Donald K. Hedrick

Department of English
Kansas State University
Manhattan, KS 66506
hedrick@ksu.edu

NOT FOR QUOTATION OR PUBLICATION

Paper for MLA Session on Humanities Futures, Chicago, 1999
 
 
 
 
 
 

"Maybe the trouble is my name's not Johnny and I never taught college anywhere and I don't appreciate the finer things in life--like looking at a doll cry and taking the rap for a murder she committed." (Humphrey Bogart in Dead Reckoning)
 

Mean Cities
 

While I value complexity as much as the next guy, I propose here what may not only appear to be simplifications, but may actually be so. I do not, of course, presume to suggest what we might collectively expect or do for our next thousand years of literary study, only what we might more modestly do for, say, a generation or two, by way of grafting an identity on humanism's long revolution.

First of all, let me begin my take here in a tangential way, by simplifying the massively freighted discourse of the moment around the topic of violence, a subspecialization of mine, as it happens, which I have taught both here and abroad. I regard myself as somewhat of an expert on this topic--"somewhat" because when in Central Europe, where I was teaching, most Americans like me are presumed to be experts on violence. While exceptionalist and indeed innovative violence constitute questions, I suppose, for Americanists to ponder, for my purposes here I want to reflect on a different sort of question. The problem of modern violence is not so much, as Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out, its causes or its extremity, but something more like its geography: that is, why it exists in such close proximity to nonviolence, perhaps even in some way dependent upon it. The Columbine school killings in Colorado, where hypernormal suburbia jumpcuts hyperabnormal Gothic, are, like the cultured aestheticizations linked to fascism, a current, lurid instance of this apparent paradox.

Shifting for a moment nearer our spot at the MLA Convention in Chicago, we find ourselves some hundred years back as my great-grandfather Teofil was guiding tourists through the White City of the World's Columbian Exposition with its wonders predicting the next millennium of powerful marvels of technology, of consumption, and, perhaps less expectedly, of advertising itself. The fair thus spoke multiculturally and even globally to its visitors, as did also the voice of my great-grandfather himself, whose skills in seven languages, as a recent emigrant from the Ukraine, earned him the position of a specialist guide and interpreter, one assigned to VIP visitors to the Fair.

On the outskirts of the fair were the hotels and pensions he must have known, which served the massive influx of these tourists. One of these hotels, later called the "Holmes Castle," became infamous, however, in another of the modernist juxtapositions of nightmare and utopian dream. A tourist trap in the worst sense, it had been constructed in the early nineties by Herman Webster Mudgett, aka Holmes, whose twenty-seven confessed murders in the place may have been the tip of the iceberg, it is thought, for the estimated several hundreds of murders that may have taken place there. These would make Mudgett perhaps America's most prolific serial killer, and certainly a most notorious figure of the turn of the century. With its concealed passages, sliding panels, secret staircases, peepholes, and trapdoors, the building itself was designed as a murder factory, an instrument of torture and destruction (quite literally so, including torture racks, surgical tables, vaults of quicklime and vats of acid). In its up-to-date innovations of gas and electricity, it drew upon the same technological fantasies touted at the fair, pointing toward various technical means by which Mudgett, for example, was apparently able to control from valves in his own bedroom the gassing of his victims (primarily young women) and perhaps their incineration in asbestos lined rooms below. As in other cases (such as, famously, "domestic" violence, "date" rape, etc.), violence is in proxmity with nonviolence, and it thus staggers thought why no movie has yet been contrived for us out of this grim, sensational history, for our extended appreciation of "art-horror." Significantly, at the outset of the spectacularization of such serial violence by the media, we have an economic exchange by which Holmes, awaiting execution, sold his story to the Hearst publications for $7,500, perhaps diminishing his purity as a killer to become sullied in yet another way, at the same time implicating the media in the very spectacularization which feeds the pathology.

If our century's legacy is indeed a pathological public sphere, of such tangled complicities and such proximities of the public and the criminal, the privileged and the abject, it may be that the most apt collective fantasy for this situation is the film noir, whose spiritual locus is rather Los Angeles than Chicago. Los Angeles, where, as Mike Davis has shown us in different ways, late capitalism plays itself out at its limits, is capitalism's canonical city that helps to explain the paradoxical juxtaposition I have referred to. Thus, we have Fredric Jameson's account of the often forgotten Marxist position that capitalism is a progressive historical form, one responsible for producing, through capital and its lack, the best and the worst that there is, hells alongside its heavens, a heaven of safety nets for some and a trapdoor to the basement for others.
 

Shakespeare: The Franchise.
 

In the case of the humanities, the close juxtaposition of the lowbrow to the extremes of cultural capital exists by analogy, at least, in the case of Shakespeare, whose historical shift toward the highbrow in the previous millennium has been deftly traced by Lawrence Levine. It is to this example in its current phase that I now turn, in the hopes that it provides some transferrable insights for the identity of the humanities.

A sometimes barometer of the fate of the humanities, the space of Shakespeare seems to be one of boom and bust cycles--a figure now threatened by highbrow elitism, anti-canonicity, or the academic market of specialization, now only to be renewed by forces as disparate and incommensurable as new historicism, Harold Bloom, or Hollywood. That this status should be in such flux, even increasing flux, is only fitting, given Shakespeare's role as the exemplary model of cultural capital, and given what we know of capital's transformative powers. As cultural capital he is not only volatile but pivotal, the author inevitably cited as test case in debates both theoretical and curricular about reforming the humanities to come. Given the increasing commercialization and corporatization of everything whatsoever, including academia and its classrooms, it is unsurprising that the value of this capital would remain volatile.

Attempting to supplement my cultural or other income from teaching Shakespeare, I contacted the promotions and sponsorship division of the Pepsi Corporation, which had just struck a multi-million dollar deal with my university, Kansas State University, for exclusive soft drink rights on campus. This corporate coup managed in one single action to distinguish us from our rival state university, the University of Kansas, which last year went Coca Cola, so that a Bourdieuan fine academic distinction now exists between Pepsi U and Coke U, the latter uncannily reproducing the Board of Regents representation of the school as the state's "flagship" university. The deal I offered Pepsi was to wear my Pepsi jacket in class, the one I got at a second-hand store on Melrose Ave. in LA and which is embroidered with "Don" on it, for some sort of consideration from the company, as yet to be negotiated. The smooth-talking representative was doubtful about working this out, since she was frequently contacted to sell such jackets to people willing to wear them as advertising. But she encouraged me to keep wearing my jacket, complimenting me on my "loyalty." Where Coke and Pepsi were concerned, as I discovered from the torch song of Elizabeth Scott in Dead Reckoning, "Either it's love or it isn't; there's no compromise."

I felt like I was being played for a sucker. If the Shakespearean teacher and perhaps by extension the humanist is, according to Richard Burt in his recent study of sub-pop adapations of Shakespeare, increasingly identified as a "loser," it is in part because everything is increasingly identified as either winning or losing. Loser cycles, like downsizings, become ever more expected and naturalized, even where, or especially where, Shakespeare is concerned.

Shakespearean critics Richard Burt and Harold Bloom offer contrary authorities for us proceeding into the next century, providing competing versions of the security and value of the cultural capital of the humanities: Burt tracing the popular figure of Shakespeare increasingly "unmoored" from his works and irrelevant, and Bloom authorizing Shakespeare's high status as the "inventor" of a usable human nature, and thus always again relevant. While both positions contend for the position of "public intellectual" some academics are calling for now, what they seem to embody as a pair is the very cyclical and unstable nature of this valuation, and perhaps, by extension, of the humanities themselves--neither flourishing, nor, as Bill Readings proposes in some sort of usable ruins, but both, and sometimes both at once. As universities become more enmeshed in the marketplace, particularly identifying with and entangled with the corporate world of image-production and rationalization of intellectual and pedagogical activities, it may be that the case of Shakespeare becomes an even more crucial model for the place of the humanities. And it may be that such cycles, rather than simply being deplored or tolerated, can, in the manner of the market itself managed on a long-term basis, be exploited for our own profit. Some effort at viewing the bigger picture is in order.
 

Historical Coalitions
 

Whether the new "public intellectual," however becoming more "public," will constitute a continuity or a break with the traditions of the humanities should be, I think, an important question for the academy. The figure of Shakespeare, as it happens, may be instructive in such a question. While many, among whom I include myself, would hope for radical rethinkings along progressive political lines, to re-create the humanities as a committed weapon for social justice as Dick Ohmann has consistently proposed through his editions of English in America, I would suggest that there is a continuity within the humanities tradition which, at our present historical moment, might actually serve us better than that of a radical break, although I am by temperament drawn to the latter. The continuity or longer-term consensus I refer to is--and I oversimplify deliberately questions of economic history here--that of the anti-commercial. From the wary glimmerings in Renaissance writers such as Shakespeare and Jonson about commodification, reification, and consumerism, to the full-blown sympathizing with underclasses and workers after the ravages of industrialization, and finally, to postcolonial critiques of the encroachments of globalization, the relationship of the humanities--whether in Elizbethan, Enlightenment, Romantic, modernist, or postmodernist forms--to the commercial sphere has been perennially and predominantly critical. Despite the revolutions of criticism and theory over the years, there has been more continuity in this regard than it would appear from our internal divisions, often such small change within the broader picture of academic change.

It may be possible, then, to achieve some kind of historical consensus by acknowledging this longstanding tradition more explicitly and publically, in fact, asserting the anti-commercial tradition as both our critical heritage and as our identity. One problem would arise, I think, of a certain contradiction in our practices. While Shakespeare, as others have recently argued, may provide an early modern example of such an anticipatory critique, the recent work on his place in the early modern market suggests that, whether or not you view his work as having either transcended (Bristol et al) or else as having been constrained by the market, one cannot ignore that a chief beneficiary of this commercialization was Shakespeare himself, along with the institution of his theater, the first commercial entertainment industry known. If Shakespeare was critical, he was also complicit, inhabiting the tangle of race, class, and gender that current scholarship works to undo.

On the other hand, our century's image of the scholar, a figure ranging through the revolutions of criticism and now of theory, has largely been that of the investigator--the Holmesian detective, explorer, and excavator of truth, meaning, irony, structure, ideology, history, and, to bring the catalogue up to the present, even surface itself. Whatever seems an obviousness, as it happens, has always become less obvious under our successive scrutinies.

If we were to adopt the distinction made by Slavoj Zizek between two traditional detective roles, we would have, I think, one productive resolution of the contradiction. Zizek distinguishes the Holmesian detective, who objectively overviews the crime, from the noir detective, who is always implicated or becomes somehow implicated in it. This latter, as it happens, is the same role that has been argued for postmodernism as a political practice, namely, as complicit critique. Thus, if the standpoint of noir were to become the figure for the stage of our development, it would behoove us to acknowledge and to examine how we are often beneficiaries of what we critique--from a commercialized humanities in the public sphere, to part-time academic work in our institutions, like the increasing use (and abuse, as it happens) of the hired men by Shakespeare's company. Marlowe and company--the detective rather than the writer--would show us how tangled is our own complicity in what we investigate; while Marlowe and company--the writer rather than the detective--would show us how an entertainment industry could itself be founded on complicities. It may be that our job, if not our heritage, is to be hired to investigate the hidden crimes of the powerful, even as we benefit from their patronage, and from the attentions of their fascinating and dangerous spouses. And it may be that, as Pierre Bourdieu has recently argued, the resistance to the commercial will mean that what is most progressive will now require a certain traditionalism or even conservatism, the humanities as an invented counter-tradition to the commercial, its public role acknowledged publically not as an enemy in the culture wars, but the dirty job everybody knows somebody's got to do.

As the commercial inevitably fills more and more public and cultural space, and even as our public institutions themselves devolve into entertainment industries, we can make use of the contradictory circumstances we find ourselves in, recognizing our conditions of possibility for what they are. We can thus decide that noir humanism, the marriage of Burt and Bloom, may be our best, perhaps only, hope.
 

CODA: Noir Canonicity, Pedagogy, and So Forth

"You know, the trouble with women is they ask too many questions" (Bogart, Dead Reckoning)
 

A Noir Humanism would entail rethinkings of everything from canonicity to pedagogy, for which a few scattered suggestions must suffice for now. A noir canonicity would entail spending cultural capital rather than critiquing it; teaching an informed Eurocentrism (as Spivak suggests) but with its barbarisms juxtaposed with its civilizations; sometimes, though not always, historicizing, in order to establish contemporary complicities with the past; "greatness" of literature in quotes, allowing a full fetishization acknowledged as such.

A Shakespearean example or two of a transhistorical noir pedagogy. Let students, for instance, collect the manipulative techniques of Shakespeare's Iago, but in order to construct a contemporary manual of ways to incriminate and defeat a colleague in the workplace, an increasingly noir habitation it would appear. Or let students memorize the immortal words of the bard, not however "All the world's a stage," but rather the submission speech of Kate at the end of Shrew, an exercise which does wonders to defeat any illusions about Shakespeare's timelessness, and appears to have salutary effects as well when male students are required to take these lines to heart, momentarily experiencing Deleuzian transversality.

If, like Shrew, noir is really, beneath its crusty cynicism, about love, then it is again on all fours with the traditions, and countertraditions, constituting the humanities, even though love, in such a city, may only be able to announce itself in smirking worldweariness and repartee, or, updated a couple of generations, in the "whatevers" and "as ifs" of Burt's loser criticism. Ultimately, if the realm of literature now, as I see it from the border of the millennium, approaches the condition of Los Angeles, as the contradictory space of later capitalism, then the archetypal genre of the city provides us with a register, if not a research paradigm, for an ever more hard-boiled critical function. Our canonicity, and our community, will increasingly form in the image of our canon city, a public sphere for a private eye, where we get the goods from anyone we can--from some feminism fatale, always already asking too many questions; from those queers down the alley performing god knows what next; from that nutcase hawking workers' pamphlets on the corner; from the homeless foreign chick with her loud gripes--living not exactly resistantly but by codes more or less smashed. But it's a town we already know.

On these damp streets, smoking will still, as always, look cool, but we'll know more about what it does to us next time.