Reply to Mark Bauerlein

Although Mark Bauerlein’s review stings in places, it seems to me to have identified the flaws in The Employment of English all too accurately. In the matter of the book’s subtitle, for instance, part of me wants to protest that I do, in fact, touch on questions pertinent to the various projects of theory. After all, the book does contain a brief discussion of the constitution of the aesthetic and its relation to the franchise of literary studies; an analysis (with the help of Janet Lyon) of the affinities between Jean-François Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition and the Nanterre Manifesto of 1968, which underwrites a more general account of the rise of “interdisciplinary” units in the humanities as a response to the legitimation crises of the 1960s; and an assessment of the relations between cultural studies and public policy, negotiated by way of Fredric Jameson’s dismissal of Tony Bennett’s suggestion to “work with” ideological state apparatuses. I think that when I finished my book, I must have decided that these discussions were sufficient to warrant the use of the word theory as one of the three terms in my subtitle. And like I say, part of me wants to defend that decision now.

But whom exactly would I be kidding? The Employment of English is certainly not a book of theory as Bauerlein would have us understand the term, and it is true that the book habitually treats theoretical questions under the aspect of their institutional, political, and economic implications. (Would that more theorists would do the same.) But then, let’s look again at how Bauerlein would have us understand the term. Apparently, theory is not an epistemological enterprise, since “inquiry relies on epistemological commitments, and those run against the grain of theory and cultural studies” (197). When we add to this formulation Bauerlein’s (contestable) definition of epistemology as that which “asks not ‘what do we know?’ or ‘how do we know?’ but ‘how do we justify what and how we know’?” (197), we derive the following principle: Epistemology concerns itself with discourses of justification, evidence, and argument; theory does not, and neither does politics. Bauerlein is welcome to try to convince people of this set of axioms if he can, but I’d prefer to persuade our readers that the task of judging and justifying truth-claims, of establishing “guidelines of evidence and interpretation” (198), cannot be so easily separated, even for heuristic purposes, from the task of determining the good, the true, and the just in the sublunary political realm.

Indeed, one of the benefits of understanding judgment as simultaneously an epistemological and political enterprise is that such an understanding tends to prevent one from writing sentences like, “Political critics regard those committed to logically justified beliefs and formally grounded methods as reactionary and naïve, still caught up in myths of disinterest, objectivity, and truth” (200). Among the many reasons I take exception to this sentence is that I actually believe that my political analysis of the profession relies on logically justified beliefs and formally grounded methods—and nowhere is this clearer than in my analysis of current crises in peer review (chapters 3–4). Perhaps it is fitting, then, given our disagreements on the status of judgment and the state of the profession, that Bauerlein’s characterization of one of my arguments in chapter 3 (“Professional Obligations and Academic Standards”) comes so close to caricature. Bauerlein writes: “When [Bérubé] questions the theoretical status of cultural studies (86–87), he does so to ask how it should be taught to graduate students so as to make them better interviewees at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention” (202). This is poor textual conduct, I think, for someone so invested in reliable standards of evidence. Here’s what I actually said on the pages Bauerlein cites:

If we conceive of cultural studies—and theory more generally—as something that is potentially as relevant to freshman writing...