Gary Burns

SOURCE: "Television and the Crisis in the Humanities," in Journal of Popular Film and Television, Vol. 19, No. 3, Fall, 1991, pp. 98-105.

[In the following essay, Burns defends television against criticism that it is responsible for a decline in American cultural literacy and champions media studies as a legitimate subject of academic inquiry. ]

Comes now TV Guide complaining that "54 percent of Americans know that Judge [Joseph] Wapner runs The People's Court but only 9 percent know that Justice William Rehnquist heads the Supreme Court." Lest readers miss the point of this supposedly shocking allegation (drawn from an unidentified survey), TV Guide solemnly concludes: "That's a sad commentary on the public's legal savvy."¹

Of course, one could look at it another way and say that it is a sad commentary on the Supreme Court. The "legal savvy" of Americans has probably increased as a result of The People's Court—more people probably know that small claims court exists and is available to anyone who wants to use it. On the other hand, the Supreme Court is remote, arcane, and (as a cynic might conclude) primarily concerned with disputes among people and groups rich enough to hire lawyers to pursue the matter that far.

This is not to say that The People's Court is a masterpiece of public service, entertainment, or art. Its appeal lies not in any kind of "legal savvy," however meager, but in the judge's personality and the lurid disputes he presides over. The problem with the TV Guide article is that it illogically implies some serious deficiency in Americans' legal knowledge, which is operationally defined as familiarity with Rehnquist. Having set up this false crisis, the article pretends to blame TV (as if TV Guide ever really blames TV) but actually blames the audience. Then the article does a pseudo-about-face and says that the solution to the alleged problem is more TV, in the form of the new cable channel Court TV, which signed on 1 July 1991, with round-the-clock legal programming, including actual courtroom proceedings from around the country (as if this will increase the percentage of Americans who can name Rehnquist, much less increase their real legal knowledge).

I begin with this example because it treats television as a site of crisis. Americans should know Rehnquist (high culture), but instead they know Wapner (low culture). The audience has failed to reach a desirable level of cultural literacy. The culprits are audience members themselves, the inferior form of television they bring about through their viewing choices, and (by implication) the educational system whose job it really is to teach people about our revered legal institutions.

In both form and function, this line of reasoning bears strong resemblance to many of the recent, well-publicized exposés of American education. The Wapner-Rehnquist comparision, although a minor part of the TV Guide article, is illustrative of a type of statistic widely used to sound alarm—a certain percentage of some surveyed group does not know some fact. A quarter of college seniors cannot "distinguish between the thoughts of Karl Marx and the United States Constitution." Forty-two percent "could not place the Civil War in the correct half-century." Fifty-eight percent "did not know Shakespeare wrote The Tempest." Seventy-five percent of Americans could not locate the Persian Gulf on a map. And so forth.²

In a similar vein, William Bennett, then head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, used smokinggun statistics from the American Council on Education to support his 1984 call for reform in humanities instruction in higher education: "a student can obtain a bachelor's degree from 75 percent of all American colleges and universities without having studied European history; from 72 percent without having studied American literature or history; and from 86 percent without having studied the civilizations of classical Greece and Rome."³ Bennett continues with numerous other statistics, all in support of his thesis that humanities education is in a state of disarray.

Bennett's is only one voice in the strident chorus of conservative criticism aimed at higher education over the past several years. Other architects of the conservative critique include Allan Bloom, Dinesh D'Souza, Roger Kimball, Russell Kirk, Charles Sykes, Hilton Kramer, and current NEH head Lynne Cheney. This group is by no means monolithic, but there is enough agreement among them that we can give a fairly detailed and unproblematic account of what we might identify as the conservative position.

That position is that there is a crisis in the humanities or in liberal education (hence D'Souza's phrase "illiberal education").⁴ The principal evidence of the crisis is the various statistics, plus anecdotal evidence, about what students do not know. This student ignorance is the effect, and conservatives make a series of assumptions, largely unsupported, about what the causes are. They include a hodgepodge curriculum; dilution of the canon of literary classics; substitution of popular culture for literature as an object of study in teaching and research; the rise of women's studies, ethnic studies, cultural studies, and other new fields; overspecialization and triviality in research (and a concomitant neglect of teaching); and overemphasis on cultural diversity, sensitivity, and multiculturalism on campus.

Above all, the conservatives blame professors. Sykes's book ProfScam depicts the professorate as fraught with laziness, dishonesty, and selfishness. One of Bennett's main themes in To Reclaim a Legacy is that it is abandonment of the humanities by professors that has landed us in our current, sorry state.⁵

In particular, the conservatives blame radical professors for the alleged decline of the humanities. Kimball's "tenured radicals,"⁶ ensconced in comfortable positions, have turned their backs on supposedly timeless and universal classics of literature in favor of a politicized curriculum. According to this view, politics (i.e., the politics of radical professors) is corrupting higher education, with results not only in curricular matters, but also in such phenomena as campus speech codes that institutionalize "political correctness" and a "new McCarthyism."⁷

What's wrong with this picture? Plenty, but in order to understand its appeal, we need to examine and acknowledge the many things the conservatives get right or almost right.

To begin with, let us admit that too many students are alarmingly ignorant when they enter college, as well as when they leave. A student should learn the location of the Persian Gulf in high school or earlier, along with the dates of the Civil War, who wrote The Tempest, and many other facts.

But statistics about ignorance of facts are hardly an index of the gravity of the problem university teachers face. Sykes, in a rare moment of moderation, admits that the accumulation of facts in one's brain amounts to a game of Trivial Pursuit and does not make one wise or educated.⁸

Yet the conservative position typically glosses over this point. The last one-fourth of E. D. Hirsch's book Cultural Literacy, a favorite among conservatives despite Kimball's later rebuke of Hirsch, is little more than Trivial Pursuit in book form.⁹ The idea behind the book is that an educated person should know content—that is, facts. This requires rote memorization rather than the aimless "inquiry" into methods, skills, and concepts that conservatives imagine goes on in too many college classrooms.

As I said earlier, conservatives are correct to insist that students should learn facts. Where they are wrong is to emphasize this "cultural literacy" while overlooking actual literacy. The problem is not only that students do not know facts but also that they cannot read or write.¹⁰ As anecdotal evidence, I offer the following passage written within the past five years by a college senior in one of my classes. I use the passage with her permission. I am reproducing it, complete with mistakes, in exactly the form I received it:

In the era we are in today, Television is doing all it could to raise controversy, since that is how the culture seems to be going. Our society is controversial about A.I.D.S., children growing up to fast, and homosexuality. In relevance to these subjects, there are shows displaying these topics. One program from the show, The Hogan Family, Jason Bateman's best friend dies of A.I.D.S. Then of course there is the highly rated show Bart Simpson, a cartoon of an obnoxious, vulgar mouth kid admired by the younger generation. The newest controversial topic shown on television, is the Madonna video displaying homosexuality. It is not allowed to be shown on air, yet when Nightline aired aired it to show what it was like, thousands of viewers tuned in, and millions are talking about it. The idea that in today's society controversy is strong, therefore, the media tries to capture the audiences by having strong controversial topics on television.

This is by no means the worst writing a senior has ever submitted to me—in fact, it is fairly representative, and this student had actually shown some improvement after I gave her guidance and harsh grades on three earlier papers. Still, she is incoherent and close to illiterate. Elsewhere in the paper, she plagiarizes at length because she cannot write herself. Now, I can teach this student the location of the Persian Gulf, and I can even teach her how to spell it. What I cannot do is teach her in one semester how to read, write, and think. William Bennett's idea that everyone should read Huckleberry Finn is a splendid one, but this student cannot read a newspaper article, much less a serious book.

To blame professors for problems like this misses the mark. What this student needs is prolonged tutoring in remedial reading and English grammar. Of course, she will not get it, and she probably does not want it; but these are the subject areas that are especially in crisis, and they reflect problems in elementary and secondary education. We in higher education inherit the problems and handle them as best we can.

It is not enough to suggest, as Bennett does, that "we" raise college entrance requirements in the humanities.¹¹ This, according to Bennett, would have a ripple effect and cause high schools to raise their graduation requirements, or at least to increase their course offerings in the humanities. This is an unusual deviation from the conservative doctrine of local control over schools and is also pie-in-the-sky. Bennett seems to have the impression that the faculty is regularly polled about what admission requirements should be. In fifteen years in higher education, I have not once seen an issue of this sort come before the faculty. I was once involved in a decision to raise admission standards in a particular degree program, and the university administration overturned it. On another occasion, the campus faculty voted to raise graduation requirements, and the administration refused to implement the decision.

Admission and graduation requirements at all levels are very much subject to the whims of politicians and administrators. These whims lean strongly in the direction of vocational and professional training—for example, in June 1991 the Illinois legislature passed the Illinois Cooperative Work Study Program Act, which will (if signed by the governor) promote and provide funding for cooperative education at the university level. This is a curricular matter, yet the faculty has nothing to do with it. If enacted, the new program, although probably well intentioned, will certainly not have a positive impact on the humanities. It will, instead, increase the already overwhelming predominance of business and vocational concerns in student life.¹²

Bennett's conservatism will not allow him to venture into anything resembling a criticism of the business ethic. On the contrary: "To study the humanities in no way detracts from the career interests of students. Properly taught, they will enrich all."¹³ Again the problem is professors, who are not teaching properly. Further,

Conventional wisdom attributes the steep drop in the number of students who major in the humanities to a concern for finding good-paying jobs after college. Although there is some truth in this, we believe that there is another, equally important reason—namely, that we in the academy have failed to bring the humanities to life and to insist on their value. From 1970 to 1982 the number of bachelor's degrees awarded in all fields increased by 11 percent from 846,110 to 952,998. But during the same period, degrees in English dropped not by a few percentage points, but by 57 percent, in philosophy by 41 percent, in history by 62 percent, and in modern languages by 50 percent.¹⁴

Let us apply a little good, old-fashioned humanistic logic to this paragraph. The uncredited statistics are quite scientific sounding, but they do not prove what Bennett would like us to think they prove, which is that there is anything wrong with "conventional wisdom" about job hunting. The statistics certainly do not support Bennett's assertion that "we in the academy have failed to bring the humanities to life and to insist on their value."

Who is "we"? Not Bennett, who gave up teaching to become an administrator and bureaucrat. Not Cheney, who left teaching to become a journalist and bureaucrat. Not Kimball, D'Souza, or Kramer, who are probably best described as gadflies with ties to conservative periodicals, foundations, and think-tanks.¹⁵ Not Sykes, whose father was a professor but who is not a teacher himself. These "untenured conservatives" have great reverence for Homer and Dante but little respect for the teacher in the trenches, who must try to "bring the humanities to life," as Bennett puts it, in mass lectures to unruly crowds of poorly prepared and uninterested students. The students then grade the teacher through evaluation-of-instruction forms that help to determine whether the teacher will receive a 1 percent raise or a 1.5 percent raise. Low raises, poor pay and working conditions, deteriorating facilities, budget cuts, crowded classrooms, exploitation of teaching assistants and part-time faculty, low morale, and an anticipated severe shortage of qualified humanities faculty¹⁶—these are crises from the teacher's point of view, yet the conservatives have practically nothing to say about these issues. Similarly, from the student's perspective, the crisis lies primarily in such matters as high cost; declining availability of financial aid; balancing school, family, and career demands; and closed and cancelled classes. On these matters, too, the conservatives are silent.¹⁷

In fact, the crisis rhetoric of conservatives has about it the ring both of Chicken Little and of Nero fiddling. Chicken Little, because life goes on at the university with very little day-to-day evidence of the sort of crisis the conservatives have announced. Students are disgracefully illiterate, but they were equally illiterate in 1975 when I started teaching, so what we have appears to me to be more a chronic problem than a crisis. Moreover, the idea of crisis is itself chronic—we can trace it back through Philip Coombs's World Crisis in Education (1985), the "Literacy Crisis" of the 1970s, Charles Silberman's Crisis in the Classroom (1970), Christopher Dawson's Crisis of Western Education (1961), Bernard Iddings Bell's Crisis in Education (1949), Walter Moberly's Crisis in the University (1949), and numerous other alarmist tracts. Here is how Jacques Barzun described recent college graduates in 1959:

. . . young men and women [who have] no knowledge that is precise and firm, no ability to do intellectual work with thoroughness and despatch. Though here are college graduates, many of them cannot read accurately or write clearly, cannot do fractions or percentages without travail and doubt, cannot utter their thoughts with fluency or force, can rarely show a handwriting that would pass for adult, let alone legible, cannot trust themselves to use the foreign language they have studied for eight years, and can no more range conversationally over a modest gamut of intellectual topics than they can address their peers consecutively on one of the subjects they have studied.¹⁸

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

The conservatives also resemble Nero fiddling because, as I have noted, they ignore real problems that have better claim to the word "crisis" than do such conservative worries as political correctness, radical professors, and the inability of students to quote Shakespeare. In addition, the left has a perspective of its own about a crisis in the humanities. As Patrick Brantlinger describes it, "[t]he conservative myth that 'theory'—structuralism, deconstruction, Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, and so on—has caused the crisis in the humanities needs to be turned around: theory is a response to crisis, not its cause."¹⁹ Viewed in this way, crisis is the discovery of illegitimate authority. There are many dimensions of crisis, including economic crisis, political crisis, and failures of institutions to serve their ostensible functions and to provide for the needs of the population. These crises and failures impinge on the humanities as intellectual dilemmas and clashes.²⁰

It is at this intellectual level, rather than at the more mundane level of teachers' and students' concerns, that the conservatives concentrate their attack. In "The Real Crisis in the Humanities," the concluding chapter in Tenured Radicals, Kimball focuses entirely on a 1989 Williams College panel discussion called "Crisis in the Humanities?" This particular conference, or any such conference, is so far removed from the everyday experiences of most humanities teachers and students that it seems a very unlikely setting for a crisis. But in Kimball's eyes it epitomizes a widespread intellectual subterfuge:

Here we had the most traditional of academic ceremonies, replete with academic regalia and communal singing of "My Country, 'Tis of Thee," providing the setting for a speech whose essential point was that the humanities can cut themselves off from both their foundation and their ideals and still be said to be thriving. What else are we to make of . . . the contemptuous reference to "the sanctity of the so-called canon"? Or the suggestion that "the referentiality of language" is something the humanities today could just as well do without? Or the idea that "new methods"—meaning deconstruction and its progeny—and new "subjects of inquiry"—meaning everything from pulp novels to rock videos—are fit subjects for humanistic inquiry?²¹

Recently, conservative critics have been quite concerned with free-speech issues—especially speech codes, political correctness, and instances in which conservatives have allegedly been punished for expressing their views. Here again I believe we should concede that the conservatives are correct to insist upon free speech. The problem is that, at least in one respect, they do not reciprocate. I refer particularly to Kimball's castigation of new methods and new subjects of inquiry. According to Kimball, the methods and subjects he disapproves of are not "fit subjects for humanistic inquiry." In making this assertion, he is seeking to deny the right of academic freedom to scholars who disagree with him. What is at stake in such a denial is not only the academic freedom of individuals, but also the very idea of a university as a place to study the universe. Kimball's position is also logically inconsistent in that by objecting to humanistic inquiry into rock videos, for example, he is himself, as a humanist, making a statement about rock videos. He would deny to others the right to study rock video, while reserving for himself the right to comment both about it and about anybody else's research on the subject. As someone who has conducted humanistic inquiry into music video, television, popular music, film, and other subjects Kimball despises, I object to his attempt to restrict what I am able to say and write. He has every right to disagree with any scholar's findings about music video or some other popular culture topic, but this is not his usual tactic. What he prefers to do is ridicule the subject matter so that it becomes unnecessary to make a substantive engagement with the author. It is not that he disagrees with something I have said in one of my studies—since the subject is unfit, the study ipso facto has no value and no right to exist. As Kimball says, quoting Nietzsche: "[W]e do not refute a disease. We resist it."²² This tidy analogy, grounded in unreason and an inflammatory use of the word "disease," overlooks the fact that in order to resist a disease, it is helpful to research it and understand it.

The condemnation of media studies (and much else) is obviously an attempt to violate academic freedom, and therefore free speech, which the conservatives claim to support.²³ Sykes finesses this inconvenient fact by latching onto half of the American Association of University Professors' "Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure," while ignoring the other half: "The AAUP drew a careful distinction between freedom of research, which was entitled to 'full freedom,' and classroom teaching, which required professional restraint."²⁴ Having noted this careful distinction, Sykes proceeds to ignore it. Despite the efforts of Accuracy in Academia, it is still difficult for conservatives to document lack of professional restraint in the classrooms of radical professors. Consequently, Sykes and Kimball focus instead on incoherent curricula, silly course titles, and what they consider absurd and politically irresponsible research projects. Their critiques of the titles of courses, conference papers, and articles are usually amusing, and when they offer substantive analyses of the contents of recent scholarship, their points are often well taken. But this does not excuse or justify the conservatives' true goal, which is to prevent research that does not conform to conservative ideas about proper subject matter, methods, and political outlook. Naturally, conservatives want their agenda upheld in the classroom and curriculum as well, but their critique of research should be seen for what it is. It is not an appeal for greater professional restraint by teachers. Rather, it is an attack against the full academic freedom claimed by AAUP for researchers.

Media studies and popular culture are particularly objectionable academic pursuits, in the eyes of conservatives. One of Kimball's most virulent attacks is against E. Ann Kaplan for her book Rocking Around the Clock, which is a study of MTV and music video.²⁵ Kimball does not demonstrate, or even state, that music video is bad—he assumes it. He does not allow for the possibility that some videos may be good, or even that the entire corpus of music video may, somewhere, contain something of value. Nor does he entertain the possibility that, despite its aesthetic inferiority, there is any value whatsoever in studying music video, or that some other music video scholarship besides Kaplan's might be worth looking at. In his guerrilla-style critique of Kaplan, Kimball follows a pattern, also used by Sykes throughout ProfScam.²⁶ The pattern is this: Focus on the topic of research rather than on what the research says about the topic. In selecting research to ridicule, choose topics that can easily be portrayed as trivial (music video, TV commercials, everyday conversation, TV series, potholders, cheerleading) or sensational (masturbation, rape, phallic symbolism). Ridicule the title and subject of the study (or of a course in a college catalogue). And, sometimes, quote a few passages and make fun of them. The more ridiculous the passages, the better—and often they are quite ridiculous, especially when taken out of context. Interestingly, TV Guide was one of the pioneers of this technique in a 1988 article that poked fun at academic analyses of television.²⁷ It seems that anyone who wants to study television seriously needs to be prepared to withstand refutation-by-one-liner in books and magazines that reach millions of readers.

Kaplan was an attractive target for such an attack, both because of her prominent position in the humanities²⁸ and because of various flaws in her book. The passages selected for ridicule by Kimball use equivocation, jargon, and passive verbs to such an extent that Kaplan's meaning is often quite unclear. There is no point in trying to defend Kaplan against Kimball's substantive comments, because the comments are essentially correct. Those of us who write about popular culture should note these problems and try to avoid them in our own writing.

At the same time, we should reject Kimball's unwarranted position that music video is unworthy as an object of study. We should object not only to the position, but to the fact that Kimball arrives at it without logical argument (and in fact does so, erroneously, in the name of reason). His implied reasoning is that Kaplan's study is worthless; therefore, the study of music video is worthless. In rejecting the study of music video, Kimball is refusing to take seriously the people who create videos, the people who watch them, and the people who study them. This is anti-democratic and irresponsible, not to mention mean-spirited in the case of the attack on Kaplan.

There are good videos, good studies of music video, and viewers who exercise aesthetic judgment in watching videos. That is not to say that music video should be part of the core curriculum at universities or should fulfill general education requirements. Music video is not part of the literary canon, nor should it be, nor is anyone saying it should be. But it is part of the humanities, and it should be studied by humanists and taught in specialized courses at universities, just as we study and teach obscure painters, writers, philosophers, theologians, composers, and even the obscure filmmakers whose work has inspired music video directors.

Of course, anyone who believes that music video is now one of the most-studied subjects in the humanities is wildly mistaken. On the contrary, it has received very little serious study, and outlets for publication are extremely limited—so, again, Kimball is Chicken Little. But even a few studies of music video are too many for the conservatives. In the conservative view, there is such a thing as a corrupting "media culture," which universities should exclude and combat.

New Criterion editor Hilton Kramer makes the point in conference proceedings published in Partisan Review:

[0]ur subject today is the impact of the media on the university. We know that the impact of the media as it now exists on the university has been a corrupting impact. We know that a good deal of what university teaching has to contend with is this culture of simplifications, caricatures and lies that students bring with them to the university, as if they were bringing a state of nature. For more and more students find it impossible to distinguish between media culture and outside life, what might be called "real life," because there has been so little, in their education and in their upbringing before coming to the university, that encouraged them to make the requisite distinction between culture and life itself. Such distinctions are lacking not only in the students, who are in many respects the involuntary victims of the media culture, but also in the faculty and the administration, who are more and more inclined to countenance and indeed initiate the substitution of media artifacts, media studies, media propaganda for the traditional objects of study. Indeed, they have allowed media culture to supplant humanistic culture as the basic standard of discussion.²⁹

Leaving aside the question of proof, which is so often absent in conservative polemics, we find again, at the heart of the argument, the conservative distate for media studies. Elsewhere in his remarks, Kramer makes it clear that newspapers and magazines are included in what he means by "the media"—so, in the end, apparently it is only permissible to study books (the Great Books, of course), live performing arts, and museum art. In case his position is not clear enough in the preceding passage, we may refer to an article in New Criterion in which Kramer states that "all forms of popular culture should be banned from courses in the arts and the humanities." This includes films, "either as objects of study or as aids to study."³⁰ It is safe to assume that Kramer would include television in his ban, since it is, of course, "media culture," which consists of "simplifications, caricatures and lies" (in Kramer's own simplification and caricature).

What is the "requisite distinction between culture and life itself'? Indeed, what is "life itself," and by what authority does Kramer claim to know? Kramer's life is, no doubt, quite different from that of the average student or faculty member. What is "humanistic culture," and how is it so different from "media culture," and how are these related to the "culture" that students cannot distinguish from "life itself? Kramer does not say, but later in his remarks he provides a clue that suggests a possible interpretation of the "distinction between culture and life itself."

In a response to a "point about the ideological character of television being the result of an economically determined program," Kramer says,

Yes, in some general way that's true. Television is a business and it's in business to make a profit. But that doesn't really address the question of what shapes its ideological content and why, from one period to another. After all, the television networks in the fifties were just as concerned with making a profit as they are in 1990, but the shift from what might loosely be called "family values" to what might loosely be called "uncontingent self-fulfillment" which dominates television today—that is, the shift to an emphasis on total autonomy of self—this is not economically determined. That's determined by the political and cultural values television shares with the elite culture of the moment—what I call the intellectual academic elite culture.³¹

It is difficult to imagine a more ill-informed view of television. First, it is not categorically true that television is a profit-oriented business enterprise. PBS is not. The BBC is not. Video art is not. Public access is not. Religious TV stations such as KNLC, St. Louis, are not. To ignore the variety of television is a grave intellectual error.

Second, it is nevertheless true that the type of TV that is in business to make a profit (i.e., commercial TV) is more responsive to the "economically determined program" of capitalism than to any other force in society. Todd Gitlin's Inside Prime Time, the most thorough recent study of the American television industry, demonstrates this convincingly.³² This point is so undeniable that Kramer must admit it "in some general way" before moving on to his own muddled explanation.

Third, Kramer's characterization of the ideological content of both 1950s and 1990 TV is simplistic and naive, at best. There is also a logical inconsistency in his implicit nostalgia for 1950s' TV, both because 1950s' TV was part of "media culture" then, and because it still is, in the form of reruns.

Fourth, even if Kramer were right in his summary view of the change in TV's ideological content from the 1950s to 1990, he would still be wrong about the cause of change. That cause is primarily economic, rooted in the economic interests of advertisers, networks, stations, and other participants in the industry. For verification of that, one needs only to look at any good book on the history of television. A particularly instructive source is The Sponsor, written by Erik Barnouw, the foremost historian of American broadcasting.³³

Fifth, Kramer's sentence about "the intellectual academic elite culture" seems to reverse his earlier position. In the previously quoted passage from Partisan Review, Kramer refers to the corrupting impact of "media culture" on the university. Now he blames the "political and cultural values" of "the intellectual academic elite culture" (presumably the university) for the shortcomings of television. It appears he would like to have it both ways, and perhaps his position actually is that there is a reciprocal influence—but a more plausible interpretation is that he will resort to any logical contortion necessary to keep from criticizing the commercial, "free" (and conservative) system of television. To a conservative, this system is desirable because it supports capitalism as we know it, but its content is "media culture" that must be kept out of the university and separate from "real life."

Kramer's mistaken understanding of television underscores the need for more, not less, media studies. Otherwise, how will we know the history of television? How will we have the knowledge to make intelligent responses to nonsensical polemics? (The Partisan Review panel participants clearly did not have sufficient knowledge.) Especially, how will we be able to evaluate, sensibly, the true contribution of television and other media to the humanities? Rather than exclude media studies, and the media themselves, from the humanities, we should include them wholeheartedly, which, conservative fears notwithstanding, has still not been done.

It is irresponsible to prate about "media culture" as if nothing worthwhile has ever appeared, or could ever appear, on television. Such a position is inconsistent with what the humanities stand for. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the humanities as "[l]earning or literature concerned with human culture."³⁴ This definition certainly encompasses television, which is human culture, and media studies, which is learning and literature concerned with it.

If it still seems unnatural to think of television as part of the humanities, it is because of deficiencies not only in television itself, but also in our understanding of it and our aspirations for it.

At the 1939 New York World's Fair demonstration of television, RCA President David Sarnoff said,

Now we add sight to sound. It is with a feeling of humbleness that I come to this moment of announcing the birth, in this country, of a new art so important in its implication that it is bound to affect all society. It is an art which shines like a torch in the troubled world.³⁵

Today, not even an NBC executive would claim that television is a torch for the troubled world. It could have been, and it could still be, but it is not. If this is not a crisis in the humanities, it is at least a tragedy.

In his book Theory of the Film, Béla Balázs said,

[A]bout fifty . . . years ago a completely new art [film] was born. Did the academies set up research groups? Did they observe, hour by hour and keeping precise records, how this embryo developed and in its development revealed the laws governing its vital process?

The scholars and academies let this opportunity pass, although for many centuries it was the first chance to observe, with the naked eye so to speak, one of the rarest phenomena of the history of culture: the emergence of a new form of artistic expression, the only one born in our time. . . .³⁶

We have duplicated this mistake with television, and if the conservatives have their way we will continue to do so. If this is not a crisis in the humanities, it is at least a scholarly oversight from which future generations, if not we ourselves, will suffer.

In his book The Media Monopoly, Ben Bagdikian demonstrates that "despite more than 25,000 outlets in the United States, twenty-three corporations control most of the business in daily newspapers, magazines, television, books, and motion pictures."³⁷ Five or six giant corporations dominate mass communication internationally (these include Rupert Murdoch's arch-conservative News Corporation Ltd., which owns TV Guide).³⁸ The largest media companies are increasing their integration and market shares at a rapid rate, with alarming effects on media content. If this is not a crisis in the humanities, it soon will be.

Meanwhile, it is indeed a problem, perhaps even a crisis, that many Americans are ignorant of The Tempest, the Civil War, the Persian Gulf, the Constitution, and Justice Rehnquist. But if humanists continue to ostracize, scorn, and ignore both media studies and the media themselves, the result will not be a return to the good old days when people read Homer and listened to Bach, but an even darker veil of ignorance, fostered for economic and political purposes by the very media that some humanists do not wish to understand. If the humanities have no use for the media, the globally monopolized media are certainly not going to have any use for the humanities—and it is the humanities, and culture itself, that will suffer the most in the ensuing Dark Age.

NOTES

¹ Neil Hickey, "Can TV Do Justice to Real-Life Courtroom Dramas?" TV Guide, 29 June 1991, pp. 8-9, quote on p. 9.

²First three statistics: Charles J. Sykes, The Hollow Men: Politics and Corruption in Higher Education (Washington, DC; Regnery Gateway, 1990), p. 14, Sykes is somewhat inaccurately citing Lynne V. Cheney, 50 Hours: A Core Curriculum for College Students (Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Humanities, 1989). Cheney, in turn (p. 11) cites A Survey of College Seniors: Knowledge of History and Literature, conducted for the National Endowment for the Humanities (Princeton, NJ: Gallup Organization, 1989), pp. 33-56. Persian Gulf statistic: National Geographic Society/Gallup survey, reported in Philip Dine, "Geography Ignorance 'Shocking,'" St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 31 July 1988, pp. 1A, 9A. As of 1991, the latter survey is being used in direct mail solicitations to sell the National Geographic Society book Exploring Your World: The Adventure of Geography.

³William J. Bennett, To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education (Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Humanities, 1984), p. 13.

⁴Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (New York: Free Press, 1991).

⁵Charles J. Sykes, Prosfcam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1988); and Bennett, To Reclaim a Legacy, pp. 15-17.

⁶Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education, paperback ed. (New York: Harper Collins, 1990).

⁷For a summary, see Laura Fraser, "The Tyranny of the Media Correct: The Assault on 'the New McCarthyism,'" Extra!, May/June 1991, pp. 6-8. On the politics-corruption connection, note the subtitles of Kimball's Tenured Radicals and Sykes's The Hollow Men.

⁸Sykes, The Hollow Men, p. 14. See also Michael C. Berthold, "Jeopardy!, Cultural Literacy, and the Discourse of Trivia," Journal of American Culture 13, No. 1 (Spring 1990), pp. 11-17.

⁹E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). The follow-up volume is entirely in the Trivial Pursuit mode (E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Joseph F. Kett, and James Trefil, The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy [Boston; Houghton Mifflin, 1988]). For Kimball's criticism of Hirsch, see Tenured Radicals, pp. 7-10, 172-174.

¹⁰On the dimensions of this problem, see Jonathan Kozol, Illiterate America (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1985).

¹¹Bennett, To Reclaim a Legacy, pp. 21-22.

¹²For an account of the intellectual decline brought about by the policy of "career education" (former Education Commissioner Sidney Marland's euphemism for vocational education), see Ira Shor, Culture Wars: School and Society in the Conservative Restoration 1969-1984 (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), esp. pp. 30-58.

¹³Bennett, To Reclaim a Legacy, p. 15.

¹⁴Bennett, To Reclaim a Legacy, pp. 13-14.

¹⁵See Kimball, Tenured Radicals, p. ix; and D'Souza, Illiberal Education, p. ix. See also George Lipsitz, "Listening to Learn and Learning to Listen: Popular Culture, Cultural Theory, and American Studies," American Quarterly 42 (December 1990), pp. 615-636, esp. pp. 632, 636; Lawrence Soley, "Right Thinking Conservative Think Tanks," Dissent 38 (Summer 1991), pp. 418-420; and Jon Wiener, "The Olin Money Tree: Dollars for Neocon Scholars," Nation, 1 January 1990, pp. 12-14. Kramer is editor of the conservative journal New Criterion. Kimball is managing editor.

¹⁶"The Academic Labor Market: A Look Into the 1990s," University Affairs, June-July 1990, pp. 3-4.

¹⁷On the Reagan administration's role in financial aid cutbacks, see Svi Shapiro, Between Capitalism and Democracy: Educational Policy and the Crisis of the Welfare State (New York: Bergin & Garvey, 1990), p. 117.

¹⁸Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959), pp. 98-99. Barzun is an excellent source on the history of "Intellect" and the lack thereof, through the late 1950s. A good history of the more recent "crises" in education is Shor, Culture Wars. The other books mentioned are Philip H. Coombs, The World Crisis in Education: The View From the Eighties (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985); Charles E. Silberman, Crisis in the Classroom: The Remaking of American Education (New York: Random House, 1970); Christopher Dawson, The Crisis of Western Education (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1961); Bernard Iddings Bell, Crisis in Education: A Challenge to American Complacency (New York: Whittlesey House, 1949); and Walter Moberly, The Crisis in the University (London; SCM Press, 1949).

¹⁹Patrick Brantlinger, Crusoe's Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 10.

²⁰Brantlinger, Crusoe's Footprints, pp. 1-33.

²¹Kimball, Tenured Radicals, pp. 187-188.

²²Kimball, Tenured Radicals, p. 204.

²³To an extent, the conservatives' concentration upon free-speech issues appears to be part of a larger plan—an organized, carefully conceived campaign to "attempt to steal [the] high ground away from the left." See Sara Diamond, "Readin', Writin', and Repressin'," Z Magazine, February 1991, pp. 45-48, quote on p. 46.

²⁴Sykes, The Hollow Men, p. 34.

²⁵E. Ann Kaplan, Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture (New York: Methuen, 1987); Kimball, Tenured Radicals, pp. 42-45.

²⁶See especially chapters 6 and 7 in Sykes, Profscam, pp. 101-114. Sykes also criticizes a music video course at California State University, Los Angeles (Profscam, p. 81).

²⁷Merrill Panitt, "If Tom Selleck Is a 'Libidinal Spectacle' . . . Then Miami Vice Is a 'Confluence of Commodities,"' TV Guide, 5 November 1988, pp. 13-14.

²⁸Kaplan, a well-known film scholar, is professor of English and director of the Humanities Institute at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

²⁹Hilton Kramer, remarks in "The Impact of the Media," panel discussion proceedings, Partisan Review 58 (Spring 1991), pp. 227-248, quote on pp. 229-30.

³⁰Hilton Kramer, "Studying the Arts and the Humanities: What Can Be Done," New Criterion, February 1989, pp. 1-6, quotes on p. 4.

³¹Kramer, "Impact of the Media," pp. 233-234.

³²Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time (New York: Pantheon, 1983).

³³Erik Barnouw, The Sponsor: Notes on a Modern Potentate (Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978).

³⁴The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), vol. 7, p. 476. The definition actually appears under the singular form, "humanity."

³⁵David Sarnoff, quoted in Harry Castleman and Walter J. Podrazik, Watching TV: Four Decades of American Television (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982), p. 10.

³⁶Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, trans. Edith Bone (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), p. 22.

³⁷Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, 3rd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), p. 4. See also Ben H. Bagdikian, "Cornering Hearts and Minds: The Lords of the Global Village," Nation, 12 June 1989, pp. 805-820.

³⁸Upon buying TV Guide in 1988, Murdoch declared the magazine "too cerebral" and promptly steered it to new depths of fatuousness, lowering the level of public discourse about television to an all-time nadir. See Katharine Seelye, "TV Guide: The Shake-Up," Columbia Journalism Review, November/December 1989, pp. 41-45.

Richard Poirier

SOURCE: "Literature, Technology, People," in Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. III, No. 4, Fall, 1982, pp. 61-74.

[In the following essay, Poirier examines the perception that technology—specifically electronic media—poses a threat to the cultural position of literature.]

From the outset, I will be involved with four terms, so large that it seems presumptuous to contend with them in an essay of this length. The terms are Literature, Technology, People, and, by implication, power. It would be foolhardy to proceed as if it were possible ever to come into firm possession of one, much less all of these words. Each has a radically different meaning in different historical periods and within different cultures. For energetic inquiry, their mere lexical definition, accompanied by lists and dates of variation, is almost useless. In addition, any one of the four wobbles in an argument whenever it approaches any of the others. Their hierarchical order is pretty much up for grabs. Indeed it soon becomes evident that it is their very instability, variability, and looseness that has made them indispensable to centuries of cultural and social controversy.

To describe this controversy in its various mutations with some degree of concision, I want to indulge in a bit of allegorization, to treat Literature, Technology, and People as persons. (I do not allegorize power because it is not an active agent; it is produced by the various interactions of the other three.) Let me begin with an observation so obvious that to ignore it, as do most pietistic devotees of Literature, is in itself an exercise of extraordinary cultural presumption: for nearly all of human history, practically no People could read. Literature included such People as subjects, compliant to the comedy and idealization in which Literature likes to indulge, but People seldom knew they were being "used," unless they happened in on a masque or a play or the oral transmission of, say, the Iliad. Except for an extremely small number, that is, People did not count as an audience for Literature. The author did not have to think of People as readers. Literature was a minority enterprise, and it exulted in its minority status. It was read and supported entirely by the economically and politically privileged classes; it was written by them, for them, and under their patronage.

As everyone knows, the situation has changed. Literature now finds itself worried about and worried by People. There are, for one thing, so many of us. Sanitation, agricultural methods, transportation, medicine, and manufacturing—all these forms of Technology have allowed a fantastic growth in the production of People and in the prolongation of life. There are now 4 billion People, and the current increase among illiterate and semiliterate peoples is approximately twice what it is among the largely literate ones. But in respect to Literature, People are different from what they were, not simply because they are more numerous, but because nearly all of them, at least in the industrialized world, can now read. It would seem to follow from this that People are at last able to assert an authority over a Literature that heretofore did not need even to speak to them.

People have acquired enormous cultural power, but they do not exercise it by reading. Their cultural power is expressed by their choosing, as they could never have done before, not to read, or at least, not to read Literature. This should surprise no one. The system of mass education that began to take root only about a hundred years ago was not created or motivated by a desire to make Literature more available, but to make goods and services more abundant, and as an instrument for civic regulation. The same Technology that produced billions of People also created an economy that required a mass of skilled and relatively docile labor. The literacy they acquired had nothing necessarily to do with Literature—and there is no reason it should. Literature is no more now for everyone than it ever was, at least not Literature in my sense of the term. But I want to say very directly that in being exclusive about Literature, I am not thereby being condescending to People. In fact, I would hope to see People wholly liberated from the notion that a productive relationship to Literature brings with it some moral or ethical benefit not otherwise available. Literature is a form of life, among others, and it cannot be demonstrated that it is more morally or ethically enhancing than, say, sports or bird-watching. Nor is it observable that those who read and write Literature, especially as a profession, are as a result in any way morally or ethically superior to those who cannot read or write at all. It often seems that the reverse is true. In my view, Literature is preeminently an activity, an example of what I have called elsewhere "the performing self" or, with respect to Frost, "the work of knowing."

The "work of knowing" can go on in many other places. In Literature, it is most successful when it creates still more work, when it leads not only from density or concealment into clarification, but out of clarification into still other densities or concealments. But there are ways of knowing that have nothing to do with the writing or reading of Literature. Literature itself says as much, for it is forever finding in these other ways analogues to its own compositional acts. It locates metaphors for literary composition in the act of love (Frost or Herbert or Donne), in farming (Thoreau), in sports (Hemingway), in exploration and scholarship (Frances Parkman), in money-making (Dreiser), in social manipulation (Henry James), in intrusions and expropriations (Wordsworth). Literature allows these analogies between itself and other activities, however, only with a proviso: the lover or explorer or athlete must be committed to his task with a dedication, a genius, a discipline worthy of a great writer. Should Literature be more available, say, than Thoreau's harvest of beans? "I was determined," he tells us, "to know beans." Why should not Literature in fact be a less available harvest, since we cannot ever merely watch it grow. We cannot reap it. The performance of Literature is complete neither in the writing nor in the reading. Reading is writing in that it produces language; writing is reading in that it interprets the possibilities in what has already been written, for what can be written. The "work" required by Literature is in that sense never finished and cannot be. I would therefore define Literature, in anticipation of later discussion, as any written text whose points of clarification, whether these occur by local or by larger design, bring you only to densities always different from, but flexibly related to, those from which you have just previously emerged. Literature is that writing whose clarities bring on precipitations of density.

This can be said, I think, of the Literature of any period. But for the last hundred years or so Literature has become, to an unprecedented degree, self-conscious and defensive about its own complications. It has developed a sort of bunker mentality, and begun to insist not only on its necessary density, but on its necessary difficulty. Moby Dick is an obvious instance, Bleak House, an only somewhat less obvious one; and by the beginning of the century, Henry James directly attributes the causes to what he calls "monstrous masses." Literature, he says, cannot catch the life of the modern city or touch its inhabitants, a deduction expressed both in The American Scene, with respect to New York, and, with respect to London, in the Prefaces, especially to The Altar of the Dead. "The general black truth," he remarks, is that "London was a terrible place to die in":

It takes space to feel, it takes time to know, and great organisms as well as small have to pause, more or less, to possess themselves and to be made aware. Monstrous masses are, by this truth, so impervious to vibration that the sharpest forces of feeling, locally applied, no more penetrate than a pin or a paper-cutter penetrates an elephant's hide. Thus the very tradition of sensibility would perish if left only to their care. It has here and there to be rescued, to be saved by independent, intelligent zeal; which type of effort, however, to avail, has to fly in the face of the conditions.

What is imagined here is not a mere standoff between "monstrous masses" and "the tradition of sensibility." James proposes some more drastic and intransigent alienation. If the "tradition" is to be saved by "independent" effort, then both the effort and the independence call for the abdication by Literature of public power in its earlier forms. Instead of applying its forces "locally"—instead, that is, of creating "vibrations" within a civilization known to be susceptible—Literature must now "fly in the face of the conditions," and these are nothing less than the civilization's "imperviousness." James's aeronautical image suggests confrontation, when in fact he and other late Edwardian writers, specifically including the line from Pater to Joyce, were to fly less in the face of, than away from, or over, these "conditions." If the "tradition of sensibility" is to be rescued, then it will be by embedding it within stylistic fortifications made intentionally and necessarily intricate. James perceived nearly twenty years before T.S. Eliot, in "The Metaphysical Poets," that Literature "in our civilization, as it exists today, must be difficult." Let it be remembered that Literature by its very nature would have excluded even a solicitous semiliterate People. But even a literate People are in James's account grown elephantine in size and thickness, and his own later novels are an instance of the stylistic release from any obligations to them.

All this suggests some reasons why in England, from about 1900 to 1914, modernist characteristics began to manifest themselves in Literature. It had happened earlier in America, during the decade before the Civil War, with Hawthorne and Melville. These are the times, significantly, when demographic and educational developments in both countries helped to produce James's "monstrous masses." In both countries—in America first, because of extraordinary growth in the economy, in compulsory education, and in land-grant universities—there emerged great numbers of People who could read and write and make unprecedented demands on cultural production. But the "tradition of sensibility," the preserve of Literature, was not necessarily a tradition for them. Literature was forced to extemporize an audience out of itself. The critical enterprise of F.R. Leavis and Scrutiny magazine was nothing less than an effort to show how this might be done. It was proposed that the Literature of "the great tradition" offered us not so much ideas as an experience of reading. The experience was to be available only to those who could enter most fully into Literature's vital, dramatic, and exploratory uses of the English language, who could reenact what it was like to have lived within "the tradition of sensibility." Reading, carried out with this particularly strenuous kind of intensity, was an implicit critique and rejection of the new civilization of People, who read, but in quite other ways. At the same time, no such reader of Literature was allowed to think that the traditions of sensibility could exist in this civilization except in remnants, redoubts, pockets of resistance. Lawrence was, and is, the necessary hero of this effort; more so, for Leavis at least, than Eliot, who was, by nationality and by the nature of his religious feeling, rendered incapable of understanding the culture Lawrence represented. More so, too, than Joyce, in the sense that Lawrence insisted that a viable culture, indigenous to the English language, still did precariously exist. But we need not here indulge in Leavisian refinements. The form of James's "tradition of sensibility" became, when it expressed itself in the twentieth century, grotesque in appearance and in sound, and it was rendered as such whether you were reading Joyce or Lawrence, Eliot or Faulkner. It was innovative, unconventional, and experimental, in order, paradoxically, that it might affirm a tradition. It was radical and reactionary.

Distortions of form and dislocations in language were meant to restore certain kinds of life that had presumably been displaced by the emergence of People. Literature was not to be a mirror of contemporary life held up to People; they would not have recognized what they saw. It was, instead, an extraordinarily difficult inquiry into certain resources for life that still existed in language and in the mythological correlations to literary form. It was unpopular; it was ignored by People; it was read and understood only by an elite. And yet Literature was at the same time claiming for itself a degree of historical and cultural significance that it had never before, so explicitly and under such compulsion, been required to claim. Literature assumed an enormous historical mission—to record the demise of the cultural traditions that sustained it—precisely in the act of abdicating its traditional centrality, its place in the community. At the moment of its exile, Literature said to People "I banish you," and then set about, as Coriolanus never could, to build another empire for itself.

Literature feels, if anything, even more embattled now. It found itself after World War II confronted with People still more indifferent, as if Literature were not there at all. Starting with radio early in the century, then with recording mechanisms, tape machines, television, and the miniaturization of these, Technology, which created vast numbers of People to begin with, provided the equipment that allowed People to become, to a degree they could never before have expected, both visible and articulate to themselves. Visibility and articulateness had, till recently, been exclusively in the selective giving of the literary minority, who chose to represent the illiterate classes (and the natural scene) to suit its own aesthetic and political sense of things. For the first time in history, People who in earlier centuries had no way to register their existence at all, except in church records, no way to tell anyone what it was like to be as they were day by day, could record, could re-present themselves.

Having created a new mass of People, having then removed literacy as a prerequisite for demanding a place of sustained significance in historical narrative—a prerequisite that in the past made the preterite masses, as they might be called, relatively powerless, malleable, and silent—Technology thereby induced Literature to become still more inaccessible. And this happened, remember, at exactly the time when People were disposed in any case to ignore Literature. Literature was required to re-present the consequences on People of Technology's power, to show what it is like to live under the aegis of media other than Literature, media that threaten wholly to appropriate and subvert the resources of language, and to accelerate and thereby exhaust human consciousness. What Henry Adams suspected, Thomas Pynchon was brilliantly to confirm.

Nor was this the only challenge to Literature from Technology. New processes for the reproduction and storage of sound and of video images, advanced methods for color reproduction, the proliferation of portable radios, small tape recorders, duplicating machines, and the development of word processors—by these means Technology has begun to appropriate, fracture, and disperse even the image of high culture's rarification of itself. The time was not far back when to hear one concert, to look at a single painting, even to get hold of a book—James in his study of Hawthorne gives a touching glimpse of the excitement of the arrival of books from Europe—required considerable patience, energy, money, and the time and endurance for travel. Now musical compositions are immediately on demand in the living room, played by several different orchestras and rearranged to suit the vagrant mood of the listener. On video recorders, the plays of Shakespeare and the ballets of Balanchine can be edited, put into slow motion or cut to the viewer's taste. Reproductions of paintings by a dozen artists from as many centuries can be arranged at pleasure or spliced into collages. The very idea of authorial prerogatives is under constant assault, and an undeveloped sense of plagiarism among some young people is at least in part attributable to their knowledge that the musical groups they listen to on tape are continually assisted by electronic dubbing, by the substitution of anonymous replacement performers for advertised stars, and by the ready availability of anonymously authored "soft wear" from computers. While Technology has brought to thousands of people the delights of high culture they would not otherwise have had, it can also be said to threaten the condition of relative inaccessibility on which the vitality of high culture, and especially of Literature, depends. The vast museum shows of Picasso and Matisse and Cezanne are a further instance, wherein art is deployed so that thousands of people can be force-marched at short intervals to look at several hundred works in the time insufficient for the proper appreciation of a few. What Walter Benjamin called the aura of high culture has thus been substantially reduced, and with this has gone some of the self-esteem and conviction of centrality that animates the work even of minor writers and artists. Sounds pretty grim, does it not?

But if we have arrived at a point in the story where it is possible to feel sorry for Literature, give thought, also, to a few historical contradictions and peculiarities. Before Technology struck back, or even had the capacities for doing so, it had, for the centuries before it got its growth, been the whipping boy of Literature. Consider as an instance Book II of Spenser's The Faerie Queene. Book II was given to the printer in 1589, but it will be important to my argument that it describes itself as an "antique" mirror of a faery land. The past for which it is an image has always been an imaginary past. Near the end of that book, Sir Guyon descends from the open fields and virgin lands of chivalric England into the Cave of Mammon. The Cave has ascribed to it the detailed horrors of what would later be called an industrial-factory system, along with many of the blandishments of finance capitalism. For one thing, it is filled with currency that reproduces its own value without in the process contributing to the growth of anything other than money, filthy lucre. The Cave is a perversion of nature in the interests of financial and industrial progress. Guyon is so appalled—or tempted—that he nearly faints when he reaches the surface. He returns to knight errantry, to the pursuit of heroic ideals that even in the sixteenth century was already recognized as antiquated, a kind of Don Quixotism.

Literature, that is, from some of its earliest and now classic instances, seems always to have been nostalgic for something that has been lost. What can be the origin of a loss that was always there? It was to meet such a logistical and logical gap that Literature introduced Technology as a villain. It is obvious, again, that I am using the term Technology to describe manifestations whose early forms are quite unlike later, more familiar ones. Literature did not wait for Mark Twain or Lawrence or Pynchon before it ascribed demonic and destructive powers to what can be called Technology. Nearly from the beginnings of English literature, images of exploitative control over environment are, embryonically, images also of industrialization. Usury is an aspect of this, of money that begets only money, until, as in the opening of Volpone, accumulated wealth rivals the sun, the source of natural energy and generative power. In writing of this development, R.H. Tawney implies what I want directly to address—the paradoxical dependence of Literature on Technology: "Behind the genii of beauty and wisdom who were its architects"—he is speaking of the emergence of the modern from the feudal world—

there moved a murky, but indispensable figure. It was the demon whom Dante had met muttering gibberish in the fourth circle of the Inferno, and whom Sir Guyon was to encounter three centuries later, tanned with smoke and seared with fire, in a cave adjoining the mouth of hell. His uncouth labors quarried the stones which Michael Angelo was to raise, and sank deep in the Roman clay the foundations of the walls to be adorned by Raphael.

To read Tawney is to be reminded that electronic media are, for Literature, only the most recent version of an imagined threat to cultural health and continuity. With precedents for which there are forever other precedents, Literature has always asked us to be nostalgic for some aspect of the human and the natural, whose essential purity is revealed by the very fact that it begins to perish under Technology's pressure. So much so, that it seems as if the ideal forms of the human and the natural do not in fact or in reality ever actually exist; as if when they appear, even in re-presented life, they can be no more than fleeting and pitiable remnants, like Sir Guyon, or shepherds, like Melville's Starbuck or Wordsworth's Michael, like Lawrence's Mellors or Joyce's Bloom. One might call it the Cordelia syndrome—these creations of a nostalgia for human goodness uncontaminated, a nostalgia so strong that its embodiments emerge from the doom that awaits them.

Again, why has Literature persuaded itself, and us, that this should be so? When a villain is hard to find, there is always, after all, "original sin." But original sin is one likely source of Literature itself. Original sin was probably invented to explain and relieve some feeling in each of us that we lost something, abandoned someone, betrayed our natures in the process of becoming human. We love our cats and dogs with a certain pathos, a sense that we have betrayed them, left them behind, along with other creatures, in an inarticulateness that once was ours. The Fall of Man, according to Emerson, "is the discovery we have made that we exist." We fall from the womb into the terrible consciousness of unitary existence. Literature, one of our great human creations, is in this view one compensation for the Fall. It offers consoling evidence of a community of loss but also—and this is implicit in the shaping powers of language itself—a promise of corporate creation. Without the Fall there would be, as Milton tells us, no Paradise Lost. What, then, has compelled Literature to invent yet another instrument of loss and call it Technology?

To ask this question is to become suspicious of Literature in a way not at all offensive to great writers and artists, though it might be so to their more pious interpreters. Literature, especially in its idealized images of the human and the natural, is a reparation for its own transgressions—this much is already admitted by and in Literature itself. I would like to go further and suggest that the transgressive nature of Literature, and Literature's own awareness of it, helps explain why it needed to displace its inevitable anxieties onto Technology. Literature's own operations are peculiarly akin to those exercises of technological power that it writes against. Like Technology, Literature appropriates, exploits, recomposes, arranges—within inherited, but constantly "modernized," mechanisms of form—materials that all the while are also said by Literature to belong mythologically to something called "life." This concern for the power of technique in Literature is especially pronounced in the English romantics—in Coleridge's "Odes" and The Ancient Mariner, in such poems of Wordsworth's as "Nutting" and Book I of The Prelude, where, as David Ferry and others have shown, human intrusions, acquisitive destructiveness, or theft, all of them visited upon an otherwise silent, aweful, and serene nature, are a metaphoric equivalent for the poet's own seizure of objects for use in poetry. Wordsworth includes in his poetry the criticism later made of him by Lawrence, that he was "impertinent."

The dialectic concern for form as against fluidity, for figuration as against fracture, for structured selves as against fragmented selves—these are not, however, original to the Romantic or modernist self-consciousness about the transgressive nature of writing. They are everywhere in Literature, expressions of a concern for order that is always—and also—an anxiety about its possibly brutal and deforming rigidities. More recent literature is especially useful for illustration, however, because it tends to treat earlier writing as if in itself it were a kind of Technology, as if it had created forms and predictable movements that have become reified and potentially deadening.

Literature's distaste for Technology reveals a squeamishness about its own operations—this is perhaps most evident in a characteristic peculiar to a species of the human that Literature tends to idealize. I refer to people who are themselves almost never interested in Literature. Here we come to a crux: in some central instances—and I realize there are many exceptions to this—the most admired and admirable characters in works of genius, especially since 1800 or so, are either unliterary or positively suspicious of Literature. The worthy rustics of pastoral poetry, no less than Faulkner's enduring Dilsey, could hardly be expected to read about themselves. Indeed, you might say that they are examples to the rest of us, for the very reason that they do not engage in the exploitative enterprise of reading and writing. While Leopold Bloom can, of course, read, would anyone expect him to read Ulysses? Literature, that is, seldom includes among its implied readers the kind of people it most admires, and when it includes literary people, they are often a shady or tortured lot. This has been the case long before such "ordinary" people were presumably corrupted by, or lost to, Literature by the TV screen. A little of such literary demography might dampen the high culturalistic bravado of, say, Anthony Burgess, who seems to assume, in his study of Joyce, that since Literature makes such redeeming use of ordinary people, it follows that ordinary people can make redeeming use of Literature.

It seems quite generally assumed that because ordinary people are available to Literature as a resource, they are also available to it as an audience, had they not been otherwise seduced. How else explain the voluble and confused disparagement visited, in the name of print culture, on television? But if critical competence in the reading of Literature requires some sort of productive engagement with difficulties made inevitable by the nature of language itself, then it requires some measure of critical incompetence to go about complaining that Literature should or could be in competition with TV for the attention of the general public. Many avid readers of Literature spend, as I do, a great deal of time watching television, but it doesn't follow that the reverse might also be true, that inveterate watchers could care about Literature and language in ways they can rewardingly be cared about. Leaving aside the masses in the world who cannot read at all, it is evident that reading citizens, wherever they are, would not necessarily read more, or read better, if they watched television less. And much of what they do read in newspapers, magazines, and what passes for good fiction is often lacking in the nuances (because more neglectful of the human voice) that can be heard on certain TV shows, like "Kojak," or remarkable situation comedies like "Taxi," and on certain talk shows like Johnny Carson's, not to mention "Masterpiece Theater." The argument that the emergence of TV is largely responsible for the decline of reading or literacy is no more tenable than the wistful suggestions that the so-called art of conversation (never a conspicuous feature in the TV-less childhoods of people my age) disappeared from the family circle because of the intrusion of the tube. To judge from the endless conversational murmur in movie houses, which used to be much quieter, people have been convinced by TV that they can and should become more, not less voluble before any available screen.

There is a habit of phrasing that neatly epitomizes the confusions I am trying to sort out. You may have noted how on occasion all instruments of expression except literature are referred to as "the media," often with the omission of such qualifiers as "electronic" or "mass." The implications are especially glaring in linked phrases like "print and media culture." What is suggested by that phrase is that video is one of "the media" and that print is not; that print, and especially literature, are exonerated from the contaminations associated with media.

The implication, not dispelled by any amount of critical theory, however ancient, is that language and literature are "natural" while all other media, like TV, are not. This is at the heart of the confusions and expectations of those who assume that Literature might compete with video for a general audience. What seems to be forgotten is that language is in itself a mediation, another point that cannot be emphasized enough, no matter how embarassingly obvious. Every word is a form of re-presentation. And Literature, by virtue of its formal conventions and the conscious struggle by which it appropriates language into poetry or the novel, is yet another, still more formidable example of media and re-presentation. It is likely that language and Literature are the most indispensable and resilient cultural resources that human beings have made available to themselves. And yet, no matter how inherent the human facility with language is judged to be, language is obviously an artifact in large part created and fashioned by all kinds of social, religious, economic, and political pressures. Perhaps the tendency to believe otherwiset, to believe that language partakes of nature, is a result of the quite understandable desire to believe that language and Literature should be identical with the kinds of nature and humanity that they idealize and preserve. It is a very costly mistake, however, a fatal concession to vulgarians, mediacratic or literary. It concedes that culture, in its literary or high artistic manifestations, can be absorbed in the way TV is absorbed, that somehow, in its competition with popular culture, high culture has gotten not less, but more readily available than it has ever been in history.

Language is not virgin "nature," available as fully to video or to radio as it is to Literature. It is a resource that Literature, more effectively than any other media, can productively mine and develop. The cultural threat of video in its effect on the general public has been exaggerated precisely to the extent that the possible effects of Literature on the general public have been idealized. Régis Debray's recent remark that "the darkest spot in modern society is a small luminous screen," is a sample of the kind of Gallic silliness that passes for thinking on this subject. What has happened—and for a variety of reasons, whose source lies deeper than any developments in Technology—is that there have been, in the last hundred years or so, some accelerated changes and displacements in ideas of the natural, the traditional, and, especially, the human. These ideas, which are in part the invention of Literature, are essential to its prosperity and to the prospect of its being able to maintain some degree of its ancient cultural-social power. But this is not to say that Literature ought to preserve any particular image of nature, the human, or the past. The very existence of Literature, in the sense in which I have ever tried to define it, depends on its capacity to question what at the same time it proposes, to challenge in one period—in one phrase—the images predominant in another, and to expose as a figuration any term, like "human" or "natural," that the culture at large may want, for its own political or historical convenience, to institutionalize. What is truly threatened by Technology, in the form of electronic media, is exactly that play of dialectical complication that is inseparable from the act of literary creation.

What I have been implying can now be said more directly. A feature of Literature essential to its value is quite simply its refusal to offer, in the parlance of TV, a clear image; and the obvious implication of electronic media is that Literature's kind of opacity is inessential, evasive, and obscurantist. This also, to expose the full and tortuous ironies of our cultural situation, is customarily the charge leveled against Literature itself by elements of the literary-critical establishment—who are of course extremely anxious also about the effects of TV—whenever the canon is disrupted by the appearance of experimental or theoretical work. "Inessential," "evasive," "obscurantist"—this has at some point been said of nearly every innovative writer (and critic) in recent history. Those who want Literature to be widely available, on the assumption that it is socially and morally enhancing, generally oppose TV on the grounds that it is socially and morally injurious, but their criteria are as simplistic in the one case as in the other.

We are left, nonetheless, with the task of finding some way to describe best the various ways in which Literature, unlike TV, manages to put itself out of focus, no matter how hard we try to bring it into focus. I said a bit earlier that Literature is a kind of writing whose clarities bring on precipitations of density. At other times I have used the word "difficulty,"¹ instead of density, to characterize an essential aspect, particularly of modernist literature. I want very briefly to discuss these terms and their utility in the larger argument being made here. Density is a useful term, particularly with respect to a kind of Literature that gives a more or less direct access to pleasure but that becomes, on longer acquaintance, rather strange and imponderable. Shakespeare is a good example, as is Marvell or Paradise Lost or Middlemarch, Another kind of writing may, on first encounter, seem quite bristly, resistant, difficult. If somehow, maybe with the help of notes and annotations, you master the difficulty—you cannot in the same sense master density—you may then find that there is little or no density behind it. Stephen Dedalus's tortured prose in the Proteus section of Ulysses is, for me, a case in point, as are the episodes like Oxen of the Sun and Ithaca, where formal mechanisms, more than any information carried by them, rather statically communicate the significance. To put it very crudely, the Joyce of "The Dead" is more dense than is the Joyce of Ulysses, where he is being both difficult and dense; Ulysses, generally speaking, is difficult, while Women in Love is dense; Pound is difficult, Frost is dense.

Twentieth century criticism and theory tend to prefer difficulty to density. Difficulty gives the critic a chance to strut his stuff, to treat Literature as if it really were a communication of knowledge rather than a communication of being. Difficulty also carries with it a lineage of theoretical, historical, and cultural justification. George Chapman had religious theories about the virtues of obscurity in poetry, but in this century, difficulty has been made to seem the inescapable social and political responsibility of the artist. You are already on notice that when something is hard to read, there are Big Reasons for its being so, and that you, reader, had better shape up. Density is another matter. No guide book will help you. It does not announce itself in Literature, anymore than it does in some of our most intimate conversations, and it can go unnoticed in either case by those who do not care to encounter it. Density is very often something that happens to the ear rather than to the eye; it is often something you hear happening to voices as they modify words and phrases that, at another point, seemed quite clear or casual. The genius of Shakespeare manifests itself in this way, as we hear one voice more or less deconstructing the vocabularies used by some other voice, and then reconstructing it for other purposes. One need only trace out, for example, what happens to the words "space," "gap," and "arch" in Antony and Cleopatra.

I began with one question, and have produced a couple more. At the outset the question was this: Is there a threat to literary culture posed by electronic media, this latest manifestation of Technology, Literature's ancient enemy? In response I have been arguing that the threat is in part no more than a continuing effort to secure for Literature, and for the written word generally, an immense prestige, and with it an equally immense cultural power and hegemony over the illiterate masses and over the human imagination of itself. Furthermore, I have argued that Literature often disguises its transgressive ambitions, its desire to take over where life begins and ends, and that it does so, first, by ascribing these ambitions to Technology—which it then condemns—and second, by offering, in its idealizations of the human and the natural, compensations for its own technological ambitions as manifested in acts of composition. I have then proposed that, because of these inner contradictions, and for reasons still to be explored, Literature is characterized by a degree of difficulty or density that does not allow very many People, relatively speaking, to appreciate what it does. The unavailability of Literature was not a problem, but a social and historical advantage, so long as the small minority, to whom it was available, was also dominant, empowered, and articulate—so much so, that it could determine the shape of culture and of its visible and audible evidences. It also determined what could not be seen or heard.

By this line of argument I have arrived at a position that would seem to put into question the things I regularly do as a literary person. Am I not disputing the cultural centrality of Literature and of the written word? And would it not follow that Literature has either very little historical relevance or only such relevance as would disallow most of the large claims made for it by traditional criticism? Finally, in putting such stress on Literature's difficulty—Fielding? Thackeray? Dickens? Wordsworth? Tennyson? George Eliot?—am I not saying that it is, by and large, unyielding and obscure to nearly everyone? Can it be said that Literature pretends to send messages that it never delivers, even while thousands of people swear that they are receiving them?

I must put these questions to myself, because for twenty-five years I have given a course to all sorts of students on how best to ask questions of the classic texts of English and American literature; because the poet who is to me one of the most interesting of this century so far, Robert Frost, is also the most popular of the great poets who might be compared to him; and because I am involved in the founding and development of The Library of America, a project designed to make the best of American writing permanently available to the common reader in a form equivalent to the French Pléiade. How, it must be asked, can anyone engaged in these activities say that Literature is so essentially "difficult" or "dense" that it is somehow unavailable to the majority of People?

But these questions only arise, indeed only exist, because of prevalent assumptions, to which my opposition is already clear, about the nature of Literature and of how it is to be read. The questions are generated by humanistic traditions having to do with the way language works or ought to work in Literature. These traditions have been everywhere promoted for over a century in the teaching of Literature and in the kind of criticism that follows from that teaching. The tradition unites Arnold and Eliot, despite the latter's disclaimers; it includes Trilling along with the Southern contingent of the New Criticism, however much they may have wanted to differ; and it has set the conditions even for the challenges made to it in the past decade or so, challenges that in any case do not sufficiently acknowledge the political consequences of how one chooses or is taught to read Literature. Its emphases are epistemological, its stress is on knowledge and referentiality as essential effects of the language of Literature, and it is committed to moral and humanistic hierarchies that have proved strong enough to determine how readers, even deconstructive ones, trace out the activities of language in a text.

In opposition, I have proposed here and elsewhere that, while such hierarchies cannot be dispensed with or ignored by Literature, and are indeed its sustenance, the writer's or the reader's proper commitment to them is akin to the acrobat's commitment to his trapeze, the dancer's commitment to the floor or a partner, something to play against, to use opportunistically, as a candidate for office, himself a species of writer, will use language—less because he believes in it than because it is believed in: "The play's the thing / Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King." The pleasure in Literature, whether of the writer or the reader, would thus involve, as does the pleasure of vital conversation, an attention to how words, by their interplay, their interfusions, their transformations, can, moment by moment, create and decreate structures of life and being to fit an occasion however large or small. The performing self exults in the use to which it can put the most sacrosanct or the most obscene of terms. Falstaff is one of the most obvious, Cleopatra the most subtle, of practitioners, and Shakespeare is more indifferent to sincerities than either one of them.

To read with an ear to the edifying/de-edifying movements of language in Literature is to put yourself in a position to listen, with an equivalent alertness, to the political movements of language in life, which includes the politics implicit in the making of cultural discriminations. Literature can become more, not less historically and culturally important once the reader is freed from the compulsion to treat it as a representation of life. Life already is re-presented in words, to repeat an already obvious point, and Literature is best taken as a dramatization of the career of words as they try to fulfill their impossible, their poignant and comic obligations.

Reading, in that sense, is the discovery of the movements by which certain words, including those I have been using here, like technology, life, literature, people, find a place in a hierarchy that is continually altering itself as surrounding circumstances change, as contexts evolve. I owe something here, obviously, to Kenneth Burke and, in proposing that words in a text act the way people act in life, to Leavis and his phrase, "the dramatic use of language." Initially the words are simply there, in a first paragraph, a first scene, an opening line, looking more innocent than they possibly can be, given the history they inescapably bring with them. Then, almost at once, they find themselves in a crowd of other words within which they discover affinities and antagonisms, the inclination to seek support or give it, the power to attract or the desire to subvert. This drama of words, as in a play by Shakespeare, can make us acutely aware of how even the most culturally revered and necessary words like "God" or "Nature" are, if you attend carefully enough, subject, even in daily usage, to extraordinary transformations, dislodgements, and jokes, no matter how unassailable they are officially meant to be.

Reading, if cultivated in this manner, can make us uncommonly attuned to the linquistic techniques outside of Literature by which social, sexual, and political hierarchies are insinuated, by which dominations are established, and by which they may possibly be resisted. However, the kind of contemporary fiction that overtly offers a self-conscious, self-referential reading of itself, carried out within the text, the kind of fiction that, in doing this, is anxious thereby to show that life and history partake of the fictional process of Literature—this kind of exercise seems to me dreary and naive. The most instructive and pleasurable occasions for reading occur, I think, when Literature is seduced by the life it proposes to create, when it half resents the fact that its powers of invention and beguilement have already been exceeded by nature's. A "classic," in Frank Kermode's sense, allows perennially for its own reformations, and it does so by not forcing upon us, in the manner of a Borges or a John Barth, the proud evidence that the author has already exhausted the possibilities for analysis or is giddily overwhelmed by them. The trouble with a Literature that is intent on displaying its own hermeneutica! powers is that it is too simple; it is a puzzle that drops dead when you solve it. By contrast, the most popular of what can be called great Literature is also quite often the most ordinary-seeming and the most dense, without being difficult. The Bible, Shakespeare, Dickens, Wordsworth, Lawrence, Frost—these are, at last, always interesting to return to, because they offer so much and offer it so readily that they evade analysis. Each dares to take language on trust, like a handshake before a game of some sort. They are, as it were, prompted by the platitudes of language, by its pieties, its familiar shapes and idioms. They all freely indulge in a language that makes us feel at home in the world. It is just because they do hold to a course that belongs to the natural bias of the language that they get involved in mystifications and multiplicities of meaning that threaten to cancel one another out but never quite do so.

This drama of words—this struggle by which they arrive at some only momentary stay against confusion—is really what the common reader finds exciting about Literature, and it gets expressed, too, in a taste for detective stories and the engrossing irresolutions of soap opera. Literature enacts the birth and troubled destiny of life as it is created in language, and it should remind its readers that something of the same intense obscurity can lend substance, pleasure, and promise to our daily talk. "Ordinary language is all right," Wittgenstein assures us—though of what, exactly, we cannot be sure. His sentence, like some of Thoreau's, becomes dazzingly mysterious the more we repeat it. It is so familiar-sounding that it reverberates with tones that haphazardly pun on one another. The marvel of this, and of the writers I have mentioned, especially Shakespeare, is that ordinary discourse, the sound of it, is never sacrificed to the extraordinarily elusive (and allusive) movements of the words that are suspended within it. Shakespeare is sound, the sound of English idiom as it creates and sustains the terminological agitations and blurrings that are its essential life.