Uncanon

I want to suggest that a canon is not best thought of as an effect of the will of individual intellectuals, be they of good or bad or indifferent intentions; rather, a canon is better understood as a supra-individual, shifting, and differential structural formation. Consequently, the question I would like to ask is not whether the canon has ended or will end or can end or should end; I take for granted that the canon should end even as I know the canon can never end as long as the academy works as an ideological state apparatus. Rather, I want to reflect on how we might relate to the canon in a radical rather than a reformist manner. Knowing that the canon should end while also understanding it to be a structural feature of the academy as such, what is to be done—or, rather, how might we do what we do?

In the 18^th Brumaire, Marx theorized class as just such a supra-individual structure that is misunderstood to be principally a feature of individual wills and intentions:

In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. In so far as there is merely a local interconnection among [them], and the identity of their interests begets no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not form a class.¹

Marx suggests here that classes are made of people and people make lives in and of classes, but individuals cannot be said to make classes, in a voluntaristic sense. In fact, it is bourgeois capitalism that proffers the ideology of voluntaristic class formation, in order to claim that individuals are willful and autonomous actors who are ultimately responsible for their own fate, particularly for their own economic suffering: your poverty is your own problem, “lazy rascal.”² Classes are thus made supra-individually by structural, shifting, and differential “conditions of existence.” So too, I think, are canons supra-individual; and so too would the liberal ideology of the academy have us think that willful and autonomous intellectuals make canons, reform canons, and reject canons. This is a sort of analogy, of course, and as Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton once wrote about their own analogy between institutional racism and colonialism, “obviously, the analogy is not perfect.”³ But as Kaja Silverman has vividly shown us in a different context, analogy has a powerful political potential: to reveal “authorless and untranscendable similarities … even when there is only a narrow margin of difference, or a sliver of similarity.”⁴

In fact, I would go so far as to say that we in the academy, as Roland Barthes might have said, are canon-effects. Structural conditions give rise to canons, liberal ideology tells us that we have power over them, and our efforts to reform them are often conducted under the spell of that ideology. Consequently, our ever-faltering efforts to undo or remake canons frequently end up reinforcing the very logic and effect of canonization. This is neither fatalistic nor apolitical. This is how change happens (or does not happen) in an institution like the academy when that change seeks to reform rather than to revolutionize (which is to say abolish) the academy as such. While never radical in and of itself, reform can nonetheless leave open the possibility of radicalism only if it is uneasily combined with the persistent auto-critique of, as well as a certain irreverence toward, its own effects.

It is this persistent auto-critique and irreverence that I would like to focus on here, rather than the claims made or implied by Maurice Lee about syllabi, which for my taste fall too short of meaningful statistical evidence and attend too little to the canon as a structural formation. Two sentences in particular make it difficult for me to draw any convincing conclusions from Lee’s study. The first sentence: “After posting a request to the C19 list...