Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation

By John Guillory and Merve Emre

An enlarged edition to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of John Guillory’s formative text on the literary canon.

Since its publication in 1993, John Guillory’s Cultural Capital has been a signal text for understanding the codification and uses of the literary canon. Cultural Capital reconsiders the social basis for aesthetic judgment and exposes the unequal distribution of symbolic and linguistic knowledge on which culture has long been based. Drawing from Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, Guillory argues that canon formation must be understood less as a question of the representation of social groups and more as a question of the distribution of cultural capital in schools, which regulate access to literacy, to the practices of reading and writing.
 
Now, as the crisis of the canon has evolved into the so-called crisis of the humanities, Guillory’s groundbreaking, incisive work has never been more urgent. As scholar and critic Merve Emre writes in her introduction to this enlarged edition: “Exclusion, selection, reflection, representation—these are the terms on which the canon wars of the last century were fought, and the terms that continue to inform debates about, for instance, decolonizing the curriculum and the rhetoric of antiracist pedagogy.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Oct 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9780226830605

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© 1993 by The University of Chicago

Introduction © 2023 by The University of Chicago

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Published 2023

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83059-9 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83060-5 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226830605.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Guillory, John, author. | Emre, Merve, writer of introduction.

Title: Cultural capital : the problem of literary canon formation / John Guillory ; with a new introduction by Merve Emre

Description: First edition, enlarged. | Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023008568 | ISBN 9780226830599 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226830605 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: English literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc. | English literature—Study and teaching—Case studies. | Capitalism and literature. | Literature and society. | Canon (Literature)

Classification: LCC PR21 .G85 2023 | DDC 820.90001—dc23/eng/20230417

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This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CULTURAL CAPITAL

THE PROBLEM OF LITERARY CANON FORMATION

JOHN GUILLORY

With a New Introduction by Merve Emre

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

CONTENTS

Introduction to the New Edition by Merve Emre

Preface

Acknowledgments

Part One: Critique

1. Canonical and Noncanonical: The Current Debate

Part Two: Case Studies

2. Mute Inglorious Miltons: Gray, Wordsworth, and the Vernacular Canon

3. Ideology and Canonical Form: The New Critical Canon

4. Literature after Theory: The Lesson of Paul de Man

Part Three: Aesthetics

5. The Discourse of Value: From Adam Smith to Barbara Herrnstein Smith

Notes

Index

INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION

Merve Emre

1

Already it is here, and flight is meaningless.

—CHRISTA WOLF, Cassandra

The thirty years that have passed since John Guillory published Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation have bestowed upon this magnificent book a strange and troubling air of prophecy. One cannot help but wonder what might have been different had its lessons reached readers more willing or able to appreciate them. In 1993, its readers were figures familiarly met in the groves of academe, the subjects of anecdotes innumerable: the tenured radicals, brandishing new canons of race, gender, and sexuality; the master theorists, who spoke and wrote in a hyperrefined language imported from the Continent; the polite, Arnoldian critics who fretted that literary studies had fallen into jargon, unnecessary abstraction, and cliquishness; the less polite and largely self-appointed defenders of the Western tradition and its great books; and the journalists for the popular media, who enjoyed amplifying the conflicts between these characters to a near hysterical pitch. The Battle of the Books, announced a New York Times headline about the ferocious debates over opening the canon. With bafflement and not a little wonder, the writer of the article observed, In the academic world, I kept hearing, the canon was 'a hot issue.’ ‘Everything these days has to do with the canon,’ one of my campus sources reported.¹

In 2023, readers of Cultural Capital are likely to look back on these professional melodramas with a sense of grim amusement. The characters seem like faded images from another world, their complaints quaint, their rhetoric overblown. Now, when we cast our minds back thirty years, we see not the crisis of the canon but the early stirrings of the so-called crisis of the humanities, the declining number of undergraduate majors willing to undergo force-feeding in writing skills, history, great books, and appropriate ‘values,’ as one critic put it. That memory is accompanied by a desperate anxiety about the future, an apprehension that it is too late to change things; that the die has been cast, the course charted; and that our most earnest attempts to imagine the future of literature otherwise must remain only a thought experiment, as Guillory describes his utopian vision for the arts at the end of Cultural Capital.

What use are thought experiments? It is possible, of course, that nothing would have changed had more people heeded the lessons of Cultural Capital, nothing other than the language in which teachers of literature think about and explain what is taught in their classrooms and why. This is the exceedingly modest intervention that Guillory lays claim to in the preface of his book, when he announces that he will introduce a new term, cultural capital, to an old and battered debate about the literary canon. Where the debate speaks of the literary canon, its inclusions and exclusions, I will speak of the school, he states: Where the debate speaks about the canon as representing or failing to represent particular social groups, I will speak of the school’s historical function of distributing, or regulating access to, the forms of cultural capital (xxxiii). To speak as he does is not to recuse himself from engaging with what is commonplace or urgent. It is to excavate the history sedimented in the present, to insist that we understand the future of literary study as conditioned by its past. Only then may we dispel certain confusions that have sowed dissension among critics who are more alike than they are different. Only then may we bring ambitious claims about literature’s purpose and aims—political, ethical, aesthetic, hedonistic, therapeutic—under a more strategic control.

We begin the first chapter, Canonical and Noncanonical: The Current Debate, with the phrase that has caused the greatest confusion, literary canon. Already, we hear a jangle of misapprehensions in the analogy it draws between the literary texts taught in the classroom and the scriptural canon’s settled texts. The notion of literature as a quasi-scriptural entity, containing the sacred signs of love, truth, and redemption, leads us not to revelation but to the insistent errors that characterize the language of canon critique on the right and the left alike. (A theme that recurs throughout Cultural Capital, the tendency of teachers and scholars to confuse the institution of the school for the institution of the church, is seeded here.) The first error derives from the conflation of "the process of selection," the process by which certain works are deemed canonical and others noncanonical, with "the process of exclusion," the process by which social minorities are denied access to power or political influence. The first error is compounded by a second and stranger error, the conflation of political representation in institutions of liberal democracy with symbolic representation in literary texts. "The latter sense of representation conceives the literary canon as a hypothetical image of social diversity, a kind of mirror in which social groups either see themselves, or do not see themselves, reflected, Guillory writes (7). What he calls an imaginary politics, a politics of the image," was the dominant mode of canon critique then, as it is today. Whatever its efficacy may be—and Guillory is careful not to deny its potential efficacy—it remains limited in its imagination of what the politics of literature entails.

Exclusion, selection, reflection, representation—these are the terms on which the canon wars of the last century were fought, and the terms that continue to inform debates about, for instance, decolonizing the curriculum and the rhetoric of antiracist pedagogy. To stress the strangeness of these terms is to insist that they were by no means inevitable, even if they were, as Guillory notes, beholden to a certain postmodern logic in which images and symbols order nearly all aspects of our lives. Rather, these terms and the theoretical errors they encode suggest a profound blindness to the institution lodged at the heart of the canon debates. This institution is the school, which regulates access to the means of literary production and consumption by regulating access to literacy, to the practices of reading and writing (xxxv). The school’s regulation of literacy begins with compulsory education in primary and secondary school and extends, for some, into the degree-granting programs of the university. Whatever enlivening intellectual or emotional experiences these years of schooling may offer—and for many, they offer them in spades—the role of the school in modern society is the reproduction of the social order, a vast and complex system of inequity. In a nation like the United States, in which higher education has never been a socialized good, the school, Guillory argues, grants restricted access to the know-how (to echo Louis Althusser) that entitles its possessor to the cultural and material rewards of the well-educated person (xxxv). He names as cultural capital the unequally distributed forms of linguistic and symbolic knowledge—ways of reading, writing, and speaking—that underwrite the production and consumption of literature.

Guillory borrows the term cultural capital from the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose approach, which Guillory alternately describes as Marxist and post-Marxist, clarifies the limits of the liberal pluralist framework from which the call to open the canon draws its energies. If the definition of cultural capital seems elusive, a little hard to pin down, this is because Bourdieu’s method, Guillory says, constructs the concept through the contexts in which it is deployed—that is, through the specific ways that different fields of power, of which education is only one, organize patterns of consumption, skills, and awards to confer symbolic distinctions. Yet Guillory offers a more straightforward and, indeed, rather charming definition in a subsequent essay, Bourdieu’s Refusal:

Cultural capital is certainly a species of symbolic capital generally, but it is a form of symbolic capital certifiable by objective mechanisms, most importantly, by the credentializing function of the school. In The Wizard of Oz, for example, we know that the Scarecrow has more than proven his intelligence and that he has acquired considerable symbolic capital based on that personal embodied quality. He only lacks, as the Wizard says, a diploma. It is the curious property of the diploma to certify his intelligence to those who may not be familiar with the Scarecrow’s accomplishments.²

The literary canon is one form cultural capital can assume in the school. What makes it essential for Guillory, however, is that the evaluative acts presupposed by canon formation—that is, the judgments of individual works—are always subordinate to the social function and institutional aims of the school. This grants the canon form the privilege of helping us reimagine the interplay of cultural and material life and how they shape the historical category of literature.

Guillory’s interest in how individual acts of evaluation converge with the socio-institutional conditions that determine the success of these acts is what makes Cultural Capital a sociology of judgment—a point that he stresses repeatedly but that has been largely overlooked in the reception of the book. If the canon wars are premised on a series of errors about the relationship between symbolic and representational politics, then these errors led to the greatest error of all: an error concerning the nature of judgment and its significance to the cultural capital of literature. For both progressive scholars and their conservative critics, judgment is subtended by the belief that literary texts are repositories for the values of their authors or the values of the social groups to which their authors belong. The selection of texts is thus understood as a selection of values that may be transmitted from author to reader, or teacher to student. This discourse of value makes it possible for critics of the canon to impugn the values according to which texts were canonized—the values of, for instance, straight white men educated in elite institutions—or to assert that these values were simply incompatible with the values of other, subordinate cultures.

This erroneous logic of judgment is an insult of sorts to literary texts and the remarkably complex, highly mediated ways that readers encounter them. It is a logic that has led both defenders and critics of the canon astray in their attempts to articulate what should be taught and why. If the canon’s defenders have typically justified their judgments by appealing to a universal or transcendental discourse of aesthetic value, then the canon’s critics have dismantled this fantasy only to replace it with a different, equally ahistorical one: that a text not selected for canonization "must be conceived of as the actively excluded, the object of a historical repression, Guillory summarizes (9). The critique of the canon has always constructed the history of canon formation as a conspiracy of judgment, a secret and exclusive ballot by which literary works are chosen for canonization because their authors belong to the same social group as the judges themselves, or because these works express the values of the dominant group" (28). The somewhat paranoid belief in this conspiracy of judgment has resulted in an incoherent approach to canon reform. On the one hand, proponents of the integrationist approach have elected as canonical texts previously taken to be noncanonical. On the other, proponents of the separatist approach have attempted to establish distinct canons of texts keyed to particular races, genders, sexualities, and ethnicities, each premised on the fantasy of a consensus reached outside the influence of dominant groups.

The relevant question for a sociology of judgment is not: why is this text or author in the canon, while this text or author is not? Rather, it is: under what conditions do the judgments of certain texts accrue the kind of force and longevity that leads people to assert with striking regularity, with a perfectly unproven confidence, that these texts belong to, or somehow constitute, the literary canon? To phrase the question as such is to begin to recognize that there is something amiss in the fixity we have ascribed to the canon, something peculiar about the claim that a text is definitively canonical when the canon is nothing we can point to; nothing that can be objectified in the form of a list; nothing that can be winnowed down to ten, or fifteen, or fifty texts when there exists an astonishing variety in what students who enroll in literature classes or major in literature are required to read and what the instructors who teach those classes are required to assign.

The canon is an imaginary list, an imaginary totality, Guillory argues (30). It is a shared symbol, a common idea that has helped teachers, students, and readers at large make sense of the social whole of literature during an epoch of intense cultural fragmentation. For both the left and the right, canon formation offers a nostalgic fantasy of unity, of access to a closure, completeness, and shared national tradition. By contrast to the canon, the actual instruments of the school are the syllabus and the curriculum. The project of opening the canon has been, quite straightforwardly, a matter of changing the syllabus, usually by replacing older works, written at a time when access to literacy was most restricted, with newer ones, written once the school had opened its doors not just to more people in general, but to people of new and varying social identities. The confusion of the syllabus with the canon thus inaugurates a pedagogy of misreading, Guillory writes, since the individual works are stripped of historical context (34). Absorbed into the apparent unity of the canon form, they become available for the presentist values of either dominant or subordinate groups.

How might we restore history to these texts and thereby inoculate them against misreading? First, by separating research, the work of producing specialist knowledge about literature, from teaching, the work of modeling both the pleasure and the performance of reading for others. The separatist canons are, at heart, research programs, Guillory observes, and they should not be used to justify separate programs of study for separate constituencies. He imagines instead an integrated curriculum, one in which all the works taught, whether written by minority or nonminority authors, would be subject to the same judgment and justification: that "the school has the social obligation of providing access to these works, because they are important and significant cultural works" (52). Second, teachers should counteract the fetishization of modern works by stressing the importance of historical ones. It is just as important for both minority and nonminority students to study historical works as it is for both groups to study modern works, Guillory argues: The cultures which give rise to them are as other to all of us as minority cultures are to some of us (53). To insist that the Victorian and Romantic periods or, more distant yet, the early modern, medieval, and ancient worlds are alien to those of us who live in 2023 is to reorient the concept of minority culture along a different, more expansive axis. It is to infuse it with a sense of history.

In a stunning display of his own historical knowledge, Guillory closes the introduction by taking his reader on a whirlwind tour through the rise and fall of the cultural capital of literature—and, by extension, the evolution of what kinds of texts the category of literature names. Against essentialist accounts that insist on an ontology of literariness—that its being is poetic, paradoxical, and estranging—he insists that we understand literature as a historical category, one whose precise constitution as both a collection of written genres and a spoken sociolect, or literary language, remains subject to change. The story of this change spans, in the final act of Guillory’s introduction, from the Roman educational system and its rhetorical training to the medieval scriptorium, the Renaissance humanist project, the vernacular canon, and, in our own century, the rise of professional sociolects and their technical jargons and styles of speech. The present marks a turning point in Guillory’s narrative. Whereas, from the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, literature provided the linguistic paradigm for the reading and writing practices of the entire educated class—it was the cultural capital of the old bourgeoisie, he writes—now this function is served by the composition curriculum (45). And not just the composition curriculum but, increasingly, the profession-specific composition syllabus: Writing in Business Administration, Writing for Premed, Writing in Economics. In Cultural Capital, the true crisis of the literary canon is not that it fails to represent marginalized identities or that it has abandoned its previously impeccable standards of aesthetic judgment. It is that the professional managerial class no longer has any use for the cultural capital of the old bourgeoisie.

2

There is an obvious difference between someone who works within the technical limitations of his time which are beyond his control and someone who accepts without thinking limitations which are entirely within his own power to set aside.

—HELEN DEWITT, The Last Samurai

If the canon form is the general guise that cultural capital assumes, then one way to narrate the evolution of literary study in the school is to examine seismic shifts in the configuration of the canon—that is, the centrality of specific evaluative judgments of specific texts at specific moments in time. Each of the three case studies that anchors Cultural Capital aims to do just that, by concentrating deeply, ferociously, on the aesthetics of a single poem or a single oeuvre to explain the emergence of a distinctive canon and its social function. Sometimes, cultural capital is constituted primarily by linguistic capital, as in Guillory’s discussion of the rise of the vernacular curriculum and the eclipse of the classical curriculum in the first case study, Mute Inglorious Miltons: Gray, Wordsworth, and the Vernacular Canon. Sometimes it is a blend of linguistic and symbolic capital, as in the New Critics’ gravitation to the language of paradox and the technique of close reading, the focus of the second case study, Ideology and Canonical Form: The New Critical Canon, or Paul de Man’s charismatic fetishization of the science of language, considered in the third case study, Literature after Theory: The Lesson of Paul de Man. Guillory denies at the outset that he has set out to produce a history of literary study, and indeed, Cultural Capital bears little resemblance to a book like Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature, which painstakingly sifts through university course catalogs and the minutes of professional associations to extract a coherent account of what may seem an incoherent discipline. Yet there is a strong historical arc, as Guillory’s case studies usher us from the desks of eighteenth-century primary schools, down the halls of the twentieth-century college, and into the graduate student lounges of the contemporary research university.

Before following that arc, however, we should note that the term case study has been chosen instead of the more familiar chapter. Like cultural capital, the term is borrowed from sociology, where it signifies a strict protocol for calibrating different scales of analysis: first, between increasingly large and more expansive units of social formation; second, between a single example and a general claim about the organization of social relations. The persuasive force of the three case studies derives as much from their precise and harmonious organization as from their arguments. Each is structured by the arrangement of four phenomena, occurring almost simultaneously: a shift in the economic conditions of cultural production in general and literary production in particular; a crisis in the idea of what literature is and what function it should serve; a corresponding change in institutional pedagogy at a specific level of the school system; and a judgment of a literary text or group of texts, which, through Guillory’s masterful readings, become fully saturated by all the other aspects of his analysis. The history of literature, the history of textual canons, the history of languages—these histories yield nothing but facts if they do not bring into view this structural arrangement, he writes (71). Everything in Cultural Capital is made to occupy its proper place, to serve its proper function. This can render its arguments curiously resistant to paraphrase, as if what one must summarize is not a single claim, not one part of a vast system of reading and writing, but the entire organization of social relations in the crosshairs of history.

The voice that narrates—perhaps I should say the voice that orders—the parts in relation to the whole is patient, erudite, and wonderfully fastidious. At times, it is relentless, twisting and turning a common word or phrase to ensure that it is examined from all possible angles; having read this book, one will never again use words like diction, paradox, or rigor without considerable forethought. At times, it seems to speak from a place of Olympian detachment. But when the prose comes down to earth, it can be extremely witty—wickedly so—and occasionally melancholy. One of the enduring peculiarities of Cultural Capital is that, for all its resistance to essentialist claims about the nature of literature, the writing itself often approaches the qualities claimed as inherently literary: an ingenious facility with metaphor; an immunity to paraphrase; the shifting presence, or absence, of the author and his authority, which, as we will see, has had curious implications for the book’s afterlife.

We begin in the primary schools of the eighteenth century, the moment when the vernacular English canon entered the school system, attended by a far-reaching teaching apparatus of anthologies, elocution training, and commonplace books. The institutional history is sketched swiftly and cleanly, connecting the emergence of the vernacular canon to the rise of commerce and the vocational academies. If the vocational academies offered courses in skills necessary for an increasingly international commercial scene—practical sciences, mathematics, geography, French, Dutch—their growing prominence was paralleled by a deterioration in the education offered by the grammar schools, which in the previous several centuries had been essential institutions for disseminating classical literacy. The consequence of these linked economic and educational changes was the beginning of a schism in the constitution of cultural capital, marked, on the one side, by the aristocracy’s purportedly useless—and because useless, noble—knowledge of Latin and Greek and, on the other side, by the commercial class’s conflicting desires to eschew and to emulate the knowledge of the aristocracy.

These desires were partially reconciled by the vernacular curriculum, which simultaneously revalued vernacular works as the equals of classical ones and normalized a polite language of letters, a form of linguistic capital that allowed those who were not noble by birth to nevertheless claim various political entitlements. This distinct sociolect was a prelude to the appearance of the bourgeoisie as a more stable class location and identity, one cultivated through access to the school. Far from being the normal or anticipated outcome of schooling, as it now is, the prospect of upward social mobility through education posed a potentially incendiary problem for established English society, whose barons, lords, and clergymen were threatened by the devaluation of their cultural capital relative to that of the middling classes. The first case study thereby portends the momentous upheaval of a class structure divided into the aristocracy and the free peasantry.

The competition between vernacular and classical literacy, the confusion between aristocratic and nascent bourgeois norms—all this was supremely instanced, for Guillory, by Thomas Gray’s 1751 Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. The Elegy was our poem of poems, quipped Edward Gosse, arguably the most widely anthologized poem, and especially useful for introducing students to the study of literature. Its cento of quotable quotations—Guillory’s memorable description of the poem’s compositional aesthetic—absorbed both classical and vernacular works into its linguistically homogeneous form, the proto-‘Standard English’ of mid-eighteenth-century England (92). Standard English would soon become the linguistic capital of the bourgeoisie. Within the still metamorphosing world of the Elegy, however, its emergent language standard remained suspended within the transition from mercantilism to capitalism.

Nearly two centuries later, the Elegy would be criticized by William Empson for its complacent attitude toward inequality, as conveyed by the tone of the poem’s speaker, who is content to depict the short and simple annals of the poor and illiterate without expressing any interest in reforming their living conditions. While not disputing Empson’s judgment in its entirety, Guillory insists that this society was not as settled as it might have appeared, that the setting of the Elegy was a place of vertiginous homelessness—a haunting phrase—an empty pastoral landscape in which the redistribution of cultural capital had thrown the class structure into a state of terrible confusion (118). Into this confusion wandered Gray’s melancholic speaker, a gentleman pretending to be a peasant, a Renaissance anachronism adrift in the eighteenth century. His diction was neither humble nor privileged, neither the speech of a literary blowhard nor the silence of some mute inglorious Milton. He was not yet legible as what we would today call a striver, a careerist, or an upstart, the bourgeois archetypes who make themselves available for resentment and scorn. Rather, his pathos and his solitude expressed "the contradiction between emulation (or ambition) and its systematic self-repression" (114). In his moment of origin, he remained stranded between the bourgeois and the aristocratic habitus, which were keyed to the vernacular and the classical canons, respectively.

In the second case study, T. S. Eliot’s devaluation of Milton and revaluation of the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets conducts us from the nineteenth century into the first half of the twentieth, the moment when the canon of the university became sharply differentiated from that of the primary and secondary schools. The reputation of any individual author Eliot passed judgment on was less important than the reason Eliot felt the need to reassess reputations in the first place, Guillory explains. As with all projects of revaluation, Eliot’s was born out of a common perception of a crisis in the state of literary culture, a certain perceived disorder of culture that had intensified with the spread of what was, in England, decried as mass civilization and, in the United States, as mass culture (135, 139). With the growing popularity of dime novels, dance-hall songs, and confession magazines, and the parallel decline of classical poetry and criticism, what could we properly call our cultural tradition? Eliot’s judgments were important because they altered the set of terms by which the culture of the school was put into relation with mass culture and, by extension, altered how the totality of literature was imagined. His judgments were based on his claim for the preeminence of orthodox minor poets over heterodox major poets—that is, the superiority of poets who adhered to tradition over poets who broke from it and, in doing so, seemed to amplify the sense of cultural disorder that threatened the moderns. The horizon of the problem for which the figure of the minor poet provided a historical solution, Guillory argues, was never less than culture in general—specifically, the ability of a minor or marginalized cultural formation, like literature, to impose an alternative, utopian order onto a fractious and disintegrating world (151).

Minor was one of the terms that would anchor Eliot’s revisionary bid for the cultural capital of literature; another was sensibility, the power of quick and strong perception and emotion, in Matthew Arnold’s words. Sensibility was a peculiar aptitude whose tacit, unconscious, or self-evident quality Eliot contrasted to belief, the explicit or doctrinal form for the expression of ideology. For Eliot, the ideal order of literature would be able to install a strong literary sensibility in absolutely everyone, no matter their religious or class affiliation, and, as Guillory explains, would serve the social function of neutralizing the very political ideologies which set the classes in opposition to one another (136). This was not to claim that literature was itself removed from the operations of ideology. Rather, the specificity of literature as an ideological form resided precisely in its resistance to doctrine and, by extension, doctrine’s capacity to divide the world into proselytizers and heretics, into social positions of orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Literature, for Eliot, more closely resembled what Bourdieu called doxa, a belief system powerful and pervasive enough to require no undisguised advocacy of its cause.

A quick glance at even the most sophisticated consumer’s bookshelf or browsing history confirms that neither Eliot nor the New Critics influenced by his judgments managed to install a doxa-like literary sensibility in the cultural masses. The only avenue for them to claim victory for minority culture was to retreat into the university. The school became for them the necessary site of adversarial culture, Guillory writes (140). It was a space of deliberate and strategic withdrawal . . . of literary culture from ‘the world’ (165)—a withdrawal whose trace remains in the frequent insistence that, upon leaving school, a reader finally enters the real world. Yet once the institution was tasked with the overt function of preserving an increasingly marginalized literary tradition, doxa degraded into orthodoxy, and sensibility hardened into belief. The problem became how to express the orthodoxy of literature without representing the university as "an institution too like the church" (140).

For Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, literary sensibility would be disseminated in the university through the pedagogy of close reading. Its central term was paradox, which offered a solution to the problem of how to smuggle orthodoxy in under the cover of literature. Paradox, Guillory argues, detected in the formal features of literature the hidden theme of orthodoxy, a strict and secret adherence to doctrine. Yet paradox was itself an inherently heterodox notion, naming a discrepancy between different levels of interpretation or advocacy. Eliot’s history of literature as the story of a split between orthodoxy and heterodoxy was appropriated by the New Critics in their allegorical readings of paradox, bringing to light the inherent ironies and ambiguities of the literary text.

What is particularly compelling today is the reminder—for some scholars, it may be a revelation—that paradox is not the essence of literary language but a historically and politically specific discourse. Paradox named a strategy of interpretation that allowed the New Critics to discover in the major poets what Eliot exalted in the minor ones. Through his searching and energetic analysis of Brooks’s The Well Wrought Urn and the poem that guides it, John Donne’s The Canonization, Guillory tracks the New Critical maneuvers by which every poem was transformed into an image of the school: a well-wrought urn filled with the ashes of greatness, an enclosed space in which literary culture’s melodrama of loss and rebirth may be reenacted indefinitely. The New Critics’ belief that all literature spoke the language of paradox allowed them, Guillory argues, to hold up paradox as evidence of a ‘unity of experience’ no longer available to dissociated moderns, though we moderns may continue to contemplate what we have lost in the experience of the literary artifact (157). In pursuing the fall of literary culture from doxa into orthodoxy, sensibility into paradox, mass culture into school culture, the second case study measures the growing distance between a highly muscular fantasy of literature—that it plays the most important role in the ideological production in the social order (153)—and its actual effect, which is considerably less than what either the New Critics or their descendants, the critics of the canon, would like to believe.

We are propelled into what was once the near present, to the rise and fall of theory and of the figure who stands in a highly vexed relationship to it, Paul de Man. And not just de Man, but de Man’s disciples, the graduate students whose love for their teacher, their master, is the subject of the third case study. What was it about Paul de Man that provoked such intensity of feeling? wondered the correspondent for the New York Times in a 1988 article titled The Case of Paul de Man, one of the many pieces chronicling the revelation and the aftershocks of de Man’s wartime journalism.³ The final and longest case study answers this question with an account of theory’s relationship to charisma—those special gifts of the body and spirit, gifts believed to be supernatural and not accessible to everybody, wrote Max Weber. The dissemination of the nonliterary canon of theory alongside the literary canon was made possible by the charisma of the master theorist, Guillory suggests. The peculiar intensity of de Man’s charisma was inseparable from his notion of rhetorical reading, his equation of literature with the figural potential of language. This equation was the ideology of theory, and it authorized the boundless expansion of the literary critic’s remit to all texts, all instances of language use, and every aspect of social life. Rhetorical reading turned the social into the symbolic, a transfiguration that mirrored canonical critique’s conflation of the politics of representation with the politics of the image. The difference between the two was, above all, a difference in tone; theory was discreet, canonical critique indiscreet in its ambitions.

In assessing the fraught legacy of de Man, Guillory’s interest in psychoanalysis, a covert thread in Cultural Capital up to this point, is pulled into full view, with a startlingly dramatic reading of the transference and countertransference dynamics of de Man’s pedagogy in the graduate seminar. The reading opens with a provocative claim: the social relation between teacher and student oddly effaces its institutional conditions in producing nothing less than a kind of love (182). Nothing less than a kind of love—the phrase is almost Jamesian in its evasiveness, its air of hesitance. Why not call love by its name? Because, we learn, this love was restless, indirect, and self-deceiving; good at covering its own tracks. Sometimes it was the disciple’s love for the master, or the transference of the disciple; other times, it was the disciple’s love for what the master teaches, for the master’s texts and theories, for the transference transferred. The transformation of transference into transference transferred was facilitated by the master’s countertransference response, which refused to recognize teaching as an intersubjective relation, as de Man wrote in The Resistance to Theory. He insisted his disciples turn a blind eye to the psychodynamics force of his persona. And he insisted they watch as, in one book after another, he wove this blindness to the self—the death of the subject—into the cornerstone of his theory.

To deny the intersubjective dimension of teaching is to attempt to purge both human genius and human error from the teaching of literature; to displace love from the person who compels it onto an imitable style, the hazy, if seductive, fantasy of a replicable method. For de Man, it was to present theory as a technical science not unlike the sciences housed in more protected departments of the postwar research university. The application of this science to an ever-greater repertoire of authors and texts will in fact be the task of literary criticism in the coming years, de Man prophesied, a prophecy to which Guillory returns several times to reveal its hollowness, its falsity.

The research university was the specifically American institutional context from which theory—a dense jungle, a tropical French colony, according to writers for the popular media—derived its significance, particularly its political significance. While it was true that rhetorical reading espoused no positive political content, it functioned "as a political theory just by virtue of being no more than a theory of literature, Guillory argues (236). For de Man, the ideology of theory as a science offered a justification for departments to excuse themselves from the project of reproducing universal humanist values, of providing political, ethical, aesthetic, and quasi-spiritual instruction to the unwashed undergraduate masses. At the same time, this ideology carved out for the master theorist an external vantage point on the institution of the school. What was the school but a series of utterances he could deconstruct? Theory anointed the master with an aura of anti-institutionality. He was part renegade, part exile. His outsider status seemed to be confirmed by the resistance to theory" that issued from everywhere—from the university, the profession, the xenophobic and melodramatic journalists. But here Guillory points out the obvious. It was only from within the university that theory could have emerged. It was only within the university that it stood any chance of survival. Yet theory had to deny that dependence to secure for its practitioners an oppositional, if largely imaginary, position outside the school and its institutional conditions.

Blinded by de Man’s charisma, by the dazzle of his anti-institutional posturing, his disciples failed to recognize what was, in retrospect, right in front of their noses. The apparently unrestrained charisma of the master theorist existed in a thrilling, tragic tension with his career as an office holder: first as an assistant professor, then an associate professor, a full professor, a director of graduate studies, a department chair, and a dean. His charisma was fused to the reorganization of intellectual labor along technobureaucratic lines, in which the career of the professor mimed the career of the bureaucrat rising through the tiers of the modern corporation. Only in this context can we understand the total importance of theory’s valorization of all that is technical and scientific, its fetishization of rigor as the privileged standard for assessing scholarship. On the one hand, theory transformed reading into an "unconscious mimesis of the form of bureaucratic labor, Guillory argues, insisting that technically correct rhetorical readings are, in de Man’s words, boring, monotonous, predictable, and unpleasant" (257). On the other hand, it generated the charismatic aura that allowed the master theorists to make a bid for autonomy in graduate training, the only level of the school system at which such autonomy could be secured.

Once the master theorist’s charisma was routinized, once rigor had become de rigueur, the disciplines could no longer remain blind to the problem for which theory offered only the most temporary solution. The master theorist was never an outsider to the profession of literature. He was the most insider of figures: the academic superstar, the hottest of hot commodities, a brand name bought and sold by the upper-level administrators who purchased his intellectual labor and, in doing so, fortified the illusion of autonomy that trailed in his wake. But there can only be so many stars in a shrinking system. The master theorist’s charisma may have been imitable. His career was not. The failure of theory to secure professional or intellectual autonomy for the master’s disciples presaged the current crisis of graduate education, the crisis of the academic job market, as it is commonly called. The legions of talented graduate students today who find themselves precariously employed or underemployed, or who fail to find employment at all, may become visible to us as the disinherited descendants of the master theorists.

We are enjoined to return to de Man’s prophecy about rhetorical reading’s dissemination: This will in fact be the task of literary criticism in the coming years. It seems to be a command to the disciples, who, armed with their master’s method, would venture ever farther afield from the authors comprising his personal canon. But the statement’s rhetorical mode was not the cri de coeur of the prophet warrior. Instead, the prophet theorist spoke in the dry, uninspiring "style of the memo, the humblest text of bureaucracy, Guillory observes: It reports on the future productivity of rhetorical reading. But to whom is the memo addressed?" (258-59). The master did not command his disciples anymore. The university did—it always had—and, by the turn of century, it was perfectly capable of producing the Hochsprache of the New Class, the professional managerial class, through the syllabus of composition, whose nonfiction syllabus bore no necessary relation to either the literary canon or the canon of theory. Here, then, is a new ‘political’ question: What is the systemic relation between the syllabus of composition and the syllabus of theory? Guillory asks (264). The question goes unanswered in Cultural Capital. To whom is it addressed?

De Man’s prophecy appears for the final time in the final paragraph of the case study, in a more intriguing and ambiguous register:

If literary criticism is ever to conceptualize a new disciplinary domain, it will have to undertake first a much more thorough reflection on the historical category of literature; otherwise I suggest that new critical moments will continue to register their agendas symptomatically, by ritually overthrowing a continually resurgent literariness and literary canon. At the same time it is unquestionably the case that the several recent crises of the literary canon—its opening to philosophical works, to works by minorities, and now to popular and mass cultural works—amounts to a terminal crisis, more than sufficient evidence of the urgent need to reconceptualize the object of literary study. One may predict, without resorting to prophecy, that such reconceptualization will become the task of literary criticism in the coming years. (265)

The statement remains in quotation marks, transforming it into an act of double voicing that would have fascinated, among others, de Man. We may ask of Guillory the same question he asks of de Man: To whom has this task been given? Who will reconceptualize the object of literary study? Does quoting de Man retain some of the charisma of prophecy while disguising it in the more neutral, self-effacing language of prediction? A master who refuses to instruct his disciples may evade some of the problems of discipleship. But does he suffer a loss in turn? Maybe. If so, its pathos is not the pathos of rhetorical reading—that it is, in the final analysis, boring, predictable, bureaucratic. It is the hopeless poignancy of the good advice that no one took. Perhaps they could not decide whether it was advice or not. Or perhaps they simply did not know how to take it. The example set for them was inimitable, sui generis.

3

Into how small a space the word judgment can be compressed; it must fit inside the brain of a ladybug as she, before my eyes, makes a decision.

—LYDIA DAVIS, Judgment

To forget the past is to misunderstand the present and to fail to prepare for the future effectively, strategically. The most needless sacrifice made on the altar of the canon and its imaginary politics has been the discrediting of judgment, Guillory observes, as though human beings could ever refrain from judging the things they make (xl). If there is anything that he is compelled to speak of in transhistorical terms, it is judgment. Judgment, like aesthetics, arguably refers to an aspect of human existence that is immemorial, he writes in his subsequent book, Professing Criticism.⁴ If there is an ideology that animates Cultural Capital, then it is to be found in this claim concerning the omnipresence of both aesthetic experience and our evaluative responses to it. This holds true even though the practice of aesthetic judgment may be formalized differently for different groups of people—professors, students, critics, reviewers—or not formalized at all.

Judgment is the secret coordinate, the hidden nerve of Cultural Capital. It rises to the surface of the book in its final chapter, The Discourse of Value: From Adam Smith to Barbara Herrnstein Smith, which still strikes me as the source of Guillory’s most important and unappreciated lessons.⁵ It is here that he unfurls his broadest argument about the relation of the economic to the cultural domain, a relation that the participants in the canon wars can conceive of only as a problem of value: the canon is either an affair of pure values and eternal verities, according to one contemporary commentator, or an opportunity to elevate values of feminist interpretation, according to another—where one could replace feminist with any identity category. For Guillory, the conflation of all aesthetic experience with this reductive discourse of aesthetic value is why judgment has been thoroughly discredited. The best representative of this conflation is Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s 1988 book Contingencies of Value, which postulates that any judgment one expresses of a literary text is entirely the result of a contingency, an estimate of how well that work will serve certain implicitly defined functions for a specific implicitly defined audience, who are conceived of as experiencing the work under certain implicitly defined conditions.⁶ According to Herrnstein Smith’s theory of judgment, the value of a text is determined by its adaptability to the evolving contingences of communities of readers, with more structurally complex and, in the technical sense, information-rich texts standing a greater chance of survival over time.⁷

Herrnstein Smith’s Darwinian relativism is picked apart doggedly, brutally, to the point where it would feel mildly sadistic to rehearse Guillory’s moves here. The broader point he makes is straightforward. An account like hers depends on a reductive logic of value similar to the one that both defenders and critics of the canon have espoused. But, Guillory reminds us, there existed a discourse of aesthetics prior to value. It has been forgotten not only by left-liberal critics like Herrnstein Smith but by Marxist ones like Tony Bennett, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, and Frank Lentricchia, who have attempted to rinse from Marx’s view of Kunst his claims for the transhistorical appeal of the art of Greek antiquity.

What is at stake in this forgetting is nothing less than the whole history of political economy, the complicated process by which the commodity form and the work of art became irrevocably tangled up with each other across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The transition from an aristocratic model of patronage to a modern marketplace for goods was marked by the emergence of civil society, a distinct and relatively autonomous sector of the social order, the sector of competition, commerce, and production, Guillory argues (304). It yielded a new class of cultural producers, hustling, jostling against one another to exchange their growing array of products in an ever-expanding scene of commerce, Against this new backdrop of variety and opulence, amid the fear that consumers of the middling classes would evince the same greed and hedonism historically associated with the aristocracy, moral philosophers began to formulate the first theories of taste to discipline consumption. While they did not possess the conceptual vocabulary to relate the economic to the cultural systemically—the language of class was not yet available—they could champion the acute and delicate discernment of the man of taste, who distinguishes the minute, and scarce perceptible differences of beauty and deformity, as Adam Smith described in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

The moral philosophers of the period aspired to discipline taste so that production could exist in proportion to consumption, the one balanced against the other just as, in a beautiful work of art, the parts exist harmoniously within the whole. The analogy between the aesthetic and the social led to the earliest stirrings of a theory of taste, which was trained on the thriving market for goods. The preliminary step in this training was the categorization of objects, with the creation of a distinct name, the Fine Arts, for commodities that appeared to encourage the virtuous contemplation of beauty exclusive of mere sensual gratification. Here it is worth quoting at length from what is arguably the most important paragraph in Cultural Capital, on the origins of the work of art and the discourse of value:

The uneasiness of the first consumer society with the lack of any systematic regulation of consumption produced as its end result a very curious new object: what we call the work of art. Acknowledging the novelty of this object does not require us to deny the existence of poems or paintings before the eighteenth century, but rather to measure the effect of generalized commodity exchange on the discursive classification of objects, as well as on the practice of producing them. The work of art at the beginning of the eighteenth century is yet any made thing, but as Adam Smith’s tale of the manufacture of the pin in The Wealth of Nations reveals, there emerged in the course of the century, as a result of an increasingly complex division of labor, marvelous new ways to make things. If the faculty of taste was to be exercised in the domain of consumption, it might proceed first to exclude from the objects presented to judgment the large category of objects which did not fall within the category of the Fine Arts. Nevertheless such a sharp distinction was troubled by the production at its border of objects which shared some features of both categories: On the one side, for example, novels and prints, which could mimic aspects of manufacture for the general population; and on the other, commodities of manifest utility which yet incorporated elements of design borrowed from the Fine Arts (Wedgwood china, or Chippendale furniture). It was the apparent continuum of production, then, which required the exercise of taste, or a faculty of discrimination in the realm of consumption. Production and consumption proved to be the recto and verso of civil society, and a claim for civil society’s autonomy in the sphere of the economic required a similar claim on behalf of cultural production. This claim took the form characteristically of a defense of the faculty of taste that was not legislated, but which nevertheless obeyed an implicit law, a je ne sais quoi. (307-8)

From this history, we may see how a rich and variegated continuum became a tidy dichotomy, the double discourse of value (308), that distinguishes objects by utility versus contemplation. If they are directed to the end of use, then they are commodities, objects of craft; if they are directed to the end of cogitation or perhaps even reverie, then they are works of art. The amnesia that afflicts the discourse of value, whether espoused by conservatives, liberals, or Marxists, makes it possible to believe that there exists a space of pure aesthetic production, buffering artists and the objects they make from market forces, just as it makes it possible to believe that those cultural productions that bear the mark of the market are tainted, degraded, inferior, or, quite simply, unavailable for aesthetic experience at all. The conjunction of the economic and the aesthetic that generated this quintessentially bourgeois division between the commodity and the work of art has been repressed, with grave consequences for the practice of judgment.

How would the sociology of judgment change if access to cultural capital were not unequally regulated by the school? How would we express our tastes or cultivate the practice of criticism if the overfamiliar hierarchies of judgment—avant-garde art over popular art, literary fiction over genre fiction, form over content—were to vanish? If we no longer felt compelled to chase cultural distinction, the gratification of being recognized as the kind of discriminating and urbane person who consumes High Art, over and above the mingled joys, as Proust beautifully put it, of art, erudition, and sensuousness? How would we identify or communicate the specifically aesthetic pleasure that accompanies our experience of all cultural objects?

The final appeal that Cultural Capital makes is to a brief thought experiment that Marx undertakes in The German Ideology. In imagining the communist organization of society, Marx speculates that eradicating the division of labor will also eradicate the distinction that accrues to artists as what he calls unique laborers, in contrast to those merely human ones. In a communist society, Marx explains, there are no painters but at most people who engage in painting among other activities.⁸ The ideal horizon of cultural production is the disappearance of the painter, the writer, the actor, the composer—or rather, the disappearance of painting, writing, acting, and composing as domains of autonomous production, their agents beholden to separate protocols of creation and evaluation from the rest of humankind.

For Guillory, what disappears in Marx reappears in Bourdieu’s sociology as the universalization of the field of restricted production, a system which produces cultural goods objectively designed for a public of producers of cultural goods.⁹ In Bourdieu’s model of the social universe, as in Marx’s thought experiment, there would be no painters—only people painting for others who could also engage in painting should they so choose. The only distinctions between the objects they produced would be symbolic distinctions. Cultural producers would still compete to have their products read, studied, looked at, heard, lived in, sung, worn, and would still accumulate cultural capital in the form of ‘prestige’ or fame, Guillory writes (339). Rather than proxying inequalities of class or education, this form of cultural capital—call it the utopian form—would be expressed as distinctions in lifestyle, in the myriad ways that people would choose to speak, act, dress, play, and eat, along with what they would choose to read and watch and listen to. The result would be a spectacular liberation of aesthetic judgment from the institutions of the advantaged, its overflow into the activities of everyday living.

"We must—I have never stopped repeating it—work to universalize in reality the conditions of access to what the present offers us that is most universal," Bourdieu insists.¹⁰ What is universal and immemorial for Guillory is judgment, which no amount of skepticism or moralism can purge from the realm of human existence. It would be a fool’s errand to attempt it, and though there are fools in our midst, we would do well not to count ourselves among them. Cultural Capital ends with a proposal that sounds modest but is, in truth, completely radical:

In a culture of such universal access, canonical works could not be experienced as they so often are, as lifeless monuments, or as proofs of class distinction. Insofar as the debate on the canon has tended to discredit aesthetic judgment, or to express a certain embarrassment with its metaphysical pretensions and its political biases, it has quite missed the point. The point is not to make judgment disappear but to reform the conditions of its practice. If there is no way out of the game of culture, then, even when cultural capital is the only kind of capital, there may be another kind of game, with less dire consequences for the losers, an aesthetic game. Socializing the means of production and consumption would be the condition of an aestheticism unbound, not its overcoming. But of course, this is only a thought experiment. (340)

Guillory would elaborate the rules for playing an aesthetic game some years later, in his contribution to a delightful little book called Pleasure and Change, a transcript of Frank Kermode’s Tanner Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley. Their subject is the relationship between pleasure and the canon, not in itself an obvious source of delight, Kermode admits. "By a series of institutional decisions, a very large number of people of whom it might be said that they are paid to do the community’s serious reading for it, ceased to talk much about