the minnesota review n.s. 61-62 (2004)Jeffrey J. WilliamsSmartFeatures of ClassMy father has a disconcerting habit, especially for people who don't know him, of pointing to things with his right pinky. Why it's disconcerting is that his pinky is only a stub. Its top half was sheared off on a conveyor belt while he was working in a feed mill that supplied the many duck farms then dotting a good part of Long Island east of Queens. As a teenager in the early 40s, he loaded eighty-pound bags of feed, then after coming back from driving a half-track across Africa, Italy, and Germany, he forewent the GI Bill to drive a tractor trailer delivering those eighty-pound bags to the duck farmers. While Long Island metamorphosed from farms to suburbs, he took a job as a dispatcher—as he puts it, telling the truckers where to go—at a cement plant that flourished with all the building. When I was an undergraduate at Stony Brook, founded with the sluiceway of postwar money to universities and serving the people in the new suburbs, I would sometimes show up at the office hours of a well-known Renaissance scholar and Shakespeare critic. He was born the same year as my father and also served in World War II, but after the war signed on for the GI Bill to get through the University of Chicago. He always seemed surprised to see someone appear at his door; he was tough-minded, with a neo-Aristotelian, analytical edge common to Chicagoans of his generation, which put some students of my generation off, but I saw the gleam of ironic humor underneath, plus I liked the challenge. He would typically fuss with his pipe (this was when professors still really smoked pipes, and in their offices) while we were talking. One afternoon in his office, watching him light his pipe, I remember noticing that his fingernails were remarkably long, and polished to a low gloss. If you've ever done what used to be called manual labor for any extended period of time, you'll know it's hell on your hands. Or if you've ever read Life in the Iron Mills, you'll realize that class is not just a question of what money you have or don't have, nor solely a question of status conferred by cultural capital, but that it marks your body. If you look at most fellow academics' hands, you'll rarely see calluses. I start with this not to invoke guilt (I prefer to have all my fingers), nor to take part in a form of academic abjection (that we don't do real work), but to broach both the visibility and invisibility of our class position. As academics, especially in the humanities, we have a vexed relation to class. On the one hand, by normal markers such as educational level (only about 10% of Americans have grad degrees, not to mention doctorates), the kind of work we do (white collar, with some autonomy, setting our own hours, etc.), salaries (which, while we might complain of how low they are, are much above the national mean, and certainly higher than, say, school teachers), as well as by tastes (what kind of magazines we have on our coffee tables—if you've ever tabulated the survey at the end of Paul Fussell's Class), we are of the cultivated classes. Attaining our position through educational credentials, we are quintessential denizens of the professional-managerial class. On the other hand, we often eschew or deny our class position, projecting a distance from the normal parameters of class in America. There are several ways that we do this: sometimes by projecting a kind of bohemian position on the peripheries of, if not antagonistic to, normative culture (we're not like sharkskin suited lawyers, but wear jeans and open collars, and proclaim our queerity); sometimes by asserting a clerical position set against mainstream capitalism (we are not profit-seeking businesspeople, instead working in the non-quantifiable realm of culture, whether conservatively sanctifying its lineage or progressively opening it); sometimes by celebrating our uselessness (we fumble at basic tasks like filling out forms, because we reside in the higher realm of the mind); and sometimes by proclaiming our political resistance (as intellectuals, we stand outside capitalist society to criticize and resist it). Thus we are the class that somehow stands outside class. In some ways this plays out a characteristic attitude toward class in America, that, because we are all in the great middle class, we do not experience the class distinctions of the old world. This affects what the German sociologist Hans Speier calls the "masked class membership" of the middle classes. But it also has specific permutations in academe, and we experience and enact class in distinctive ways. This holds true especially in the humanities, that have a traditional bearing set apart from business and little commercial crossover. In the post-welfare state university, some of the sciences, technological programs, and practical disciplines, like business, are oriented toward paying their own way, through grants, business "partnerships,?and patentable results, so do not oppose the world of commerce. Rather, they embrace it. (If you look at the cars in the parking lots around the quad, you're more likely to see Mercedes, BMWs, and Lexuses near their buildings, instead of the Hondas near ours.) Members of those disciplines might give up some of the humanistic aura of the university, but they express less ambivalence about their class position. Many of our codes and practices play out our peculiar relation to class. Most academic measures purport a structural neutrality, beyond class, but they also carry with them, and inculcate, a distinctive range of affects designating our class. While we are not marked with the striations of class in the visible ways that a stooped factory worker might be after twenty years at a drill press, we are nonetheless marked by the ways that we feel, experience, and act out professional life. Some of the difficulty of talking about this realm of feeling or affect is that it is more amorphous than visible marks, but it is not any the less tangible—tangible when the ticket agent acts deferentially to us when it says "Dr." on our itinerary, or when at the faculty meeting the full professor frowns at the tentative assistant professor and adjuncts aren't even allowed, or when the persistent student expects us to be in our office 9-5, by his or her lights seeing us as the clerk behind the counter of the educational department store, by our lights misrecognizing our true position. Or tangible, as Stanley Fish has pointed out, when we drive sensible cars. Affect is how we embody our class position, and in a sense generates our class position. For instance, tenure. Structurally, tenure is a simple legal protection. (Very technically, it is not a guarantee of a permanent job, but a protection against firing without due recourse.) And every university has fairly definite criteria and protocols to attain it. This protection is justified by the high-minded rationale of academic freedom. Still, there is no more fraught thing in academic life than "tenure." In practice it most commonly signals a range of affects supporting and sustaining the hierarchy of relations among workers in a department, and it makes "the fear of falling" that Barbara Ehrenreich defines as the central feature of "the inner life of the middle class" a formal part of academic protocol. It is not a one-time probationary hurdle, as one might have in a civil service job (as an IRS worker or police officer might undergo), but permeates the academic habitus, incorporating junior through senior professors in an often anxious affective economy. Outside departments, beyond simple job security, tenure also signals academics' class difference from other workers in society, defined as a special exemption that in turn confers higher status. Thus, in my surmise, a large part of our sometimes vehement defense of tenure stems not from the threat to academic freedom but from the threat to our class distinction. In sorting through the experience of being an academic, I have rooted through a number of other keywords or phrases that permeate our professional lives and bearing, such as "the life of the mind," "name recognition," and "my work."1 These commonplaces usually purport a neutral, altruistic basis, but they also signal distinctively academic ways of feeling. They define what we desire, what we are anxious about, what we are proud of, what we are embarrassed by—those affects that in turn texture and spur what we do. For now, I want to look at one other keyword of academic life and the chain of associations it invokes, at the present prevalence of the adjective "smart." We aim to be smart, and "smart" is one code that distinguishes us within the profession and designates our status outside academe. But first, a short history of disciplinary diction. The Academic Obligation to Be SmartIt was recently recommended to me to read someone's work: "you have to read it, it's really smart." Or how often does one hear, say at a conference, "her paper was very smart" or "I want to go that panel, he's really smart." Or, "I didn't agree with anything she argued in that book, but it was smart." Or, less flatteringly, one hears things like, "how did he get that job, he's not very smart." Imagine how damning a comment would be, for instance on a reader's report or tenure evaluation, that said, "not especially smart, but competent scholarship." In my observation, the attribution of "smart" is the highest approbation one can now attain. While it no doubt has wider colloquial currency, it carries a special status in academic culture as a criterion of judgment and distinction. But why this preponderance of "smart?" What exactly does it mean? Like most such words, it seems to designate a definitive judgment, but when pressed, its meaning sifts away. In a profession that takes pride in the questioning of all categories, the keyword "smart" goes without question, as a transparent or transcendental category that ineluctably is. We know it when we see it. And why not, instead, competence? or knowledgeability? or conscientiousness? or seriousness? We might value these qualities as well, but they seem pedestrian, lacking the added value of being "smart." Historically, "smart" only takes an approbative sense relatively recently. Deriving from the Germanic "smerten," to strike, through the middle ages and Renaissance it primarily meant the sharp pain from a blow. Probably from the sense of quickness and sharpness of a blow, it figuratively slid to indicate a quality of mind as well as a manner. Much of its eighteenth and nineteenth century usage adapts it this way. For instance, the OED notes Francis Burney's 1778 use in Evelina, that "You're so smart, there's no speaking to you," and quotes Tennyson's 1845 quip, "I said something that offended him; and [he] told me that I was 'affecting the smart.'" We still retain this sense in the expression "smartass." Though in the same semantic realm as "intelligence" (see Raymond Williams on "intellectual"), "smart" suggested a superficial facility rather than a more serious quality. It also bled over to fashion; in the eighteenth century, a dapper person might be called a "Smart," which suggested wit as well as a dandyish affect. We retain this sense in that one might wear a smart suit. It seems that only in the recent past has "smart" morphed into a largely approbative comment, and in fact has supplanted "intelligent." One might even hear a commentator on CNN remarking admiringly that a politician is "smart," but it has more particular application in academe and defines an academic sensibility. In literary studies—I draw examples from the history of criticism because it is my field, although I expect there are parallels in other disciplines, especially in the humanities—during the early part of the twentieth century the most prominent term of approbation was "sound." In establishing a new discipline (the central humanistic disciplines of the nineteenth century were classics, rhetoric, and oratory), the literary scholars of the time, as David Shumway recounts in "The Star System in Literary Study," strove for "sound" scholarship. Their dominant method was philology or literary history (carrying over from classics), and they might have adduced, for instance, the French root of a word in one of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, or a source in French fabliaux. They sought historical accuracy, the soundness of which affected a kind of scientific verification that would legitimate the pursuits of their nascent discipline. They were in fact suspicious of precipitous innovation; in working to batten down a tradition, something too fashionably smart would be deemed unsound. During mid-century the keyword seems to have shifted to "intelligent." Lionel Trilling reminisced in a 1964 lecture, "An eminent teacher of ours, John Erskine, provided a kind of slogan by the title he gave to an essay of his which, chiefly through its title, gained a kind of fame: THE MORAL OBLIGATION TO BE INTELLIGENT" (qtd. in Wieseltier ix). Against what he perceived as an English tendency toward anti-intellectualism, Erskine had argued to recuperate the Greek sense of intelligence, which was an inseparable part of character rather than a pretentious affect. "Intelligence" thus shifted stress from the practice to the character of the critic. The predominant method of academic scholarship was critical, in both the New Critics (of particular poems) and the New York intellectuals (of broader cultural currents), rather than historical (they have comparatively few footnotes), and it foregrounded the discriminations of interpretation. Trilling went on to say that he was "seduced into bucking to be intelligent by the assumption which was prepotent at Columbia College—that intelligence was connected to literature, that it was advanced by literature" (x). Literary scholars strove to decipher, and partake of, this essential element of the disciplinary object. The stress on intelligence conjoined with the imperatives of the postwar university. Rather than a rarefied institution of the privileged, the university became a mass institution, fully integrated with the welfare state, both in how it was funded (the prewar university received very little federal funding) and in the influx of students it welcomed. The leaders of the postwar university, like James Bryant Conant of Harvard, strategically transformed the student body (see Menand's deft account of the era in "The Marketplace of Ideas"). To meet the challenge of the Cold War as well as the industrial and technological burgeoning of the U.S., they inducted the best and the brightest of all classes—as long as they demonstrated their potential for intelligence. Conant was instrumental in founding the College Testing Service, which put in place exams like the SATs, to do so. (One might also speculate about the contemporaneous rise of the so-called intelligence community, the CIA continuing into peacetime the work of the Office of Strategic Services of World War II—and staffed by several English instructors from Yale, as Robin Winks narrates in Cloak and Gown.) In the later part of the century, during the era of theory (roughly 1965-85), the keyword of approbation shifted to "rigor." Structural and poststructural critics sought the rigor of theoretical description of rising social sciences, and literary study purported to be not a humanity but a "human science." In some sense, the trumpeting of "rigor" parallels that of "soundness," whereby academic literary scholars asserted their scientific bearing to assure their disciplinary standing. Although he averred the indeterminacy of language, the primary quality of Paul de Man, the most influential American critic of the era, was widely held to be his rigor. For de Man, the essential property that literature advanced was not intelligence but rigor; as he pronounced in the ultimate line of the introduction to Allegories of Reading, "Literature as well as criticism ... is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and, consequently, the most unreliable language in terms of which man names and transforms himself" (19). The stress on rigor dovetailed with the development of the multiversity, as Clark Kerr named it, and its research imperative, which had become entrenched by the late sixties. It resulted in what Christopher Jencks and David Riesman called "The Academic Revolution," when professors first defined themselves foremost as researchers rather than as teachers. In some sense, intelligence was a pedagogical imperative, to bring up the level of the masses through cultural literacy, both for the New Critics in training students to read poems and for the New York intellectuals in purveying art and ideas to a "general public," whereas rigor was a professional imperative, conferring the expert status of literary scholars within the multiversity. Since the 1980s "rigor" seems to have fallen out of currency. While the evidence is primarily anecdotal at this point, now critics, to paraphrase Trilling, are bucking to be "smart."2 Through the 1980s and 90s literary studies transformed, assimilating a plethora of texts, dividing into myriad subfields, and spinning off a wide array of methods. In the early part of the century, it was comparatively very small, with a concentrated canon (primarily of medieval and Renaissance works) and an authoritative method. In mid-century, though the canon expanded to include more modern writers (from the Romantics to the modernists, the favorites of critics of the era), the field was still readily definable, the object great poetry and the method close reading. Scholars were also less specialized, purveying a broad band of literary works as part of cultural literacy. A critic like Cleanth Brooks, for instance, could write his Well Wrought Urn covering poems from Donne and Shakespeare, through Pope and Wordsworth, up to Tennyson and Yeats. In the era of theory, critics embraced specialization and advanced from what they perceived as the methodological narrowness of close reading, adopting various theoretical paradigms. One became a deconstructive critic of Romanticism, or a Marxist critic of Victorian literature, or a feminist critic of modernism. However, those paradigms were still relatively definable and authoritative, designated by an acknowledged set of "schools," usually structuralism, deconstruction, Marxism, feminism, reader response, and sometimes psychoanalysis. Even if fields were parsed more narrowly, there was a certain commensurability of paradigms, and one could apply a methodological standard to which a practice adhered. "Smart" responds to the incommensurability of objects and methods in contemporary literary studies. Now the field has expanded to include low as well as high literary texts, anglophone as well as British texts, and "cultural texts" like eighteenth century bath houses or punk fashion. At the same time, method has loosened from the moorings of the grand theories to various admixtures and recombinations and spread along the many permutations of identity (race, ethnicity, place, gender, sexuality, ableness, and so on). Amid this capacious range, there are no uniform protocols of evidence across or even within literary periods (as in philology or the New Criticism), and there are no overarching methodological standards (whether close reading or the menu of grand theories); the value is not methodological consistency, but the strikingness of a particular practice. We aim to make smart surmises among a plurality of "studies" of culture.3 David Shumway diagnoses the loss of standards like soundness as a decline of disciplinary authority, which destabilizes the public rationale of literary studies (we could more readily justify what we do when we focused on Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare). 4 However, it should also be said that the expansion of literary studies has lent a certain freedom, loosened from the tight parameters of previous authority. "Smart" conjoins with the imperatives of the post-welfare state university. 5 The multiversity was a primary arm of the welfare state, but from the 1980s on, with its strategic defunding, universities have been forced to operate more as self-sustaining entities rather than as subsidized public ones. The "Reagan Revolution" rewrote the Academic Revolution. This has taken a number of familiar paths, such as greater pressure for donations, private grants (business "partnerships"), and other sources of external funding, but three in particular represent departures from the welfare state model: the production of directly marketable goods (even if called "knowledges"), spurred by innovations such as the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which permitted universities to hold patents and thus profit from them (before patents reverted to the granting governmental agency); the exponential increase of tuition, construing higher education more like any other service that requires consumers or clients to "pay as you go" (before the state subvented far larger percentages of tuition); and the casualization of labor, largely through the use of temp faculty, who now staff, by some estimates, 60% of courses (before a large majority of faculty held permanent positions). 6 Without the fiscal cushion of the state, the university has more fully internalized the protocols of the "free market," selling goods, serving consumers, and downsizing labor. It has also internalized the attendant protocol of the market, competition. Its present expansion construes literary studies more on the model of a free market than a controlled one governed by disciplinary authority. This might spur new developments (which is the neoliberal rationale for the benefit of the market), but it places them more on a competitive standard than a cumulative disciplinary one. Grafting its sense of fashionable innovation onto intellectual work, "smart" is perhaps a fitting term for the ethos of the new academic market. It emphasizes the sharpness of the individual practitioner, as an autonomous entrepreneur in the market, rather than the consistency of the practice, as a brick in the edifice of disciplinary knowledge. In some ways, "smart" complements "excellence," which Bill Readings diagnosed as the keyword of the postmodern university. In University in Ruins, Readings traces the idea of the university from Kant's principle of Reason and von Humboldt's of national culture to the current administrative vogue for "excellence." The problem with excellence, for Readings, is that it is dereferentialized, detached from disciplinary reason, state, or culture in a postnational, corporate age. "Excellence" names a judgment but has no criterion upon which it is based, or its criterion is endlessly plastic. Similarly, "smart" names a judgment but that rests on a more amorphous criterion than previous standards, and it reflects the tenor of the corporate university. However, "smart" carries tacit reference to intellectual pursuits and thus seems more fitting if not indigenous to the world of academe, which presumably values "Thought." ("Thought" is in fact the idea that Readings argues for.) "Excellence" is a broad term of distinction for administrators, which now adopts business protocols and speaks to an audience of trustees, legislators, and parents, whereas "smart" is a more specific term spoken among academics, connoting intra-academic distinction. A dean or provost might brag to alumni about his excellent ceramics or business program; a literary critic might recommend her smart student for a job or to a publisher. The primary way that those of us in the humanities experience the market is through the intensified competition for jobs. One reason for the multiplicity of our pursuits is not simply our fecundity nor our fickleness, but the enforced scarcity of permanent jobs. 7 Though begun in the 1970s, this was not fully recognized until it reached full throttle in the 1990s, when half of the PhDs in literature would not attain the grail of tenure-track jobs. 8 The competition for jobs has prompted an explosion of publication, mandated as the one desideratum that distinguishes you from other candidates. At the same time, academic publishing has been transformed. In the research era, it was heavily subsidized, but in the post-welfare state university, its mandate is to be self-sufficient if not profit-generating, and most university presses in fact now depend entirely on sales (see the interviews with press directors Willis Regier and Jennifer Crewe in this issue). Consequently, the primary criterion for publication is not sound disciplinary knowledge but market viability. One need produce a smart book to be competitive. 9 Part of the provenance of "smart" rests on its association with novelty, in keeping with its sense of immediacy and fashion, that a critical book does something new and striking to induce our interest among the glut of the publication, however sound or rigorous. In fact, "interesting" is a complementary keyword to "smart." One might praise a reading of the cultural history of gardens brought to bear on eighteenth century poetry not as "sound" or "rigorous," but as "interesting" and "smart," because it makes a novel and sharp connection. Rigor presupposes the efficacy of scientific proof; smart presupposes the efficacy of interest in a crowded field. In this way, the criterion has become aesthetic rather than scientific; in Kant's framework, it is a judgment of taste rather than a judgment of reason. Like most judgments of taste, it is finally a measure of the people who hold it or lack it. Tracing the preponderance of keywords is no doubt speculative and one might debate the weight I've placed on the lone syllable of "smart." But words that gain currency register, as I hope I've shown, the parameters of the discipline. Sometimes it seems as if the discipline proceeds by its own autonomous logic; we use the common phrase "the conversation" to talk about literary criticism, which carries an ecumenical impulse but assumes that criticism proceeds within its autonomous field of discourse. Part of my point is that literary studies proceeds by an institutional logic that it adapts to but does not control, and that it is shaped by the material circumstance of the university. We are probably aware of that circumstance in our everyday lives, but we tend to speak about criticism as separate from it. This instantiates a predicament of the university and academic professions, that project an internal space apart from the external world, whether of business, politics, or everyday life, but that are always entwined with them. Thus far I have looked at the evolution of keywords as a palimpsest of the disciplinary genealogy of literary studies in the modern university. Now I would like to turn to another dimension of "smart," its function as a term of classification. As a judgment, "smart" finally refers to a personal quality; it is a term of classification and distinction of academic practitioners, among other academics and from those outside academe. As Pierre Bourdieu reminded us, taste reflects not simply native ability or disinterested discernment but cultural capital, and judgments of taste are also class judgments. "Smart," in this regard, is a palimpsest through which to discern class. Though previous keywords likely carried social distinctions with them, "smart" seems especially weighted because of the present market conditions of the university, where there are more pronounced consequences of being deemed, or not deemed, smart. Intelligence no doubt carried its social discriminations—it helped if you were white and male, for instance—but it was a pedagogical imperative that served an inclusive cultural ideal of the welfare state. Smart is a professional imperative that serves a market ideal of individual distinction in what economists call the "winner-take-all society." In its historical usage, "smart" also differs from "intelligence" in entwining with the realm of affect, of "affecting the smart." This lends it yet more weight because it registers, paraphrasing Ehrenreich, the inner life of the academic class. It represents not only a social classification but how we feel about, embody, and perform our class position. The Inner Life of the Academic ClassThe urge to make distinctions, if you read Aristotle, is an innate human characteristic. And the urge to distinguish value, whether of literary works, critical practices, or practitioners, is a fundamental part of academic work. Indeed, a prominent part of our public rationale is that we discriminate and sustain the best of literature; the public expectation is that we can tell the laity, amidst the cornucopia of cultural artifacts, what is good and what is dispensable. More practically, much of our job as professors is taken up in evaluations of quality, of students, of colleagues, and of articles and books, in grades, in tenure or rec letters, and in reader's reports or reviews. "Smart," in some ways, merely registers the urge to make such distinctions and provides a way to talk about them. However, like many terms of distinction (beauty, the good, and so on), it is hard to define to any degree of universal satisfaction. And like "culture," it slides from designating an objective quality of a work to a social judgment, distinguishing those who recognize and possess it from those who don't. As a term of professional distinction, "smart" functions something like the word "dignity" in Kazuo Ishiguro's 1988 novel The Remains of the Day. Remains of the Day is about a butler, Stephens, who has worked in and overseen the staff of an historically important country house of a "great gentleman." Nearing the end of his career, Stephens often reflects on professionalism, what it means to fulfill the vocation of being a butler, and the qualities a superior butler should have. The son of a butler and watching as the system changes (he now works for an American businessman who has bought the country house), Stephens feels his profession keenly and fully embodies it. Part of the poignancy of the story rests on Stephens' fealty to the old system of vocation as it is supplanted by the new of service workers. One of Stephens' favorite—and few, as his is an austere life dedicated to his vocation—pleasures is talking to a colleague, Mr. Graham, about butlering. At one point he tells of a debate in the Hayes Society, the professional organization that recognizes first-rank butlers, over the "crucial criterion" that a butler possess, such that "no applicant will satisfy requirements, whatever his level of accomplishments otherwise, if seen to fall short in this respect" (33). He and Graham agree that "The factor which distinguishes [the superior] from those butlers who are merely extremely competent" is "captured by this word 'dignity'" This, however, does not settle the issue, and Stephens articulates the nub of the problem: Of course, this merely begs the further question: of what is "dignity" comprised? And it was on this point that the likes of Mr. Graham and I had some of our most interesting debates. Mr. Graham would take the view that this "dignity" was something like a woman's beauty and it was thus pointless to analyse it. I, on the other hand, held the opinion that to draw such a parallel tended to demean the "dignity" of the likes of Mr. Marshall. Moreover, my main objection to Mr. Graham's analogy was the implication that this "dignity" was something one possessed or did not by a fluke of nature; and if one did not self-evidently have it, to strive after it would be as futile as an ugly woman trying to make herself beautiful. Now while I would accept that the majority of butlers may well discover ultimately that they do not have the capacity for it, I believe strongly that this "dignity" is something one can meaningfully strive for throughout one's career. Those "great" butlers like Mr. Marshall who have it, I am sure, acquired it over many years of self-training and the careful absorbing of experience. In my view, then, it was rather defeatist from a vocational standpoint to adopt a stance like Mr. Graham's. (33) Stephens and Graham's debate plays out a crux of aesthetics, whether one can analyze or only appreciate and imbibe beauty, truth, or the good. (The former is the view of most literary critics, the latter of many creative writers, who hold that criticism misses or ruins aesthetic effects.) Stephens takes the more Aristotelian view, that, even if self-evident, one can enumerate the features that constitute dignity. Throughout the book, he frequently notes its features and implicitly defines it in his actions. He is meticulously careful in his bearing, manner, and address; he always heeds the hierarchy of rank, sometimes to the point of his own discomfort, and is loyal, discreet, and endlessly polite. His new American boss is in fact sometimes amused by Stephens's unbending sense of rank and dignity. Like "dignity," "smart" designates a special distinction, beyond the mere competence of solid scholarship or conscientious teaching. It is not a quality of a single practice, but a personal attribute that manifests itself in all one's practices. It adverts to a refinement that is a mode of behavior, a manner, a bearing, and a comportment. It suggests mental agility (to "think on one's feet"), employing theoretical sophistication but not slavishly, 10 and inventiveness, ferreting out implications that others hadn't seen. It also suggests a very un-Stephens like quality of insubordination; it values being "counter-intuitive" (another word one hears), turning previous views on their head. (Stanley Fish has codified this feature, remarking that his modus operandi is to find an accepted view and argue the opposite. 11) For Stephens, the definition of dignity entwines with how one attains it, and the real controversy with Graham is over whether it is innate or learned. Like dignity, smart purports a criterion to discern merit, but it runs up against the same quandary that vexes the two butlers. On the one hand, it suggests an innate ability that is visible in one's statements and bearing. It might have been recognized early on in grade school, avowed through high school, perhaps culminating in startlingly high SATs and a scholarship to Princeton, and later reconfirmed by a college professor who tapped us to join the ranks. The profession is punctuated by continuing stages—grad school, book, tenure—of such avowals. To a degree, one can measure the accuracy and thoroughness of a scholarly recounting of the history, for instance, of the novel in the eighteenth century, one can be trained to do archival work to adduce that history, and one can put in the time to do the research, but one cannot really be trained nor put in the hours to be smart. It seems that you just have it, a genetic gift like good cheekbones, or you're out of luck. On the other hand, merit is usually assumed to be attained through work. It implies the work ethic, that one can put in the time, do the work, pass through various educational steps and credentialing processes, make a second home at the library and wear down the carpet in front of the computer, and hence earn and deserve one's merit. That, after all, is what the professional-managerial class is all about: without being born to riches or other extraordinary privilege we can attain status and privilege through hard work on the level field of education. Stephens acknowledges that dignity might require an innate capacity, and some of us might have more capacity for math, or for language, or for details, or for ideas, but one need develop and augment that capacity. With the capacity of intelligence, smartness, or, as one college professor told me, "a good head on your shoulders," one still has to work at it, so merit is earned. As Stephens remarks, it is defeating to see it otherwise. Whether innate or learned, Stephens broaches one other criterion of distinction: affiliation. The code of the Hayes Society mandates "that 'an applicant be attached to a distinguished household'" (32). This "by itself is not sufficient to satisfy requirements," but a prerequisite. Stephens reports that this stipulation incited a good bit of debate because the Society "did not regard the houses of businessmen or the 'newly rich' as 'distinguished'" (32). They offered the qualification that, although "certain butlers of excellent quality were to be found in the houses of businessmen, 'the assumption had to be that the houses of true ladies and gentlemen would not refrain long from acquiring the services of any such persons'"(32). Stephens himself adopts the more progressive view that this is too strict a guideline, given the postwar shifts of the aristocracy and its houses, and that dignity poses a truer test. In some sense, the dependence on qualities like intelligence or smartness reflects moments in the transformation of the postwar university, from the established aristocracy of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to the houses of the newly rich welfare state universities like SUNY or University of California, or more recently the great entrepreneurial universities like NYU. Such qualities adduce merit detached from the old hierarchy, or more exactly reflect the decentering of the old hierarchy and its gentlemanly standards (in this respect, "soundness" is nothing to be mourned). The promise of "smart" is that it locates merit not in one's house but in one's intellectual ability. Affiliation is assumed to follow and reflect merit. As in the Hayes Society's code, a common assumption in academe is that affiliation naturally recognizes and rewards merit. However, insofar as affiliation is a prerequisite or prior condition, there is a certain circularity to the system; merit follows affiliation, and affiliation confers merit. The job crisis has thrown into high relief the quandaries of merit and exacerbated the defeatism arising from the profession's current system of rewards. The problem is not the desire to distinguish quality, but that the current academic system fails its promise of a level playing field on which one can demonstrate merit and which justly recognizes merit. Dispelling some of the hysteria about the star system, Bruce Robbins astutely draws out the recession of merit: "Dig deep enough into any instance of merit, and you can always dissolve it back into social determinants, factors like family and friends, lovers and mentors, identities, interests, and institutions that advanced some and disadvantaged others." Robbins' point is that merit is not reducible to those determinants, and that the star system, like the attribution of being smart, is not entirely specious but holds some degree of freedom from affiliation and presents a way that individual merit can be recognized. Still, the implication of this dissolve is that it is a fact of life, so one shouldn't complain about it or can't change it. However, there are salient distinctions to be made among Robbins' list of determinants; some are accidental, but you have to be on a particular institutional road to have those accidents. Some are personal and idiosyncratic, like the color of one's eyes, but the institutions that we inhabit are presumably roads that we have in common, that have transsubjective protocols that we put in place, and that we can change. The academic profession differs from other professions because, after graduate training, one remains within the same institutional system, and the system is relatively continuous and regularized across institutions. A lawyer or doctor might enter an established institutional realm—a large law firm, the federal government, an HMO—but it is discontinuous from training, and a more loosely connected set of institutions. Or a lawyer or doctor might start an independent practice, quite unlike academic prospects (it would be difficult to imagine hanging out a shingle as a philologist). While the university from which a lawyer received his or her degree might be a significant determinant, affiliation has especially pronounced weight in academe because of the continuity of the system. Moreover, despite the decentering of the old aristocracy (which in fact did not lose its prestige of place but allowed select others to be knighted), the university is ruled by hierarchies and rankings, all the more entrenched because of the coherence of the system. Such rankings are duly reported—and coveted by administrators—every year in U.S. News and World Reports, in specialized reviews like The Philosopher's Gourmet, in general in the Carnegie categories, and, not to be underestimated, in conversation. With the precision of degrees of rank in the British aristocratic code, such rankings recognize the great to the modest houses, from the Buckingham of Harvard to the parson's cottage of Calvin College. Hierarchy and rank permeate our profession. Despite our critiques or eschewals of class, they permeate it in various ways, from one's affiliation to the fullness of one's rank to the grades one gives. Because we reside in the same system throughout our careers and because our training is continuous with our careers, affiliation is not one determinant among a dissolve of others, but the preeminent determinant that subsists through our careers. Insofar as the entryway of the profession is graduate training, that affiliation most determines our careers; it is a precondition of merit, and confers merit. What one learns in graduate school are not only texts but modes of behavior, of bearing, manner, and comportment, and the taste to distinguish among those who have it and those who don't. Within the closed system rather than open field of academe, "smart" recognizes those with the lexicon, conceptual framing, and mannerisms of the aristocratic houses. Like the nod of the lord to the duke, or the wince of the baronet at the rude phrasing of the yeoman, "smart" is a judgment of taste. "Smart" purports a standard of individual merit, but its precondition is the merit of affiliation. In this respect, "smart" functions something like the aristocratic features ascribed to characters in eighteenth and nineteenth-century novels. For instance, in Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews, despite his low initial position as a stable boy, Joseph has an extraordinary beauty and bearing that all the other characters recognize. Women especially notice the elegance of his features, from his hands to his calves. His merit, in Stephens' distinction, is innate rather than learned. His refinement, however, arises not from a fluke of nature but from his lineage; he is the son of a gentleman. His change in position at the end is not a class rise rewarding merit but simply the recognition of his rightful class position. Analogously, if not visible on one's hands, being smart is revealed by one's bearing, mannerisms, and ways of speaking, and it arises from one's institutional lineage, confirming one's aristocratic birthright. In short, "smart" resides at the intersection of class and merit, or rather of merit and its dissolve into class. I think that its provenance rests on its representing the complexities of our class position, and for the rest of my speculation I will try to unfold some of the nodes of feeling about our profession and work. So, if you will, some theses on smart. Smart is our distinctive professional marker, of our specific if not peculiar class status and privilege. It separates us; academics particularly are the smart class, doing what Burton Bledstein, in his standard history The Culture of Professionalism, calls "brainwork" (325), and hence deserve modest physical requirements (no punching in for office hours) or more precisely ample free time to get on with it. It envalues our brainwork as separate from other kinds of work, such as working with your hands, as a plumber might do, or a waitress might do (though they both work with people). Smart, particularly the academic version, is after all not a preeminent value in other kinds of work, where dependability, or friendliness, or competence, or efficiency are the operative terms. These are not, at least in my witness, preeminent values in academe. Although "brainwork" also defines aspects of other professions—such as being a lawyer or doctor, who, one assumes, have to be smart to get there—it is a distinctively academic category, in that the measures of academic training subsist throughout one's career. One might have to do well in law school to pass the bar, but thereafter other qualities become more central. If one were to go through, for instance, a nasty divorce trial, one might want to retain a smart lawyer, but the better quality to look for would be a tenacious and dogged lawyer. Smart, in fact, might get in the way; in a courtroom, one can imagine that a brilliant scholar of jurisprudence, with dazzling interpretive skills that a literary critic might show in a reading of Joseph Andrews, would more likely lose his or her jury than win it over. The success of a lawyer's practice is frequently predicated on personability, almost to the degree of a salesperson. Why the category of smart is distinctive to our profession is that it is not a onetime measure, but, embedded in academic institutions, we repeat the primal scene of academic formation, and need to keep proving our being smart. Smart is an assurance of our intrinsic merit, to explain our class distinction to ourselves, perhaps to explain why our brothers and sisters or the people we grew up with and went to high school with might be waiting tables, or driving trucks, or shingling our roofs, or teaching our grade school children. That is, it dispels our class guilt, providing a rationale for why we have attained and deserve our class position—which for many of us, is a rise, or if hailing from the middle class, an anxious prospect to be assured. Or, for the less abject, it connotes class pride, providing a rationale for why we have superior positions (tenure, time off, etc.) and why others have less privilege. Conversely, it promulgates the affect of superiority, because we possess the ineluctable quality and merit of being smart. That is, even if lawyers, not to mention doctors, make more money and drive better cars, we nonetheless belong to the professional-managerial class (pmc) by virtue of our brainwork and putative control of our labor. Indeed, we are in fact morally superior to other members of the pmc, since we have given ourselves up to the purity of intellect, answering the calling of being smart. Analogous to the social role of clerics through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, our specific humanistic and theoretical work sacralizes our roles, smart taking the place of spirit. Inside the profession, the category of smart operates in creating distinctions among the professional hierarchy, of who is smarter than whom, and therefore gets a job at a more prestigious place, or at a less toney place, or who doesn't get jobs. It justifies class divisions within the profession, attributing one's position to the natural merit of being smart. But insofar as those at elite institutions are the "legitimating bodies," it is self-confirming, stamping those who have travelled through elite institutions, and thus speak and frame topics in similar ways, as indubitably smart. In other words, it attributes a naturalness to a learned quality. Smart occurs to us each individually, therefore fostering our thinking of ourselves atomistically, as individual brains, rather than as part of a social group or institution, in fact an institution with a decided public role. Our success is predicated upon our individual smartness, rather than the good we do for that public role or how we work with people. Like tenure, it is a measure of each of us, an island of smartness, one at a time, rather than as a class with mutual interests. (People in unions don't talk about collegiality.) Thus it is a fitting term of competition, each of us individual agents in the market of ideas. As an individual quality, it occults the class divination or the arbitrariness of institutions; it projects academic distinction as an issue of the self, and therefore self-improvement or failure, rather than an institutional problem. It makes our self-interest a constitutive part of our intellectual bearing. In the introduction to Keywords, Raymond Williams tells the story of his arrival at Cambridge after World War II. The son of a railway worker in Wales and just returning from duty in an artillery regiment, Williams was struck by "this new and strange world" of high academe. He recounts talking to one of his classmates, the only other working class lad he met there and also a veteran, and their both blurting out "the fact is, they just don't speak the same language" (11). From his initial discomfort, he went on to unpack the "different immediate values or different kinds of valuation" tied up in that language, and the "different formations and distributions" of society that that language "often intangibly" carried with it. Perhaps because of where I come from, or perhaps because I simply have an ear for words, "smart" is part of the language of academe that I have always found strange. It is strange because, while adverting to the life of the mind, I cannot help but think about those who get to judge it, how they deign it in summary fashion, and who it leaves behind. Raymond Williams made us conscious of the words that we use, like literature, culture, and class, and the social freight that they carry. Like "culture," "smart" seems a self-evident word, but, especially as literary critics, we should have a better ear for the freight of the words we wield and estrange them from their commonplace usage. For Williams, this was never a merely intellectual exercise but had social consequences. Notes
Works Cited
Jeffrey J. Williams is editor of the minnesota review. |