? How do "we"
"define" "categories" and then "admit" "works" which "fit" them? Power
is always involved, but power is not the only factor which impacts the
acceptance of works into the canon—a canon which does not necessarily exist,
except as a concept, to begin with. In a sense, by attacking the canon
of accepted works, anticanonical writers have reinforced the traditional
canon, established a narrative of center and margin, and positioned certain
works as marginal, for nothing is either central or marginal, "but that
speaking makes it so." But such articulation also permits the freeing of
both center and margin, and the questioning of the power of tradition.
Speaking of the canon allows for the possibility of rewriting the canon.
While traditionalists such as Allan Bloom, E.D. Hirsch,
and Harold Bloom may lament the passing of the Western canon, such a shift
seems both inevitable and necessary because the locus of power is shifting.
But if they are correct to believe that, in the end, the only works that
survive into eventual canonicity are those which posses eternal aesthetic
value, then they truly have nothing to fear in the long term: eventually
authors such as Virgil and Shakespeare, Milton and Cervantes will reemerge
alongside other "Great Works." But if they are not, then their struggle
is just beginning. In any case, it seems clear that, to use Nemoianu words,
"an opening towards areas of the secondary, of marginality and heteronomy,
and a more generous valuation spread over broader areas of textuality"
is inevitable; one can only hope that Nemoianu’s belief that this "will
be saluted by the scholarly and playful alike" (215) is correct, and that
he worries needlessly that literature may "find itself diminished and constricted"
by "hard and simple canons" in a period of "accelerated change" (244).
In the end, this is the power, and thus the danger, of narrative: to generate
and maintain fictions of centrality which are the focus of power, reification,
struggle, and change.
VIII · Towards
Closure: Reading/Writing the Future of CHID
CHID 390 currently positions a number of texts and approaches
as central to the CHID approach. As such, it establishes a fiction of centrality
which necessarily excludes certain elements: as one example, several Christians
have felt themselves to be outsiders within the program. In addition, narrative
tends to establish fictions of flow which limit and contain disruption.
We create a story of our world which feels seamless and unbroken. Both
of these narrative effects—fictions of flow and fictions of centrality—tend
to establish boundaries of "us" and "them," "insider" and "outsider," "Self"
and "Other." But these boundaries are also strongly associated with community,
for feeling a part of something appears to necessarily involve exclusion:
exclusion follows inclusion. The question I return to, then, is how to
generate community without fixed boundaries, how to have a feeling of belonging
without exclusivity.
There is no simple answer to this, but one method of mediating
the problem is to combine the analytical and self-critical elements of
CHID—elements which tend toward the individualistic and atomistic—with
the mythical and aesthetic elements which are a key element of community.
This combination of the aesthetic with the analytic is difficult: it requires
continual critique in order to keep the boundaries flexible, while at the
same time requiring acceptance of story and a willingness to relinquish
analysis in favor of aesthetics when the occasion warrants.
But this balanced approach posits two opposing poles,
one of analysis and one of aesthetics. Drawing on my notions of the literary
canon and, more generally, of narrative, however, allows one to begin to
escape this duality and to begin to view the two poles not as opposing
and contrary elements, but rather as interwoven and interdependent, and
as always subject to rewriting. That is, recognizing that our fictions
of centrality (ourselves as individuals, the Western literary canon, the
West in general, men, humanity) are constructed through story, through
narrative, through a particular perspective and tale about the world, but
also realizing that this story is intimately linked to power in the world
(falling off a cliff, nuclear arms) allows us to look at both as one, or
one as both, or in whatever terms we may construct. To bring the circle
around again, they are separate units in this thesis only because I have
spoken of them in this way. To speak of analysis and myth in terms of opposition
is merely one way to tell the story; by writing a new narrative, we can
reconstruct them in a new way, not as contrary and irreconcilable but as
harmonious and inseparable. Narrative then becomes the mediating element
between our artificially constructed oppositions, allowing an escape from
duality and a new approach to the world.
Part of this new approach to the world can be a reintegration
of gift, a recognition that a gift economy provides an excellent means
of knitting a community together. Already programs such as Comparative
History of Ideas recognize the importance of valuing the ability of undergraduate
students to contribute to academic knowledge, a recognition that involves
a move away from positioning students as customers in a market-oriented
university. But in order to achieve a more broad-based change within both
the university and the world in general, we must together tell a new story,
one that emphasizes gift relationships and the interconnections between
ourselves. It is only through a narrative shift that we can achieve a Kuhnian
"paradigm shift" away from positioning terms within our world in terms
of dichotomy: without a new story, aesthetics and power, gift and commodity,
Self and Other will always be separate, and often in opposition and conflict.
Of course, merely telling ourselves that the world has
changed is not enough for a complete narrative reconstruction; it is necessary
for others to believe in our construct—from a narrative of community comes
reality as we know it, but this reality is created by groups, not by individuals.
Thus narrative, even as it constitutes power relations, aesthetic responses,
and analytic approaches, is also in its turn constituted by them. There
is no escape; everything is interwoven; everything is connected: "The center
cannot hold..." The future of CHID, like the future of the world, is a
story yet to be told, but by re-reading the past we can begin to write
a new future.
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