Putting literature as anterior to the literary establishment (in the sense outlined in “The Tricky Anteriority of Literature”) suggests that the object “literature” has a self-generated validity – its benefits are pre-established and acknowledged as a public good. Then the task of literary research and its institutions, as part of the literary establishment, is simply to enhance and perpetuate those already available benefits, as a disinterested public service, irrespective of profits.
Putting literature as posterior to the literary establishment, as produced by the literary establishment and its institutions, does not annul the possibility of benefits but complicates the benefits by foregrounding the interests of that establishment. Insofar, as the literary establishment embeds economic arrangements, that means foregrounding profits for some parts of that establishment alongside the generally available benefits.
Here’s a simplistic illustration of the above. The first approach involves, for instance, maintaining that James Joyce’s Ulysses came to be recognised collectively as a literary text because its unusual textual and stylistic qualities hit a chord with readers of the time (they benefitted from reading it), which was then picked up by literary researchers. Literary researchers thereafter altruistically clarified those benefits and affects further, and enhanced them by relating Ulysses to other similarly resonant texts which they collectively dubbed “modern”.
The second approach entails maintaining that there were powerful entrepreneurial drives within the literary establishment (against its dominant interests) around the time of Ulysses’s many-phased appearances. These incorporated adventurous elements within the literary establishment who were determined to come out dominant. These entrepreneurial drives had financial backing from elite patrons or discerning investors (some providing for Joyce and family), indefatigable publicists and agents and editors (like Ezra Pound, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, T.S. Eliot), critics and culture columnists with inroads into established publishing and media firms and academia, the ability to set up economically viable means of literary production (magazines like Egoist, Little Review, Contact, Criterion, Transatlantic Review, transition etc. and publishing houses like Hogarth Press, Faber and Faber, Knopf, Random House etc.) — all already building a powerful joint-venture brand of being “modern” and courting very marketable controversies (thumbs up for court cases brought by the moral brigade). Entrepreneurial academics building their careers and lining the purses of their institutional employers were involved in this process and urged it on. [However, literary critics then did not necessarily bear university affiliations, the profession of research was embedded in somewhat different economic arrangements than those current now.] These entrepreneurial forces converged on Ulysses, aligned it with their economic and ideological interests, and ensured that it came to be visible, available, disseminated, discussed and recognised as a literary text – alongside and in relation to other texts.
However, none of the agents of those entrepreneurial forces which produced Ulysses as literature actually admitted to their entrepreneurialism – quite the contrary. And the critical industry that has thrived on Ulysses and Joyce since has been careful to conceal its business interests while being otherwise voluble about Ulysses – inside and on behalf of their universities and departments and research centres. [Encouragingly, Joyce had the future employment of researchers in mind when preparing his innovative literary commodity.] Actually all the concerned entrepreneurs were cautiously tight-lipped about their economic calculations for all the literature they had successfully produced and branded ‘modern’. On the contrary, they were very firm that it was merely dedication to literature itself – its service to culture, society, the world – that drove them. They only admitted to the first approach above, and gave it all the backing of their significant social authority and financial power. Hand in hand with them, literary researchers not only echoed them but also tried to make sure that it would never be otherwise.
So, these entrepreneurial calculations must have factored in the business advantage of the first approach; the business interests in question must have been enhanced by pretending that those interests don’t exist. Literary researchers found that doing so in an on-going way served themselves and their institutions well in terms of both (and relatedly) real and cultural capital.
I can almost visualise censorious Joyceans turning on me at this point. They will say, and rightly, that the material-production career of few literary texts has been subjected to as searching scrutiny as Ulysses’s. From various obscenity trials and bannings to Samuel Roth’s unauthorised edition of 1927 to the passionate debates about editing principles following the Hans Gabler et al synoptic edition of 1984 to news of the record auction prices of first editions into the 2000s – the commercial considerations and economic regimes underpinning the production of literature have been starkly exposed and critically considered apropos Ulysses. Several theses and monographs on the academic industry that thrives around Ulysses, carefully unpicking its reception history and institutionalization in different countries, are available; all variously unpick the workings of economic and political power within the academy, and in the literary publishing and media industry. This is all true. However, I don’t think too many Joyceans will deny that all these things have seemed noteworthy because Ulysses is in-itself a great text, that Joyce was its authoring genius and producer, and that the self-evident quality of Ulysses would have shone through irrespective of all the above – all that’s after the fact. It is some such pre-agreement that glues the communal cohesion of certain professors as ‘Joyceans’. This pre-agreement was produced by the literary establishment as it produced Ulysses and “modern literature” according to its entrepreneurial drives. If that’s so even for an interpretive community (to use Stanley Fish’s phrase) like Joyceans, which is as self-aware of its own economic underpinnings and interests, then that’s so for (dare I say) all literary interpretive communities. One could say the same for Shakespeareans and Romanticists and Harry Pottereans and electronic literature aficionados …
In brief, the literary establishment and especially the professors have carefully maintained the impression that benefits are comprehensively delinked from profits in producing literature, and then talked mainly about the benefits and largely elided the profits (or put them as a collateral effect), because that served their entrepreneurial activity – that helped generate profits. How and why?
To this question I can only offer in the first instance a brief speculative answer, much in need of testing. It involves going back to thinking about academic research generally and its commitment to generating benefits and profits for the public good (i.e. to the arguments in “Research for the Public Good”). More specifically, it involves suggesting a distinction between two kinds of academic research: applied research and basic research.
- Applied research is where the benefits are so obviously experienced by consumers, and so clearly inferable from the entrepreneurial impetus of their profit-making sources, that large numbers of consumers are prepared to invest in the profit-making sources in the hope of further enhancing benefits. Here then, both the profit-making mechanism and the benefit-generating result are correlatedly marketable to significant numbers of consumer-investors.
- Basic research is where the benefits are widely but indirectly experienced by consumers, and not clearly inferable from the functioning of their profit-making sources. Therefore, most consumers are unlikely to invest in the profit-making sources even while being happy to partake of the benefits – usually in a habitualised and subliminal way. So, here, research entrepreneurs play up the benefits at the expense of profits to create an amenable environment for ever-greater consumption which a small number of discerning investors can then capitalise on.
[“Building bridges will not only improve lives immediately, but is a life and death matter,” an engineering professor had once told me serenely, “Writing about Ulysses is a scholarly hobby.” “But hang on,” I had protested, “Someone’s life might be changed by understanding Ulysses, after all loads of people want to know what Ulysses is all about, and who knows, you might learn a thing or two about building bridges by engaging with Ulysses … after all, what really is a ‘bridge’? and is it only built from stones and steel and stuff? … and besides, …”]
Literary research is very largely basic research. That’s why it is necessary for the entrepreneurial interests of such research, and for the institutions and investors which nurture it, to delink benefits from profits and to focalise the benefits. Literary research is but one of many areas of basic research, so such delinking occurs in various kinds of basic research – we just happen to be addressing literary research here. Quite possibly, the way of delinking benefits from profits that literary research does is different and distinct from the ways in which that is achieved for other kinds of basic research; equally, there might be significant similarities.
But these speculations leave me in a conundrum: is my attempt to foreground the necessary entrepreneurial responsibilities of all literary research then actually working against the financial enterprise of literary research — the profit-making of which is better served by being left as it is?
No, of course not — something has happened that makes it expedient now for literary research to not just embrace but also announce its comprehensively entrepreneurial character.
Entrepreneurial Literary Scholar 
In his latest post I fear Alexander has made a bit of a misstep in continuing to lay out his really rather interesting argument about literary scholarship. He speculates that most literary research corresponds to basic as opposed to applied research. I think the opposite is the case. Most literary research is applied. Some literary research can be characterized as basic research as Alexander contends. Looking at Alexander’s example of the Joycean literary machine, the initial work of excavating Joyce’s novel as a paradigmatic example of an emerging body of “modern” literature can be seen as a kind of basic research. Prior to this literary activity, the text of Ulysses existed as the literary equivalent of undifferentiated matter. It takes a job of literary work to transform this text into raw material which can be subsequently worked up into something useful. A social process is necessary to transform matter in nature into a natural resource which can be subsumed to further transformation in service of human purposes. ‘An object’ becomes ‘the object’ of an essentially social process. It is this form of initial literary research which can be seen as equivalent to basic research.
Subsequent literary activity is then needed to create something useful from this raw material. Alexander, in his first posting, identifies a range of possible uses including insights into culture, self, society and the nature of good citizenship. The secondary appropriation of the hedonic benefits of literature also falls into this list. This is applied research in being directed at creating specific use values and the vast bulk of the output of the Joycean industry falls into this category. These are all aspects of literary production which can be directly consumed by individual consumers, government agencies, NGOs, corporate entities, literary researchers themselves, etc. As consumed goods, using resources that could have been directed to other uses, these productions are concretely preferred to alternative consumption possibilities and thus acquire a concrete value relative to these other possibilities. As these products have a demonstrable relative economic value, this opens the possibility that they can be exchanged and contracted for.
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Many thanks, dismalscientist — you are right, I have overstated the ‘basic research’ character of literary research. It is a matter of degree (I suppose it must be so for all research), literary research could be regarded as substantially more ‘applied’ than ‘basic’, and the point is where the emphasis is laid.
In terms of emphasis, though, the drift of my argument does not change particularly by this misstep.
Let me put it this way: literary research has to be considered and thought of as ‘basic’ before — and so that — its ‘applied’ possibilities are released: so it is expedient to focalise its benefit-giving and underplay its profit-making impetus. Some kinds of research (like construction engineering) can be presented as ‘applied’ straightaway (in fact, even in a way that elides its dependence on ‘basic’ research), since that enhances its further profit-making prospects. That means that its benefit-giving and profit-making can be promoted coterminously.
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Dear Alexander,
Please let me make a small contribution to the theme “Joyce’s Ulysses and Entrepreneurial Scholarship”. There is this text about an experiment made by The Bell System and the University of Pennsylvania, called Institute of Humanistic Study for Executives (it was in the 1950’s). The ten-month program in the liberal arts culminated in the reading of Joyce’s Ulysses. A quotation of the text: “According to one participant’s account in the AT&T corporate archives, some student-executives thought Ulysses was too difficult and should be dropped, but this student, William Cashel, believed that it should remain in the curriculum because the book stimulated so much discussion and so many conflicting perspectives.” (p. 64)
Mark Wollaeger. Reframing Modernism: the Corporation, the University, and the Cold War (Affirmations: Of the Modern, Vol 3, N. 1, 2015).
As we can see, you have a predecessor in the making of Joyce’s Ulysses as a book for the public good and, certainly, profit.
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Thanks for the reference, Leandro — it is useful to have it. Of course, when Cashel said that he was not necessarily speaking as a business executive, even though he was in a course for executives — it is possible for a business-person to speak to other business-persons about views which are not immediately to do with business (just as it is possible for a student in a literature classroom to speak to other students about the most desirable shoe-design in the market). I don’t see Cashel in this quotation making any argument which coincides with mine above. And my argument is not about what the Cashels of the world do, but about what the Joyce industry — choke full of Joyce specialists or Joyceans — does by way of entrepreneurial activity.
Alexander
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Dear Alexander,
1. You have a specific way of arguing that is difficult to engage with. You take a partial truth, a truth that could lead to a critical stance, and you generalize it. In order to refute what you say, your interlocutor sees himself forced to deny that truth and thereby support a conformist position. The existence of a *Ulysses* industry is a fact; as such it should be analyzed as an interesting symptom of the industrialization of the university, which is become ever more similar to a corporation. The main reason there is for so many publications on *Ulysses*, as so many other literary works, is that in the Anglophone world one has to publish a book to get a job, and one has to have publications to get tenure, get funding etc. So, from the point of view of the profession, the publication of a book or books precedes its contents. What you do is to take this symptom and generalize it, as if corresponded to the whole. The Joyce industry is not all there is about Joyce. Whatever there may be of opportunism in academia is not the whole of academia. In sum, the way you frame your arguments invites one to the weak, apologetic rejoinder “things are not exactly the way you say they are”. The critical challenge, I think, in dealing wit your claims is to recognize their partial truth, change their valence (you believe they are good, whereas I think they are pernicious) and turn them into objects of interpretation.
2. You could very well say that any criticism of the Joyce industry, by the sheer fact that it circulates in the same venues as the examples of such industry, is part of it. This is of course irrefutable. But the distance it establishes vis-a-vis the *content* of that critique is itself revealing. Substance becomes engulfed in/by enunciation. This is an acknowledgment of irrelevance and a symptom of the isolation of the university in relation to society.
3. Regarding the opposition between basic and applied research, I have a somewhat different view. For me, basic research in literature means interpretation, formulating an original reading hypothesis for a given object, which may also be a theoretical text. Applied research corresponds to the application of a determinate theory to an object. It is totally legitimate as a modus operandi, but it is uninteresting. Needless to say, it is much more lucrative.
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Fabio — I think, particularly in your first point, that you have hit the nail on the head. Alexander’s strength lies in a way of argument, and to a great extent the substance of what he argues follows from his method. He seizes the initiative in offering definitions so that the response then has to either go along with it or appear in its terms in some way; he puts the normative adjective in categorically so that then one is left with either going along with it or defending against it; and so on. Alexander’s method is to take a deaf initiative and then await the response rather than hearing what’s relevant and then reaching for a way forward. Alexander is likely to take a unilateral decision and then say, “Having consulted widely and heard you all it is evident to me that my decision is the one to go along with — perhaps with some little adjustments in view of what you have said.” Alexander’s way of arguing is to set the agenda and then make everything conditional to it. He is ‘leadership’ material.
One may say that much academic argument in practice does the same thing. Much scholarly reasoning consists in generalizations from what you call ‘half truths’. Generalizations from ‘half-truths’ hold, as Alexander knows well, unless you can prove that ‘half-truths’ are also and at the self-same moment ‘half-lies’, which is often not the case (not easily done). A ‘half-truth’ may not be also a ‘half-lie’, it may be a partially apprehended truth that gives access to the ‘whole-truth’.
This is worth considering carefully. Alexander’s way of arguing is eerily familiar to me where I am employed, in government and bureaucratic practice: every consultation document and process, institutional decision-making method, every policy implementation works through something like this way of arguing. If we want to argue against it, we need to seize the agenda and set it — but also, to make our agenda stronger than Alexander’s, to show at the same time and clearly and indisputably why his agenda is, as you put it, pernicious.
Suman
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Dear Suman,
I absolutely failed to realize how Alexander’s way of arguing is similar to that of universities administration. I see two ways of dealing with it. The first one, as you say, is to propose as stronger agenda than his, the second would be to proceed the way we are doing, that is, exposing his arguments and then showing their shortcomings. It’s odd, because I was just getting tired of counterarguing (clash of arguments as just that, disputatio, is tiring), but now, seeing things in this light, it becomes more interesting. I guess it’s a matter of controlling Alexander’s initiative (after all the blog is his): if he’s the one who conducts the discussion and sets the terms of the debate, it’s one thing; we have to give ourselves space to be equal to his claims. It’s another things if his points are taken as specimens in a lab and carefully scrutinized, as with a microscope. The first procedure is dialogic, which is attractive, given: 1. the fact that it doesn’t exist anymore, 2. it has a nice Platonic precedent, 3. through Bakhtin it became a catchword, meaning really that it doesn’t exist anymore. The second procedure is analytic and more usual, even though the dissection of neoliberal arguments is seldom carried out, let alone in an engaging manner.
Yours,
F.
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Dear Alex and Suman,
I realized I had something else to say about the division of research into basic and applied. At first, it didn’t seem to make much sense to me, for I can think of only one way of dealing with literature or any cultural artifact, for that matter. If you are writing about a novel, you read it unhurriedly, more than once, and reflect about it. Normally an idea emerges. You then examine it, muse upon it and if the idea seems solid you go read what has already been written on the novel. From the encounter of your idea with the field of research generally a new, reconfigured idea appears, though it may very well happen that you realize that your idea now doesn’t make much sense, in which case you look for another one, or abandon the project altogether. (It’s always salutary to remember that failure has a right to exist and that you are not forced to produce something. It’s only an imperial subject, indifferent to the resistance of matter, that is capable of extracting meaning of any object whatsoever.) Of course there are possible variations to this, e.g., you can mix the contact with the novel and the bibliography or talk to friends and colleagues etc., but the procedure is basically this.
It seems to me that the division of basic and applied research owes a lot to the rise of Theory, for it was Theory that brought to the fore the process of concept formation in literary studies. Once concepts start to become disengaged from the material they should be a concept of, a split is established which severs basic (concept formation) to applied research (the application of these concepts to particular literary and cultural objects). A productivist chain of metaphors becomes possible: cultural manifestations are like raw materials, criticism produces consumption goods, literary theory, durable ones, and Theory, capital goods. Note how inert literary works become within this framework, for they are passive, just receiving concepts, not proposing them; note, too, how the international division of labor also applies here, because we in Brazil almost never produce concepts, thinking technology, but acquire it ready-made, explaining or applying it to native contents. Would Theory be a privileged vehicle for literary entrepreneurism?
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By the rise of Theory I suppose you mean the institutionalization of something called “literary theory” as an independent dimension of scholarly production and teaching curricula somewhere through the 1970s to the 1990s. Otherwise, I can’t quite make sense of a pre-theoretical literary land, where the “you” described in the first paragraph can conduct such a leisurely and introspective exercise as a free-floating decontextualized individual. Where would this pre-theoretical literary land exist — somewhere before Aristotle perhaps?
If it is the institutionalization of Theory in universities, by publishers, in the media etc. that you have in mind then the distinction of basic and applied research has more to do with that — with institutionalization — than with Theory. Institutions and pursuits within institutions are inevitably structured by economic considerations.
Good quotation below. Despite the title, don’t think its import is confined to Theory.
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Quick follow up: I just remembered this passage from Vincent B. Leitch’s *Living with Theory*; it is NOT supposed to be read ironically or critically: “Anyone who has looked into “futures” on today’s financial markets realizes not only that they are highly risky instruments, but that they focus on short-term performance, on year or less. You put up a little money (a small margin) and open a future position, choosing either to speculate on an increasing market or to hedge on a declining market for, say, oil, coffee, sugar, or some other asset. On any day during the term of the brief contract, you can estimate that fair value of your futures asset. (There is a standard calculation which takes into account average rate of profit, prevailing interest rates, current price of the asset in question, and the terms of your contract). If you choose, you can close out your position at any time. In our current neoliberal capitalist milieu, an era of fast turnovers and casino sensibilities, “futures”signify quick gains made off growth or decline. No matter which. It goes without saying that investors do not generally produce assets, rather they speculate on them. Not surprisingly, there is an academic futures market in theory, including the history of theory.
The theory futures market is more volatile than the markets, for instance, in Renaissance of Enlightenment reasearch and scholarship. Academics, whether theorists or not, but especially up-and-coming young scholars, will calculate on any give day how the market looks for new historicism, feminist theory, poststructuralism, cultural studies, Marxism, new formalism, postcolonial theory, etc. Intellectuals today operate in a world of markets. You can close out or open a position on any theory at any moment. Personally, I am regularly asked by students, faculty and others about theory and culture studies: whether to buy, sell, or hold and in just those terms. People want to know very badly what is the latest thing. Without being coy, I remain wary of my role as futures advisor for potential theory investors, including bemused professional onlookers. In the latter category I have in mind higher education journalists, humanities deans, book publishers, and journal editors. I work for them, too. My closing point: there is a future in theory futures.” (Living with Theory, pp. 30-31)
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