The Critic as the Intervening Figure
Marcus Morgan and Patrick Baert, Conflict in the Academy: A Study in the Sociology of Intellectuals
Palgrave Macmillan, 106pp, £45.00, ISBN 9781137521286
reviewed by Simon Grimble
In late 1980, an apparently minor dispute at Cambridge University became headline news. The question was whether or not the young lecturer Colin MacCabe – whose work was heavily influenced by recent developments in structuralist and post-structuralist theory – should be upgraded to a permanent position. And before long, as Marcus Morgan and Patrick Baert put it in their short book Conflict in the Academy, the so-called ‘MacCabe Affair’ had ‘swelled to heroic proportions, drew vast media attention and became invested with considerable moral and symbolic significance,’ generating waves that are still felt in English faculties today.
MacCabe's work focused on James Joyce, and argued that reading him could not be considered as mere ‘passive consumption’. It was, rather, an ‘active metamorphosis, a constant displacement in language.’ The emphasis meant that Joyce, and other such formally provocative writers, should be seen as the producers of revolutionary texts – or, to put it another way, that formal subversiveness necessarily correlated with political dissidence. The ingredients of this kind of criticism – a heady combination of French theory (Lacan, Derrida, Barthes) and a radical, if gestural, politics – had long stoked opposition in Cambridge, and some leading members of the English Faculty were not impressed. At one of the meetings convened to consider MacCabe's position, Christopher Ricks apparently declared flatly that ‘Dr MacCabe’s book is a bad book.’ Another, Michael Long, issued ‘a twenty-minute malediction’ over it. The upgrade was by turns rejected, approved and reversed again, and public controversy ensued. At its ceremonial centre was a debate at the University’s Senate House, which took place over seven and a half hours between the 3rd and 4th of February 1981. But by this stage, MacCabe’s removal was all but a fait accompli.
Morgan and Baert seek to contextualise the quarrel in various terms: firstly, as part of the humanities' resistance to the growing influence of the social sciences in the 1970s and 1980s – an influence that, to some, seemed to involve the introduction of foreign and, at that time, politically disturbing elements into English universities. The theory with which MacCabe was occupied, after all, was largely French and, particularly, Parisian in origin. Secondly, this dispute seemed to carry particular weight in the immediate political context of the 1980s, where, according to Eric Hobsbawm, the forward march of labour had been halted, and where the recently elected government of Margaret Thatcher was in the early stages of demolishing the post-war Keynesian consensus. But we should be wary of simplifying the battle-lines. In truth, the explicit politics of those involved was not always very directly opposed: Ricks described himself as a life-long Labour voter, the same party of which MacCabe was an inactive member (though he had previously and very briefly been a member of the Communist Party). On the other hand, as Morgan and Baert suggest, ‘a public climate in which narratives that played upon struggles between the conservative Right and the progressive Left [had] gained a degree of symbolic resonance that was in many ways unthinkable before Thatcher’s arrival at No. 10.’
The specific character of Cambridge University and its colleges as a place for both shared solidarities and the expression of hostilities is also well rendered in Morgan and Baert's account – given the faculties can be regarded as contested zones, and colleges as places of retreat and fellow feeling – but whilst Morgan and Baert skilfully assemble these and other important contexts, it is not their intention to draw a particular moral from these events. Instead, they focus on the strategies that the pro- and anti-MacCabe lobbies employed: the former sought to portray the matter as a ‘sacred’ one, where ‘a violation of the higher values of fairness, intellectual openness and pluralism had taken place’; the latter, by contrast, located the sacred in the canon of English literature itself. As one participant, Howard Erskine-Hill, put it, the ‘first loyalty of us all is to our subject’, and that this ‘demanded protection from any possible corrupting or polluting forces’. The antis sought to portray the MacCabe Affair as itself a profane question: all this bombast was simply a smokescreen to occlude the fact that the candidate was not good enough for the job. Fittingly, their contributions to the Senate House debate frequently attempted to ironise or deflate the apparent augustness of the occasion: ‘move along now, nothing to see here’, as Morgan and Baert put it.
Instead of explicitly telling a representative tale about recent cultural history, Morgan and Baert draw on ‘positioning theory’ – an approach originating in social psychology – to situate their account. This approach seeks to show ‘how social actors compete, both in isolation as well as in "teams", to position themselves in meaningful relation to one another,’ since these are ‘the relational strategies that lie behind struggles over meaning-making.’ This is a very useful and illuminating approach in terms of its ability to generate the kind of sociological thick description that Morgan and Baert produce here, where sets of contexts are valuably assembled and explored. Yet it does tend to downplay the specific intellectual and social commitments of individual participants: if all that matters is competition over ‘meaning-making’, then what begins as a complex field of diverse opinions and beliefs risks getting telescoped into a Darwinian struggle between success or failure; the precise characters of the values that are winning or losing are smudged into the background.
As such, it is noticeable that Morgan and Baert – after having described the history and status of English at Cambridge – do not describe at length the subsequent history of that discipline. In its vexed position as a ‘belated subject’, English was able to take advantage of its comparative informality and lack of professionalisation in order to address an educated public that lay beyond the immediately academic world. Many of the participants in the MacCabe affair are notable for having acted in this way — Frank Kermode, Raymond Williams and Christopher Ricks were all regular contributors to the Listener, the Spectator, the London Review of Books and so on. But they stood for a relationship between English Literature and the public sphere, with the critic as the intervening figure, that is now hugely diminished. It is almost as a by-product of Morgan and Baert's study that anyone who is situated within the subject is unable not to reflect on this shift with some level of chagrin: it is very hard to imagine a similar case existing or producing similar passions today, or indeed a front-page article to do with the humanities being about anything other than fee-hikes.
In that sense, it is apparent that the particular category of the literary critic as a kind of ‘general intellectual’ who could discourse widely on politics and culture – a line of descent running from Matthew Arnold to Raymond Williams himself – is a tradition that has found it hard to sustain itself. Figures like Stefan Collini, who has been both the historian and inheritor of that tradition (in his writings on higher education funding and policy) are the exceptions here, but they are few. Perhaps we're too hasty in lamenting the supposedly vanished figure of the ‘public intellectual’ – as Wendy Brown has said of the US, ‘when we talk about public intellectuals, we’re talking about a tiny group who read the New Yorker or The Nation, which is about .0001 percent of our population’ – and in the meantime, ‘new media has made it possible for serious analysis to circulate in all kinds of ways.’ But at the moment this has created possibilities that have been used principally by intellectuals coming from the social sciences, such as Thomas Piketty, David Graeber or Danny Dorling. Recent years might have witnessed a revival of interest in New Left figures such as Williams, Richard Hoggart and the historian and critic EP Thompson, but if you type ‘literary criticism’ into a YouTube search, the thing you come to – after some examples of introductory material for literature students – is Terry Eagleton offering an account of ‘The Death of Criticism.’ Hardly a promising start.
What exactly is at stake? For my part, I would say that the revival of interest in the New Left – old as it might have become – expresses a desire to move beyond English Studies' Cold War binary where theory and close reading are kept well apart. But it also represents a bigger desire for the intellectual to be an intellectual in a normative sense, and to formulate genuine responses to the current versions of what Leavis called ‘technologico-Benthamite civilisation.' Does this mean that the desire for Raymond Williams is the same as the desire for Jeremy Corbyn – for figures who are willing to confront the ideological triumph of the market? It might do. Marcus Morgan and Patrick Baert have written an excellent book here, and part of its success is in leaving the precise nature of the critic's relationship with the world that they attempt to describe as a tantalisingly open question.
MacCabe's work focused on James Joyce, and argued that reading him could not be considered as mere ‘passive consumption’. It was, rather, an ‘active metamorphosis, a constant displacement in language.’ The emphasis meant that Joyce, and other such formally provocative writers, should be seen as the producers of revolutionary texts – or, to put it another way, that formal subversiveness necessarily correlated with political dissidence. The ingredients of this kind of criticism – a heady combination of French theory (Lacan, Derrida, Barthes) and a radical, if gestural, politics – had long stoked opposition in Cambridge, and some leading members of the English Faculty were not impressed. At one of the meetings convened to consider MacCabe's position, Christopher Ricks apparently declared flatly that ‘Dr MacCabe’s book is a bad book.’ Another, Michael Long, issued ‘a twenty-minute malediction’ over it. The upgrade was by turns rejected, approved and reversed again, and public controversy ensued. At its ceremonial centre was a debate at the University’s Senate House, which took place over seven and a half hours between the 3rd and 4th of February 1981. But by this stage, MacCabe’s removal was all but a fait accompli.
Morgan and Baert seek to contextualise the quarrel in various terms: firstly, as part of the humanities' resistance to the growing influence of the social sciences in the 1970s and 1980s – an influence that, to some, seemed to involve the introduction of foreign and, at that time, politically disturbing elements into English universities. The theory with which MacCabe was occupied, after all, was largely French and, particularly, Parisian in origin. Secondly, this dispute seemed to carry particular weight in the immediate political context of the 1980s, where, according to Eric Hobsbawm, the forward march of labour had been halted, and where the recently elected government of Margaret Thatcher was in the early stages of demolishing the post-war Keynesian consensus. But we should be wary of simplifying the battle-lines. In truth, the explicit politics of those involved was not always very directly opposed: Ricks described himself as a life-long Labour voter, the same party of which MacCabe was an inactive member (though he had previously and very briefly been a member of the Communist Party). On the other hand, as Morgan and Baert suggest, ‘a public climate in which narratives that played upon struggles between the conservative Right and the progressive Left [had] gained a degree of symbolic resonance that was in many ways unthinkable before Thatcher’s arrival at No. 10.’
The specific character of Cambridge University and its colleges as a place for both shared solidarities and the expression of hostilities is also well rendered in Morgan and Baert's account – given the faculties can be regarded as contested zones, and colleges as places of retreat and fellow feeling – but whilst Morgan and Baert skilfully assemble these and other important contexts, it is not their intention to draw a particular moral from these events. Instead, they focus on the strategies that the pro- and anti-MacCabe lobbies employed: the former sought to portray the matter as a ‘sacred’ one, where ‘a violation of the higher values of fairness, intellectual openness and pluralism had taken place’; the latter, by contrast, located the sacred in the canon of English literature itself. As one participant, Howard Erskine-Hill, put it, the ‘first loyalty of us all is to our subject’, and that this ‘demanded protection from any possible corrupting or polluting forces’. The antis sought to portray the MacCabe Affair as itself a profane question: all this bombast was simply a smokescreen to occlude the fact that the candidate was not good enough for the job. Fittingly, their contributions to the Senate House debate frequently attempted to ironise or deflate the apparent augustness of the occasion: ‘move along now, nothing to see here’, as Morgan and Baert put it.
Instead of explicitly telling a representative tale about recent cultural history, Morgan and Baert draw on ‘positioning theory’ – an approach originating in social psychology – to situate their account. This approach seeks to show ‘how social actors compete, both in isolation as well as in "teams", to position themselves in meaningful relation to one another,’ since these are ‘the relational strategies that lie behind struggles over meaning-making.’ This is a very useful and illuminating approach in terms of its ability to generate the kind of sociological thick description that Morgan and Baert produce here, where sets of contexts are valuably assembled and explored. Yet it does tend to downplay the specific intellectual and social commitments of individual participants: if all that matters is competition over ‘meaning-making’, then what begins as a complex field of diverse opinions and beliefs risks getting telescoped into a Darwinian struggle between success or failure; the precise characters of the values that are winning or losing are smudged into the background.
As such, it is noticeable that Morgan and Baert – after having described the history and status of English at Cambridge – do not describe at length the subsequent history of that discipline. In its vexed position as a ‘belated subject’, English was able to take advantage of its comparative informality and lack of professionalisation in order to address an educated public that lay beyond the immediately academic world. Many of the participants in the MacCabe affair are notable for having acted in this way — Frank Kermode, Raymond Williams and Christopher Ricks were all regular contributors to the Listener, the Spectator, the London Review of Books and so on. But they stood for a relationship between English Literature and the public sphere, with the critic as the intervening figure, that is now hugely diminished. It is almost as a by-product of Morgan and Baert's study that anyone who is situated within the subject is unable not to reflect on this shift with some level of chagrin: it is very hard to imagine a similar case existing or producing similar passions today, or indeed a front-page article to do with the humanities being about anything other than fee-hikes.
In that sense, it is apparent that the particular category of the literary critic as a kind of ‘general intellectual’ who could discourse widely on politics and culture – a line of descent running from Matthew Arnold to Raymond Williams himself – is a tradition that has found it hard to sustain itself. Figures like Stefan Collini, who has been both the historian and inheritor of that tradition (in his writings on higher education funding and policy) are the exceptions here, but they are few. Perhaps we're too hasty in lamenting the supposedly vanished figure of the ‘public intellectual’ – as Wendy Brown has said of the US, ‘when we talk about public intellectuals, we’re talking about a tiny group who read the New Yorker or The Nation, which is about .0001 percent of our population’ – and in the meantime, ‘new media has made it possible for serious analysis to circulate in all kinds of ways.’ But at the moment this has created possibilities that have been used principally by intellectuals coming from the social sciences, such as Thomas Piketty, David Graeber or Danny Dorling. Recent years might have witnessed a revival of interest in New Left figures such as Williams, Richard Hoggart and the historian and critic EP Thompson, but if you type ‘literary criticism’ into a YouTube search, the thing you come to – after some examples of introductory material for literature students – is Terry Eagleton offering an account of ‘The Death of Criticism.’ Hardly a promising start.
What exactly is at stake? For my part, I would say that the revival of interest in the New Left – old as it might have become – expresses a desire to move beyond English Studies' Cold War binary where theory and close reading are kept well apart. But it also represents a bigger desire for the intellectual to be an intellectual in a normative sense, and to formulate genuine responses to the current versions of what Leavis called ‘technologico-Benthamite civilisation.' Does this mean that the desire for Raymond Williams is the same as the desire for Jeremy Corbyn – for figures who are willing to confront the ideological triumph of the market? It might do. Marcus Morgan and Patrick Baert have written an excellent book here, and part of its success is in leaving the precise nature of the critic's relationship with the world that they attempt to describe as a tantalisingly open question.