Less Disciplinary Than Thou: Criticism and the Conflict of the Faculties

Bruce Robbins Less Disciplinary Than Thou: Criticism and the Conflict of the Faculties Literary criticism has become too politicized. In following after theory and cultural studies, it has wandered away from its true path, its proper object of study. The present crisis of the humanities should make it clear for better or worse that without disciplinary distinctness, we also find ourselves without public legitimacy. In short, it is time for literary critics to get back to the activity to which their title commits them: the interpretation of literary texts. I do not share these sentiments. But they are expressed more and more frequently by people I respect. Also, I find myself less and less complacent about answers to which I and others have appealed in the past. In particular, I am dissatisfied with the rationale for interdisciplinarity that combines (1) the argument that commitment to a given discipline represents a willful self-blinkering, a falling away from the intellectual's higher responsibility to truth and justice, wherever that responsibility may lead, and (2) the argument that politics cannot be separated off from criticism, or indeed from any discipline, because "everything is political." In search of a more satisfactory way to frame the debate over disciplinary distinctness and the place of politics in the humanities, therefore, I try in this essay to apply to the present situation an early and influential formulation of these issues: the case for the autonomy of the humanities articulated in Kant's last book, The Conflict ofthe Faculties.1 For the humanities and social sciences, a turning away from politics in the large, representative sense in favor of the disinterested pursuit of knowledge and/or a politics of local, corporate self-interest could of course be associated with the traditions of Matthew Arnold and Max Weber. Indeed, the neo-Weberian position of Pierre Bourdieu has recently been applied to the American situation very forcefully by John Guillory. But Kant is perhaps the more interesting source (Bourdieu too goes back to him; see Homo Academicus, c. 2) for at least one reason. Unlike Arnold's "culture" and Weber's Wissenschaft, his "conflict of the faculties" factors into the question of knowledge-production a political difference or conflict within knowledge-production, or rather within the university. Politics could not be kept out of the university , Kant conceded—but it did not belong in what he called the "philosophy faculty." Politics concerns the government alone. Thus the "higher" faculties of law, medicine, and theology, so called because of their proximity to government power, are both more important and also rightly subject to government control. "As tools of the govern- 96 the minnesota review ment (clergymen, magistrates, and physicians), they have legal influence on the public and . . . are not free to make public use of their learning " (Kant 25). It is by renouncing politics and the significance that goes with it that philosophy claims a unique right to autonomy: "having no commands to give, [it] is free to evaluate everything" (27). Over the past two decades, Foucault's pressing together of power and knowledge into a single unit has been our characteristic interdisciplinary counter-statement to Kant. Politics, we are fond of repeating, cannot be renounced; knowledge cannot be separated from power. Whatever one thinks of its epistemological status, no one can deny that this principle has been an extremely productive one for recent scholarship . For where power or politics is asserted to be present, it is also asserted that the researcher is investigating matters that are worth investigating, matters of true and general significance. Politics talk is, among other things, a compelling answer to the implicit "so what?" question that has haunted scholarship at least since it began having to render some account for its budgets to suspicious outsiders. The conflation of power and knowledge that is a defining principle of "theory " and "cultural studies" suggests of course that no quest for knowledge is value-neutral. But it gives back some of the legitimacy it thus takes away. For it invests with public significance a wider range of objects and projects of knowledge, including those occupying areas like "culture" or "the social" or "civil society," as opposed to "the...