THE SELF-PROTECTIVE PROJECT described in this familiar Horatian tag is exemplified by one strain of thought in Fredric Jameson's influential Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. In one of the most depressing passages of that profoundly antiromantic book, Jameson says that "the end of the bourgeois ego, or monad, . . . means ... the end ... of style, in the sense of the unique and the personal, the end of the distinctive individual brush stroke."[1] Later he says that

if the poststructuralist motif of the "death of the subject" means anything socially, it signals the end of the entrepreneurial and inner-directed individualism with its "charisma" and its accompanying categorial panoply of quaint romantic values such as that of the "genius" ... Our social order is richer in information and more literate ... This new order no longer needs prophets and seers of the high modernist and charismatic type, whether among its cultural products or its politicians. Such figures no longer hold any charm or magic for the subjects of a corporate, collectivized, post-individualistic age; in that case, goodbye to them without regret, as Brecht might have put it: woe to the country that needs geniuses, prophets, Great Writers, or demiurges! [2]

Adoption of this line of thought produces what I shall call "knowingness." Knowingness is a state of soul which prevents shudders of awe. It makes one immune to romantic enthusiasm.

This state of soul is found in the teachers of literature in American colleges and universities who belong to what Harold Bloom calls the "School of Resentment." These people have learned from Jameson and others that they can no longer enjoy "the luxury of the old-fashioned ideological critique, the indignant moral denunciation of the other." [3] They have also learned that hero-worship is a sign of weakness, and a temptation to elitism. So they substitute Stoic endurance for both righteous anger and social hope. They substitute knowing theorization for awe, and resentment over the failures of the past for visions of a better future.

Although I prefer "knowingness" to Bloom's word "resentment," my view of these substitutions is pretty much the same as his. Bloom thinks that many rising young teachers of literature can ridicule any explain everything but can idolize nothing. Bloom sees them as converting the study of literature into what he calls "one more dismal social science" - and thereby turning departments of literature into isolated academic backwaters. American sociology departments, which started out as movements for social reform, ended up training students to clothe statistics in jargon. If literature departments turn into departments of cultural studies, Bloom fears, they will start off hoping to do some badly needed political work, but will end up training their students to clothe resentment in jargon.

I think it is important to distinguish know-nothing criticisms of the contemporary American academy-the sort of thing you get from columnists like George Will and Jonathan Yardley, and politicians like William Bennett and Lynne Cheney - from the criticisms currently being offered by such insiders as Bloom and Christopher Ricks. The first set of critics believe everything they read in scandalmongering books by Dinesh D'Souza, David Lehman, and others. They do not read philosophy, but simply search out titles and sentences to which they can react with indignation. Much of their work belongs to the current conservative attempt to discredit the universities-which itself is part of a larger attempt to discredit all critics of the cynical oligarchy that has bought up the Republican Party. The insiders' criticism, on the other hand, has nothing to do with national politics. It comes from people who are careful readers, and whose loathing for the oligarchy is as great as Jameson's own.

I myself am neither a conservative nor an insider. Because my own disciplinary matrix is philosophy, I cannot entirely trust my sense of what is going on in literature departments. So I am never entirely sure whether Bloom's gloomy predictions are merely peevish, or whether he is more far-sighted than those who dismiss him as a petulant eccentric. But in the course of hanging around literature departments over the past decade or so, I have acquired some suspicions that parallel his.

The main reason I am prey to such suspicions is that I have watched, in the course of my lifetime, similarly gloomy predictions come true in my own discipline. Philosophers of my generation learned that an academic discipline can become almost unrecognizably different in a half-century - different, above all, in the sort of talents that get you tenure. A discipline can quite quickly start attracting a new sort of person, while becoming inhospitable to the kind of person it used to welcome.

Bloom is to Jameson as A. N. Whitehead was to A. J. Ayer in the 1930s. Whitehead stood for charisma, genius, romance, and Wordsworth. Like Bloom, he agreed with Goethe that the ability to shudder with awe is the best feature of human beings. Ayer, by contrast, stood for logic, debunking, and knowingness. He wanted philosophy to be a matter of scientific teamwork, rather than of imaginative breakthroughs by heroic figures. He saw theology, metaphysics, and literature as devoid of what he called "cognitive significance," and Whitehead as a good logician who had been ruined by poetry. Ayer regarded shudders of awe as neurotic symptoms. He helped create the philosophical tone which Iris Murdoch criticized in her celebrated essay "Against Dryness."

In the space of two generations, Ayer and dryness won out over Whitehead and romance. Philosophy in the Englishspeaking world became "analytic," antimetaphysical, unromantic, and highly professional. Analytic philosophy still attracts first-rate minds, but most of these minds are busy solving problems which no nonphilosopher recognizes as problems: problems which hook up with nothing outside the discipline. [4] So what goes on in anglophone philosophy departments has become largely invisible to the rest of the academy, and thus to the culture as a whole. This may be the fate that awaits literature departments.

Analytic philosophy is not exactly one more dismal social science, but its desire to be dryly scientific, and thereby to differentiate itself from the sloppy thinking it believes to be prevalent in literature departments, has made it stiff, awkward, and isolated. Those who admire this kind of philosophy often claim that philosophy professors are not only a lot drier but also a lot smarter nowadays than in the past. I do not think this is so. I think they are only a little meaner. Philosophy is now more adversarial and argumentative than it used to be, but I do not think that it is pursued at a higher intellectual level.

As philosopy became analytic, the reading habits of aspiring graduate students changed in a way that parallels recent changes in the habits of graduate students of literature. Fewer old books were read, and more recent articles. As early as the 1950s, philosophy students like myself who had, as undergraduates, been attracted to philosophy as a result of falling in love with Plato or Hegel or Whitehead, were dutifully writing Ph.D. dissertations on such Ayer-like topics as the proper analysis of subjunctive conditional sentences. This was, to be sure, an interesting problem. But it was dear to me that if I did not write on some such respectably analytic problem I would not get a very good job. Like the rest of my generation of philosophy Ph.D.'s, I was not exactly cynical, but I did know on which my side my bread was likely to be buttered. I am told, though I cannot vouch for the fact, that similar motives are often at work when today's graduate students of literature choose dissertation topics.

Nowadays, when analytic philosophers are asked to explain their cultural role and the value of their discipline, they typically fall back on the claim that the study of philosophy helps one see through pretentious, fuzzy thinking. So it does. The intellectual moves which the study of analytic philosophy trained me to make have proved very useful. Whenever, for example, I hear such words as "problematize" and "theorize," I reach for my analytic philosophy.

Still, prior to the rise of analytic philosophy, ridiculing pretentious fuzziness was only one of the things that philosophy professors did. Only some philosophers made this their specialty: Hobbes, Hume, and Bentham, for example, but not Spinoza, Hegel, T. H. Green, or Dewey. In the old days, there was another kind of philosopher-the romantic kind. This is the kind we do not get any more, at least in the English-speaking world. Undergraduates who want to grow up to be the next Hegel, Nietzsche, or Whitehead are not encouraged to go on for graduate work in anglophone philosophy departments. This is why my discipline has undergone both a paradigm shift and a personality change. Romance, genius, charisma, individual brush strokes, prophets, and demiurges have been out of style in anglophone philosophy for several generations. I doubt that they will ever come back into fashion, just as I doubt that American sociology departments will ever again be the centers of social activism they were in the early decades of the century.

So much for my analogy between the rise of cultural studies within English departments and of logical positivism within philosophy departments. I have no doubt that cultural studies will be as old hat thirty years from now as was logical positivism thirty years after its triumph. But the victory of logical positivism had irreversible effects on my discipline - it deprived it of romance and inspiration, and left only professional competence and intellectual sophistication. Familiarity with these effects makes me fear that Bloom may be right when he predicts that the victory of cultural studies would have irreversibly bad effects upon the study of literature.

To make clearer the bad effects I have in mind, let me explain what I mean by the term "inspirational value." I can do so most easily by citing an essay by the novelist Dorothy Allison: "Believing in Literature." There she describes what she calls her "atheist's religion" - a religion shaped, she says, by "literature" and by "her own dream of writing." Toward the dose of this essay, she writes:

There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto - God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger. Sometimes I think they are all the same. A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined. [5]

When I attribute inspirational value to works of literature' I mean that these works make people think there is more to this life than they ever imagined. This sort of effect is more often produced by Hegel or Marx than by Locke or Hume, Whitehead than Ayer, Wordsworth than Housman, Rilke than Brecht, Derrida than de Man, Bloom than Jameson.

Inspirational value is typically not produced by the operations of a method, a science, a discipline, or a profession. It is produced by the individual brush strokes of unprofessional prophets and demiurges. You cannot, for example, find inspirational value in a text at the same time that you are viewing it as the product of a mechanism of cultural production. To view a work in this way gives understanding but not hope, knowledge but not self-transformation. For knowledge is a matter putting a work in a familiar context - relating it to things already known.

If it is to have inspirational value, a work must be allowed to recontexualize much of what you previously thought you knew; it cannot, at least at first, be itself recontextualized by what you already believe. just as you cannot be swept off your feet by another human being at the same time that you recognize him or her as a good specimen of a certain type, so you cannot simultaneously be inspired by a work and be knowing about it. Later on-when first love has been replaced by marriage-you may acquire the ability to be both at once. But the really good marriages, the inspired marriages, are those which began in wild, unreflective infatuation.

A humanistic discipline is in good shape only when it produces both inspiring works and works which contextualize, and thereby deromanticize and debunk, those inspiring works. So I think philosophy, as an academic discipline, was in better shape when it had room for admirers of Whitehead as well as admirers of Ayer. I think that literature departments were in better shape when people of Bloom's and Allison's sort had a better chance than, I am told, they now have of being allowed to spend their teaching lives reiterating their idiosyncratic enthusiasms for their favorite prophets and demiurges. People of that sort are the ones Jameson thinks outdated, because they are still preoccupied with what he calls the "bourgeois ego." They are people whose motto is Wordsworth's "What we have loved/others will love, and we will teach them how." This kind of teaching is different from the kind that produces knowingness, or technique, or professionalism.

Of course, if such connoisseurs of charisma were the only sort of teacher available, students would be short-changed. But they will also be short-changed if the only sort of teacher available is the knowing, debunking, nil admirari kind. We shall always need people in every discipline whose talents suit them for understanding rather than for hope, for placing a text in a context rather than celebrating its originality, and for detecting nonsense rather than producing it. But the natural tendency of professionalization and academicization is to favor a talent for analysis and problem-solving over imagination, to replace enthusiasm with dry, sardonic knowingness. The dismalness of a lot of social science, and of a lot of analytic philosophy, is evidence of what happens when this replacement is complete.

Within the academy, the humanities have been a refuge for enthusiasts. If there is no longer a place for them within either philosophy or literature departments, it is not dear where they will find shelter in the future. People like Bloom and Allison - people who began devouring books as soon as they learned to read, whose fives were saved by books-may get frozen out of those departments. If they are, the study of the humanities will continue to produce knowledge, but it may no longer produce hope. Humanistic education may become what it was in Oxbridge before the reforms of the 1870s: merely a turnstile for admission to the overclass.

I hope that I have made clear what I mean by "inspirational value." Now I should like to say something about the term "great works of literature." This term is often thought to be obsolete, because Platonism is obsolete. By "Platonism" I mean the idea that great works of literature all, in the end, say the same thing-and are great precisely because they do so. they inculcate the same eternal "humanistic" values. They remind us of the same immutable features of human experience. Platonism, in this sense, conflates inspiration and knowledge by saying that only the eternal inspires-that the source of greatness has always been out there, just behind the veil of appearances, and has been described many times before. The best a prophet or a demiurge can hope for is to say once again what has often been said, but to say it in a different way, to suit a different audience.

I agree that these Platonist assumptions are best discarded. But doing so should not lead us to discard the hope shared by Allison, Bloom, and Matthew Arnold - the hope for a religion of literature, in which works of the secular imagination replace Scripture as the principal source of inspiration and hope for each new generation. We should cheerfully admit that canons are temporary, and touchstones replaceable. But this should not lead us to discard the idea of greatness. We should see great works of literature as great because they have inspired many readers, not as having inspired many readers because they are great.

This difference may seem a quibble, but it is the whole difference between pragmatist functionalism and Platonist essentialism. For a functionalist, it is no surprise that some putatively great works leave some readers cold; functionalists do not expect the same key to open every heart. For functionalists like Bloom, the main reason for drawing up a literary canon, "ordering a lifetime's reading," is to be able to offer suggestions to the young about where they might find excitement and hope. Whereas essentialists take canonical status as indicating the presence of a link to eternal truth, and lack of interest in a canonical work as a moral flaw, functionalists take canonical status to be as changeable as the historical and personal situations of readers. Essentialist critics like de Man think that philosophy tells them how to read nonphilosophy. Functionalist critics like M. H. Abrams and Bloom read philosophical treatises in the same way they read poems-in search of excitement and hope.

The Platonist subordination of time to eternity, and of hope and inspiration to knowledge, produces the attitude which Mark Edmundson criticizes in his Literature against Philosophy: Plato to Derrida. "To the degree that your terminology claims to encompass a text, to know it better than it knows itself," Edmundson says, "to that degree you give up the possibility of being read by it." [6] Edmundson's target is the assumption that one's reading is insufficiently informed if one is unable to put the text one is reading within a previously formulated theoretical context - a context which enables one, in the manner of Jameson, to treat the latest birth of time as just another specimen, reiterating a known type.

It is this assumption against which Shelley, in his Defence of Poetry, protested. "Poets," he said, "are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present." There was, to be sure, still plenty of Platonism in Shelley, even more than there was in Arnold. But, since Shelley's day, there has been less Platonism in every succeeding generation, thanks to figures like Marx, Whitman, and Dewey - romantic utopians who prophesied a human future which would be patterned neither on the past nor on the eternal.

Though I think of Derrida as just such a romantic utopian, I cannot interpret either Foucault or Jameson in this way. I think that Bloom is right when he refers to the present "odd blend of Foucault and Marx" as "a very minor episode in the endless history of Platonism" - the endless attempt to make the intellect sovereign over the imagination. [7] Edmundson seems to me right in describing much of what is going on in anglophone literature departments as part of the latest attempt by knowing philosophers to gain supremacy over inspired poets. I hope that the philosophers never succeed in this attempt. But I do not think that literature will succeed in resisting philosophy unless literary critics think of it as Bloom does: as having nothing to do with eternity, knowledge, or stability, and everything to do with futurity and hope - with taking the world by the throat and insisting that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.

Unfortunately, in contemporary American academic culture, it is commonly assumed that once you have seen through Plato, essentialism, and eternal truth you will naturally turn to Marx. The attempt to take the world by the throat is still, in the minds of Jameson and his admirers, associated with Marxism. This association seems to me merely quaint, as does Jameson's use of the term "late capitalism" - a term which equivocates nicely between economic history and millenarian hope. The main thing contemporary academic Marxists inherit from Marx and Engels is the conviction that the quest for the cooperative commonwealth should be scientific rather than utopian, knowing rather than romantic.

This conviction seems to me entirely mistaken. I take Foucault's refusal to indulge in utopian thinking not as sagacity but as a result of his unfortunate inability to believe in the possibility of human happiness, and his consequent inability to think of beauty as the promise of happiness. Attempts to imitate Foucault make it hard for his followers to take poets like Blake or Whitman seriously. So it is hard for these followers to take seriously people inspired by such poets - people like jean Jaurès, Eugene Debs, Vaclav Havel, and Bill Bradley. The Foucauldian academic Left in contemporary America is exactly the sort of Left that the oligarchy dreams Of. a Left whose members are so busy unmasking the present that they have no time to discuss what laws need to be passed in order to create a better future.

Emerson famously distinguished between the party of memory and the party of hope. Bloom has remarked that this distinction is now, in its application to American academic politics, out of date: the party of memory, he says, is the party of hope. His point is that, among students of literature, it is only those who agree with Hölderlin that "what abides was founded by poets" who are still capable of social hope. I suspect he is right at least to this extent: it is only those who still read for inspiration who are likely to be of much use in building a cooperative commonwealth. So I do not see the disagreement between Jamesonians and Bloomians as a disagreement between those who take politics seriously and those who do not. Instead, I see it as between people taking refuge in self-protective knowingness about the present and romantic utopians trying to imagine a better future.

NOTES TO "THE INSPIRATIONAL VALUE OF GREAT WORKS OF LITERATURE"

1. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 199 1), p. 15. [Back to text]

2. Ibid., p. 306. [Back]

3. Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 46. [Back]

4. The best of these minds, however, are more inclined to dissolve problems than to solve them. They challenge the presuppositions of the problems with which the profession is currently occupied. This is what Ludwig Wittgenstein did in his Philosophical Investigations, and similar challenges are found in the work of the contemporary analytic philosophers I most admire-for example, Annette Baier, Donald Davidson, and Daniel Dennett. Such innovators are always viewed with some suspicion: those brought up on the old problems would like to think that their clever solutions to those problems are permanent contributions to human knowledge. Forty-odd years after its publication, Philosophical Investigations still makes many philosophers nervous. They view Wittgenstein as a spoilsport. [Back]

5. Dorothy Allison, "Believing in literature," in Allison, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebrand Books, 1994), p. 181. [Back]

6. Mark Edmundson, Literature against Philosophy: Plato to Derrida (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 128. [Back]

7. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), p. 18. Unfortunately, Bloom attributes this latest version of Platonism to "our current New Historicists." I think it is absent from the work of Stephen Greenblatt, who is too good a critic to be buffaloed by theory. But lesser Foucauldians do indeed think of Foucault and Marx as providing keys sufficient to unlock any text. [Back]

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