Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siecle (review)

Given recent profiles of trans- and cross-disciplinary developments, the editors of this collection propose to defend disciplinarity by way of an historical perspective. They claim to have collected "more focussed genealogies of specific disciplinary developments" that "thwart any precipitous claims that the story of disciplinary formation is one of consolidation, constraint, or ideological justification" (2). They focus on the last third of the nineteenth century, long associated with the institutionalization and professionalization of the human sciences: aesthetics, anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, sexology, and economics.

Now with this goal one might have edited a collection of historians of each of the disciplines. This is the role of John Guillory, who in "Part I: Disciplinary Formations" responsibly traces the coexistence of four different disciplinary practices that can now cohabit in one English department: philology, literary history, belles lettres, and composition. But the danger of such internalist histories is minutiae or sectarian debate that loses sight of the forest for the trees, and Amanda Anderson and Joseph Valente have obviously not confined the study to narrow specialists. Most of the articles are not on disciplines in the narrow sense and most of them are not on the Victorian fin de siècle. And there is a distinctly culturalist bias to the volume, with eleven of the fourteen contributors in English departments and most of the essays showing the influence of cultural studies at our own fin de siècle. What the volume does show is that the disciplines were always messy compromises between epistemic knowledges, institutional statuses, and pragmatic regimens. While the editors make a valiant effort in the introduction to unify the contributions intellectually with reference to Victorian debates about freedom and determinism, or to show that the Victorians were always already interdisciplinary, in the contributions themselves "discipline" can mean specialised knowledge, professional status, or technologies of the self, and the contributors loosely fall into the sections named accordingly.

Thus "history" in "Part II: Disciplines and Professionalism" is shaped by the dialectic of status and market forces. Liah Greenfeld notes the reception of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) in Germany in 1777 but then cuts to the rise of research institutions modelled on Germany's in the USA. She concludes that economics had no intellectual project at all, just the desire of academics to seize the status of science in research institutes. Henrika Kuklick's predictably fine critical piece on medicine's decline in professional status due to market forces is also less about discipline than status.

In "Part III: Disciplines of the Self," discipline is used in Michel Foucault's sense of micropractices of self-identification. Beginning with writings by India's Dalit, or untouchable, class, Gauri Viswanathan attempts to map links between literary and political representation, in which religious diversity is first accomodated and then transformative. Jeff Nunokawa's piece on Oscar Wilde is more about taste than either discipline or history. Beginning with a parochial desire to look forever young, Nunokawa discusses Erving Goffman's views of dis-composed, aging women and then turns to Wilde's exclusion of everyone but the beautiful in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Ultimately for Wilde, the attractions of language triumph over his "Aryan" (228) "regime of body fascism" (229). Nunokawa's contribution is in every sense the volume's most superficial. Since it begins with the wish for external youth, we trust that this is merely triumph of the will.

I was more impressed by Lauren Goodlad's more substantial historicizing of the will as Smilesian self-originating force, the "soul of every great character" (187) that formed the ideological ground of voluntarism and the self-governing state. "Part IV: Discipline and the State" includes two substantial essays comparatively focused on sociology at the fin de siècle. Goodlad traces the contestation between organised charity and Fabian socialism that constituted a defining moment in...