Making Intellectualism Intelligible
Robin J. Sowards

MINNESOTA REVIEW, N.S.58-60 (2003), pp. 279-89.

(on Gerald Graff, Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind [Yale University Press, 2003])

Here is a diode, learn what to do with it. Here is Du Guesclin, constable of France 1370-80-learn what to do with him. A divan is either a long cushioned seat or a council of state-figure out at which times it is what. Certainly you can have your dangerous drugs, but only for dessert-first you must chew your cauliflower, finish your fronds.

"Do you think intelligent life exists outside this bed?" one student asked another, confused as to whether she was attending the performance, or part of it. Donald Barthelme, "The Educational Experience

At one memorable moment in Road Trip, Tom Green, leading a group of prospective students on a campus tour, observes: "This is the English Department. I see most of you already speak English, so we can skip that." This joke may well be funny both to college undergraduates and to their professors, but for the latter it will be tinged with bitter irony, too. The difference between the two reactions exemplifies the deeper gulf between academics and students, which, according to Gerald Graff's most recent book, usually goes unexamined and unaddressed, and hence continues to widen, to all of our peril. Graff's observation that the most basic premises of academic discourse seem counter-intuitive or downright opaque to those outside academe, and his claim that academics contribute to this opacity just as much as a complacent public, will not likely take anyone by surprise, and readers of his previous work, particularly Beyond the Culture Wars (1992), will find many familiar arguments here. But what makes this book illuminating is Graff's conscious attempt to enter the mindset of his students to find out just what makes intellectual discourse so alien to the uninitiated, while maintaining his faith in the discourse's potential intelligibility. Graff's basic move is always toward reflection: any particular pedagogical difficulty one encounters can be effectively handled by explicitly addressing it in class (his widely-known `teach the conflicts' approach). If the book has any defect, it is that Graff fails to state baldly enough what is at stake in this gesture. Graff pays far more attention to the particular details of classroom teaching in this book than he has hitherto, although the discussion of such minutiae is carefully situated in the context of broader questions about curricular structure, the place of the university in the larger educational system, and the ways in which academe represents itself (or utterly fails to represent itself intelligibly) to the total culture. His emphasis on the big picture in the past was in part a result of his reservations about the idea that all educational problems are solvable at the level of the classroom (e.g., Clueless 30). But he has many extremely keen things to say about intellectual habits that students find alienating in the classroom: for example, the "preoccupation with what often appear to be bogus `problems,'" what he calls `the problem problem' (45). University teachers regularly demand that students, in writing and discussion, seek out problems to address, but students often reasonably wonder whether "there [are] not already enough problems in the world without our straining to invent new ones" (46). One instance of this is the resistance students frequently offer to finding `hidden meanings' in literary texts on the grounds that if a meaning is `hidden' it must not obviously be `there' in the text, suggesting that much of literary critical discourse amounts to quibbling over highly speculative critical impositions (48ff.). In part this conclusion results from a misunderstanding of how literature works, such that the success or value of a literary work can be measured by its lack of contradictions, its success as an act of communication. This problem is made even more difficult to address by the seemingly counter-intuitive idea academics have about what makes a problem interesting. As Graff points out, "paradoxically, claims that are arguable and solicit disagreement are a sign of an argument's viability, not its failure" (54). If the objective of argumentation is to obtain agreement, then it would seem much more practical to make the most uncontroversial claims you can, since this would increase the chances of being found convincing. Graff's point is not just that arguments which are worth making must be falsifiable, in the sense that it must be possible to dispute them by appeal to some legitimate form of evidence, but that they must in fact be contested, even subject to serious doubts. In the absence of explicit discussion about what makes an argument interesting, it is difficult to imagine how most students would ever arrive at this conclusion or even formulate the question in these terms.

One similar confusion which arises from students' daily use of language is about intention. In the context of most speech acts, one is more concerned with what one's interlocutor intends to communicate than with the words themselves, thus allowing one to distinguish fairly successfully between, for example, rhetorical and non-rhetorical questions. But the author of a literary text is always absent, usually dead, and, even when there are records of his or her comments about interpretation, often unreliable. Strangely, Graff seems worried that students can't see the point of trying to recover the author's intentions (49); in my view, they'd be quite right. What I find more often is that students understand the task of interpretation on analogy with their daily habits of communication, and are thus rather too focused on the author's intentions, often to such an extent that the confusing minutiae of the text itself seem like a positive impediment to figuring out the-surely quite straightforward-message the author wanted to get across. Such more or less `theoretical' disjunctions between the mindset of students and the mindset of academics are reinforced, according to Graff, by an affective association between persuasion and aggression: To argue persuasively, you have to have an axe to grind, to want others to do something they are not already doing, if only to think differently about something than they do. Such an attitude will seem at best presumptuous, and at worst arrogant and coercive. .This tendency to equate persuasion with aggression is especially rife among students who grow up in liberal pluralist surroundings, where "Live and let live" is a ruling maxim and "whatever" the popular mantra. (55-6)

It is one of the supreme ironies of the culture wars that the right so often accused academics of propagating `relativism,' when `relativism' is more commonly a disposition students arrive at college with and find continuously provoked by the earnest culture of argument they encounter. Graff plausibly suggests that this "may.reflect a loss of confidence in the possibility that the arguments we make in public will have an effect on the world" (57), and in all fairness to students he should be a bit more willing to entertain the prospect that this `loss of confidence' might be well-founded, especially in light of such instructive events as the last presidential election. These aspects of the student mindset cannot, as Graff argues, be blamed exclusively on the ideologies governing their acculturation or the failure of secondary schools to prepare them adequately for the rigors of college; many of the ways in which academic culture represents and explains itself to students and to the extra-academic world not only fail to counteract these problems but positively cultivate them. For example, "one of the primary causes of academic mystification is the tendency to take academic discourse for granted, as if it were a transparent vehicle of information and ideas" (25). Setting aside the fact that there must surely be some element of rational universality in intellectual discourse, the important point is that we will only be able to effectively teach our students to engage in critical reflection to the extent that we have reflected ourselves on what exactly this entails and why it is desirable in the first place. This is in many ways the central message of Graff's book: thinking through the student's point of view (even in this quasi-hypothetical way) forces us into an alienation from our habitual practices which clarifies just what they are, and we can then return from that alienation with the power to bridge the gap which we will otherwise calamitously cement.

For this reason, Graff devotes a considerable portion of this book to practical questions, in effect laying the groundwork for a dialectical pedagogy by emphatically arguing for the centrality of conflict in day to day educational practice. This seems to me to be an extremely important move, and is what makes this book most valuable. Sometimes, though, Graff's steps in this direction are a bit too rudimentary, and there are problems which run far deeper than quibbles over his practical suggestions. Graff often speaks as if integrating conflicts is not just a necessary but also a sufficient condition for teaching critical thinking, and he rarely goes into any detail about what the specific structure and objectives of the conflict are supposed to be. In Beyond the Culture Wars he describes "the usual effect of teaching the conflicts: not that everyone becomes locked into entrenched positions (although that can happen) but that the terms of the polarization are themselves challenged and displaced by alternative ways of framing the issues" (59). Graff does not specify here what these alternatives are, and the desired outcome is concealed behind the now shopworn academic metaphor of the `frame.' His instinct is right to the extent that he sees two possible outcomes, only one of which is desirable, but he seems to think that we can trust that the conflict will complicate itself.

If, for example, you want to teach Hamlet on a conflictual model, you could easily decide to use the tried and true method of dividing the class in half and staging a debate over, say, whether or not Hamlet should obey the ghost's command and murder his uncle. This will very likely succeed in getting students engaged in the question, will encourage them to comb the text for evidence, and, if the conventions for the debate are carefully constructed, it should increase participation even among habitually quiet students. But it is very likely that in such a scenario the students will, in fact, end up "locked into entrenched positions," and will understand the critical issue at hand as decidable by convincingly arguing one position or the other; they will assume, that is, that one side or the other is right, and that Hamlet is either a morality play in which Hamlet does the wrong thing and is punished for it with death or that it's a po-mo downer in which Hamlet does the right thing but suffers for it anyway. The one solution they will not reach by these means is that the play is a tragedy, i.e., that Hamlet is caught in a conflict between the desire to redress a crime and punish a criminal and the recognition that to do so is itself a crime. The staged debate instantiates the structural tension that makes the play function, but in such a way that the students cannot recognize the necessity of that conflict or provide an account of its preconditions. To put it in Hegelese, the debate could easily result in a static opposition rather than an active determinate negation which could think the conditions of its determinacy in the other.

Graff does, I think, see clearly that the objective is the internalization of conflict: "We throw ourselves, as Mill put it, `into the mental position of those who think differently from' us by writing the voices of others into our texts, even trying them on for size" (Clueless 13). His main method for doing so in a literature course is to teach criticism, and while he is right that it is important for students to be exposed to some criticism, that's not going to guarantee any escape from the Hamlet scenario (173ff.). A method I have developed based on the sophistical dissoi logoi (`double arguments') is, in my experience, more effective for approaching Graff's objectives than teaching criticism. I ask the students to write a position paper, then write another separate paper taking a conflicting position (and one which is autonomous, i.e., not just a commentary on their first paper but a substantial argument unto itself), then write a final paper which attempts to synthesize the previous two by thinking through the underlying structure of the conflict. Some students still end up just trying to defend their first paper (or, an equally incomplete solution, just declaring the conflict aporetic), but the fact that they are arguing against themselves gives them a very strong inducement to unify the opposing sides (not to mention the fact that they know, as long as their first two papers are reasonably solid, that both positions are actually defensible). There's nothing about asking students to argue against a critic which will, in itself, guarantee that they summarize the other's position accurately. The dissoi logoi assignment puts them quite literally in the other's shoes, and it is in my experience a good deal more effective early in the semester than exposing them to criticism because, no matter how emphatically you tell them not to, they will invariably attempt the kind of servile imitation that they have been trained in by a social order which demands conformity even in the mode of one's resistance to it. To put it another way, Graff's method is to teach them to be effective lawyers, when it should be to teach them to be effective judges. A lawyer is always, in a sense, unconflicted, because his only obligation is to some finite interest; a judge, on the other hand, must adjudicate the claims of each particular as well as the claims of the universal, either in the form of the state (i.e., precedent, the constitution, etc.) or in the form of conscience (i.e., moral law). The judge cannot simply muddle through; he must make a decision, but his decision must be in the interest of truth, not merely his own self-interest.

This is the direction in which Graff's work has always been tending but to which it has never fully committed itself. Beyond the Culture Wars, for example, is an interesting engagement in the culture wars because as a rhetorical gesture it seems to purchase a certain neutrality. Instead of simply teaching either a `traditionalist' or a `revisionist' view of the canon, Graff argues that we should explicitly teach that conflict itself; this allows us to present our own views in class without being partisan, because the other side also gets a hearing. What Graff doesn't seem to recognize is that this is not a neutral gesture at all, but a deeply normative one. One of the central claims of Clueless in Academe is that "the most fundamental conflict that needs to be taught in classrooms is the conflict between Intellectualspeak and Studentspeak" (13), and since student ambivalence about the intellectual role itself is a crucial problem, Graff advocates explicitly staging a debate over the value of intellectualism (e.g., 252-3). The trick, according to Graff, is to show resistant students that even their dislike of intellectualism can be made more powerful and convincing if they articulate it through intellectual discourse. But the conflict thus thematized is hardly on a level playing field; the question of the value of intellectualism is decided in advance by the intellectual mode of addressing the conflict. Effectively, Graff wants to trap his students in the same performative contradiction he imputes to feminist critics who object that argumentation is fundamentally male, i.e., that they have to make strong arguments in order to exile argumentative discourse (89-90). Teaching the conflicts is neither an innocent nor a neutral gesture; it is, in fact, deeply coercive-and, as Stanley Fish might say, it's a good thing too.

As Graff's chapter title "Two Cheers for the Argument Culture" suggests, he is on the side of intellectualism. Graff objects to the idea that analysis and enjoyment are necessarily opposed, and the associated belief that academics are out to spoil everyone's fun. He seems to want to counter this by saying that it just isn't true and that thinking itself is fun in any case. But in fact we do sometimes want to spoil our students' fun, by making them think, and we are right to. If we succeed in inspiring them to reflect on the pleasure they take in so repulsively ideological a film as Road Trip, perhaps even to recognize their complicity with the malevolent forces of social control it reflects, we will be handing them the bill for their amusement, the endless tally of human suffering which the culture industry never forgets to shred along with the rest of the incriminating evidence.

One of the reasons that Graff does not get to a substantive defense of intellectualism (he gets no further than saying that to argue otherwise is a performative contradiction or that intellectual conflict is necessarily `democratic') is that he seems to regard it as merely a tool to be employed or a more or less arbitrary set of conventions to be learned, regardless of his various caveats to the contrary (e.g., 24). Rather than regarding intellectualism as, to borrow Gillian Rose's phrase, a `morality of method,' Graff conceives critical reflection instrumentally. One conspicuous instance of this is his declaration of the maxim "Dare to be Reductive" in his critique of the supposedly unnecessary difficulty of academic prose. As he puts it, "reductive" is about the worst thing that can be said about a piece of academic work. Up to a point I share this anti-reductive attitude, feeling abused when my own ideas are reductively caricatured by critics, and ashamed, I hope, when I realize I have committed this offense against others. What I object to, however, is knee-jerk antireductivism, the refusal to see that there are legitimate reductions, useful and necessary simplifications that can be distinguished from those that seriously misrepresent and mislead. (137) Ironically enough, he provides an excellent example of just such a bad reduction in his discussion of the critique of instrumental rationality in Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment: "This critique of instrumental reason was clearly directed at amoral misuses of reason that were not really rational at all. But, by a kind of philosophical guilt by association, the critique readily became broadened into a sweeping condemnation of rationality itself, which was seen as inherently instrumental and therefore evil" (101). Thanks to Graff's use of the passive voice, we don't know who issued this "sweeping condemnation of rationality itself," but it plainly wasn't Adorno and Horkheimer. They summed up the "two theses" of Dialectic of Enlightenment as follows: "Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology" (xviii). The point is to make enlightenment enlightened about itself, not to reverse it (see Jarvis 22ff.); the problem is the fact that enlightenment is prone to regression. The two theses are correctives to, on the one hand, the pull of nostalgia which valorizes the primitive, simple, pastoral life, and, on the other, the failure to recognize the barbarism of modernity. Graff's rhetorical gesture here, one that he makes with irritating frequency, is to present an opposing view as a caveat and follow it by his own view without addressing the real conflict between the two.

Given that Graff's object in this book is not to produce a systematic critique of the Frankfurt School, it might seem pedantic to chase down this sort of error; but the fact that Graff, clearly a highly intelligent scholar, goes so calamitously astray through being reductive should at least suggest that "Dare to be Reductive" is a dubious maxim. In arguing for clarity, he seems to me to often evade genuine difficulties in favor of arguing against a kind of bad scholarly writing that we can all presumably agree is deplorable. His parting salvo is "Don't kid yourself. If you couldn't explain it to your parents the chances are you don't understand it yourself" (277). Surely we all expect our interlocutors to really know what they're talking about, and it's clear enough that they often don't, but the problem with the principle of `clarity' runs far deeper. As Adorno observes in Minima Moralia: Shoddiness that drifts with the flow of familiar speech is taken as a sign of relevance and contact: people know what they want because they know what other people want. Regard for the object, rather than for communication, is suspect in any expression: anything specific, not taken from pre-existent patterns, appears inconsiderate, a symptom of eccentricity, almost of confusion. The logic of the day, which makes so much of its clarity, has naively adopted this perverted notion of everyday speech. Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case. Rigorous formulation demands unequivocal comprehension, conceptual effort, to which people are deliberately disencouraged, and imposes on them in advance of any content a suspension of all received opinions, and thus an isolation, that they violently resist. Only what they do not need first to understand, they consider understandable; only the word coined by commerce, and really alienated, touches them as familiar. Few things contribute so much to the demoralization of intellectuals. Those who would escape it must recognize the advocates of communicability as traitors to what they communicate. (101) A better definition of clarity than the one Graff assumes might be: a mode of expression which is adequate to the object of inquiry without rendering the object absolutely opaque to the audience. Adorno's point is just that, to the extent that one is not telling people what they already know or believe (and that's always the easiest thing to tell them), the criterion of truth will necessarily be in conflict with the criterion of intelligibility (and this conflict is exacerbated yet further when one's object of inquiry is constitutionally enigmatic, as is literature). In other words, the fact that all knowing has not-knowing as its precondition means that coming to know always involves a moment of opacity, of difficulty. The difference between ordinary speech and intellectual discourse is that the former, being governed by practical ends, always sacrifices truth to intelligibility, whereas the latter, being laboriously resistant to any reduction to sheer instrumentality, always sacrifices intelligibility to truth. Neither of these sacrifices is absolute; ordinary language's sacrifice of truth would only be absolute if the statement were absolutely without content, and intellectual discourse's sacrifice of intelligibility would only be absolute in the face of an absolutely inscrutable object (as, for example, the moment in Republic in which Socrates flatly refuses to define the Form of the Good [506d-e]). For this reason, a central part of college teaching, especially in composition courses, should be teaching students to handle genuine difficulty. Here Graff's focus on teaching criticism might come in handy, since there are certainly critics who are difficult without being obscurantist (e.g., Geoffrey Hartman), but one could just as easily use philosophy or theory. Whatever text one uses, it is, I think, important for students to have what Gordon Teskey once called `an originary experience of difficulty.' At first, even the brightest students will be baffled and frustrated, but if you take the time to lead them through reading far more slowly and carefully than they are used to, they will eventually find they can make at least some preliminary sense of the text without the teacher filling in all of the definitions and contexts. This should both build their confidence in their ability to make sense of threateningly difficult intellectual discourse and make plain that difficulty of a legitimate sort is a sign that something is worth reading, because they might learn something they didn't already know. You will know that your students have learned to handle difficulty when they can tell you all of the things that are wrong with the paraphrase you started them out on. In a literature course, you will know your students are really beginning to understand poetry when, in the course of an essay, they unravel their own preliminary formulations.

Graff's laudable sympathy with his students, and his desire to find common ground between their discourse and that of the academic world, both cause him to miss the pedagogical usefulness of alienation. This usefulness is nowhere clearer than in teaching poetry, which students generally find alienating from the get-go. Even those students who come into the course liking poetry often find that, in the course of thinking through a poem in detail under the rigors of interpretation, the poem proves elusive, always saying too much or too little, always absent where they think they've pinned it down, always hotly debated when they imagined their interpretation thoroughly unexceptionable. Graff displays little interest in exploiting the peculiar mediacy of literature for creating immanent instead of merely oppositional conflicts. On the contrary, he is very insistent that we should move yet further toward filling our syllabi with mass culture in order to exploit students' familiarity with it, even going so far as to say, in the context of a defense of large classes, that "it should be possible for schools to learn from the media's success at mega-communication without replicating the media's worst aspects" (273). The only way I can imagine that this would seem plausible is if he believes that the culture industry is fundamentally benevolent but simply misused. His own example from Beyond the Culture Wars, the endless parroting of Christopher Clausen's preposterous claim "that [Alice Walker's] The Color Purple is taught in more English courses today than all of Shakespeare's plays combined" (17), should suggest just how systematically pernicious corporate media are (and `alternative media' are rarely much better). As he points out in Literature Against Itself, "the ease with which attempts at subversive culture are now absorbed and assimilated into the motifs of mass culture suggests that something deeper is at work than a mere immunity to being shocked on the part of audiences" (2), which means, among other things, that even leftist criticisms of the media can be easily absorbed and defused.

Graff observes quite rightly that "academia itself has become part of the mass culture industry, which disseminates and popularizes academic theories and trends. Whereas academics were once rewarded for burrowing into a narrow specialty and having nothing to say about the big picture, such habits today are more likely to get one rejected by editors, granting agencies, and hiring committees" (18-9). This compulsive capitulation to market forces in the name of "the big picture" ignores the value of the genuinely specialized work of scholarship; his diagnosis is right, but he seems to think the disease a blessing. As just one example of the ways in which literary study is not arcane and specialized enough, consider the fate of Linguistics in English departments: despite the fact that literary scholars, whatever their allegiances, are in the end devoted to studying objects made of language, the world of literary scholarship has tacitly decided to keep itself in such total ignorance of what has gone on in Linguistics departments in the past few decades that many scholars still associate the word `linguistics' more strongly with Ferdinand de Saussure than with Noam Chomsky. Perhaps most bizarrely of all, Graff asserts that "intellect, so long despised in America, has been rising in esteem" (40). He follows this statement with so many caveats and counterexamples that it's hard to imagine he believes it. But let's be clear about this: if intellectualism is crucially grounded in critical reflection, then it will never be considered anything but a threat to a timocratic oligarchy like the United States or an outright tyranny like the puppet government we are busy installing in Iraq. To return to Socrates, who, if those conservatives who love to appeal to the Tradition of the West ever read him, would make their blood boil: "No man on earth who conscientiously opposes either you or any other organized democracy, and flatly prevents a great many wrongs and illegalities from taking place in the state to which he belongs, can possibly escape with his life" (Ap. 31e). Graff 's book at its best makes an extremely important case for why it's worth the risk.

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