Published Winter/Spring 2009
 
The Culture of Argument
An Interview with Amanda Anderson
by David Cerniglia | ns 71-72
Amanda Anderson diagnoses some of the glitches of contemporary theory and advocates a renewed standard of rational debate in her book, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton UP, 2006), and in the interview below. Trained as a Victorianist, Anderson first made her mark with Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (Cornell UP, 1993). Her second book, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton UP, 2001), explores the role of detachment in the literary and scientific discourses of nineteenth-century England, as well as in contemporary theory. She has also edited, with Joseph Valente, Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle (Princeton UP, 2002).
Born in Washington, DC, in 1960, Anderson attended college at Dartmouth (BA, 1981), moving to Cornell University for graduate work (MA, 1988; PhD, 1989). She taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1989 to 1999, when she moved to Johns Hopkins University, where she is Caroline Donovan Professor of English and Chair of the Department. In 2008 she became director of the School of Criticism and Theory.
This interview took place on 29 July 2008 in Amanda Anderson's office at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, MD. It was conducted and transcribed by David Cerniglia, a PhD student in the Literary and Cultural Studies Program at Carnegie Mellon University.
Cerniglia: Your most recent book, The Way We Argue Now, obviously alludes to Trollope's novel, The Way We Live Now, which is a pretty scathing indictment of late nineteenth-century British culture. I wonder how far we can push the comparison between Trollope's novel and the kinds of arguments you're making. What are your primary concerns?
Anderson: I would just say at the outset that my goal is not to produce a blanket dismissal of "argument society," as the allusion to Trollope's novel might suggest. Quite the contrary. What's interesting to me about Trollope is the interplay between satire and intermittent idealism, his tonally complex commitment to the possibilities of critique, always routed through character. What's compelling about that novel is not simply the reach of its indictment, but the moments where it tries to locate critical possibilities internal to the culture.
Cerniglia: If your book isn't a blanket dismissal, what are the specific indictments? What are the central problems that you see in academic culture?
Anderson: As I say in the introduction, the book could have been called The Way We Fail to Argue Now. The book tries to advance and defend a robust culture of argument, to make appeal to a longstanding democratic and socio-intellectual ideal. What most threatens that, in contemporary academic argument and dispute, are forms of dogmatism. Some of them stem from what I think are stark and unhelpful critiques of Enlightenment, which after all is the tradition out of which one can make a claim for a culture of argument and for the importance of the democratic tradition. I also feel that while the politics of identity has made significant contributions to the way we do scholarship across many humanities disciplines, it has also at times allowed claims to identity to trump other claims, thereby disabling reciprocal reason-giving argument.
Cerniglia: I know that you rely on Habermas quite a bit, and one criticism of him has been that communicative rationality, while it makes sense as an ideal, presupposes a kind of access that's never existed. The ability to participate in conversations or debates is often limited, and it's limited in terms of identity. Certain identity categories exclude people from the public sphere. So how do you reconcile the ideal of communicative rationality with the fact that people, often those with the most at stake, are excluded?
Anderson: My feeling is that those exclusions should become the target for productive forms of critique within ongoing democratic cultures. While I don't mean to act as though there's some sort of progressive energy at play that will guarantee that exclusions will become the focus of critique and ultimately be dispelled or overcome, I believe that those who are dedicated to liberal democratic culture and institutions have an obligation to scrutinize the political landscape for any forms of exclusion that vitiate the ideals that undergird that culture. I do not think that exclusions are hard-wired into liberal democratic culture or liberal democratic institutions or the heritage of the Enlightenment; I think that exclusions are historical and require vigilant forms of analysis and combating. I don't think we're ever going to achieve a world in which we are suddenly exclusion-free, or in which we've suddenly eliminated all injustice and inequities, but I think that part of the raison d'être of liberal democratic culture is its dedication to furthering its own ideal.
It is true that people at different periods in history often can't recognize existing exclusions, so there can be a lot of resistance. The chances are, in the case of status-based exclusions, that those exclusions will be exposed by individuals who are subject to that status. But that does not mean that the claims of individuals suffering from exclusion should, in the public arena, override claims of people who can't lay claim to that status. The guiding principle is that status should not determine one's standing within the public sphere.
Cerniglia: One of the things I find interesting about your book, which is about theory in a lot of ways, is that it accounts for practice. One of the more common criticisms of theory has been its separation from practice. One famous example would be Martha Nussbaum's criticism of Judith Butler in "Professor of Parody." It seems to me that your focus on the individual is linked to practice.
Anderson: My book attempts to analyze and elaborate the ways in which many of the theories that have been influential in the humanities, particularly in literary and cultural studies, are ultimately forms of practical philosophy, in the sense that they include an appeal to practice, method, or ethos. Part of what I was trying to say was, yes, there have been many critiques of theory as abstract, jargon-laden, irrelevant, and elitist, but in reality there is a kind of existential density, and strong practical orientation, to many of these theories. While they typically require a certain kind of training to understand, some sort of disciplinary expertise, it is superficial to dismiss them as overly abstract and therefore irrelevant to the world of lived practice.
Insofar as the book emphasizes the relationship between "argument" and "ethos," or demonstrates that different forms of thought have what I call characterologies, it does have a kind of individualist focus. At the end of the book, I try to flesh out the claim that Habermasian proceduralism has a practical dimension that is both individual and collective—on the one hand, there is an emphasis on stringent neutrality; and on the other hand, Habermas appeals to the importance of historically-situated collective struggles to overcome specific evils, such as ethnocentrism in Germany, in order to more fully realize liberal democratic principles and institutions. Along these same lines, there is increasing collective concern and political action in the name of the rule of law in many locales around the globe right now, certainly in the American political scene. While some question how much affiliative intensity a dedication to the rule of law can produce, it is interesting to see political moments coalescing not around identity, but around principles of fairness and equity and justice and the rule of law.
Cerniglia: There's often hesitation when we start talking about "the individual," which can be seen as the beginning of a slippery slope leading to neoliberal subjectivity and a privileging of interpersonal competition. That focus can hobble the kind of political work that relies on affiliation or collectivity.
Anderson: The ways in which theories lay claim to our attention are manifold, and it seems to me that theory in the humanities often lays claim to our attention by presenting modes of being or ways of thinking that are most familiarly understood when articulated in individual terms. We don't all think together. And it simply is the case that many people who have dedicated themselves to the life of the mind are fascinated by the question of what it means to inhabit, or live, a way of thinking. In literature, these concerns often shape the relation between narrative and character, and one would say that I'm trying to bring a novelistic perspective to the study of theory by saying, What kind of character is projected by this thought? Why do you have to be complacent to be a pragmatist? What's that about? What do we make of the persistent intrusion, within theoretical discourse, of questions of temperament and ethos?
Now, I can imagine people dedicated to progressive political projects saying this type of focus is essentially mandarin. But I think there's something deeply interesting about the existential and characterological dimensions of theory and philosophy.
Cerniglia: Since you often talk about character and the characterological nature of theory, I wonder how much that relates to your training as a Victorianist and as someone who works primarily on the novel. Often people in literary and cultural studies have a first book that is very literary and based on the dissertation. The second book then moves further afield, and the third book ends up being not on the Victorian novel but Norwegian pop culture or something. That seems to be less the case with you. There seems to be a clear evolution among your three books. There's an opening up from your first book, which is geared toward a more specialized audience. The second book deals with broader concerns and has a wider audience in mind, and The Way We Argue Now casts an even wider net. How did you get from the second book to the third book? How do the books link up?
Anderson: I vividly remember writing my first theory article, which was a version of the afterward of my first book. It was called "Cryptonormativism and Double Gestures: The Politics of Poststructuralism." In writing it I was coming to terms with theoretical positions I had been heavily exposed to in graduate school at Cornell in the mid-eighties. I was realizing how I wanted to frame my analysis of Victorian fallenness. Rejecting a programmatic deconstructionism or psychoanalysis, I argued that the Victorian attempt to work through anxieties about agency and modern forms of consciousness often took place in relation to fallen figures. When I wrote that first theory article, I wondered to myself, "Will I ever write another theory article again? That was so fun and so interesting, but I don't know what else I'd write about."
While working on the second book, I found myself captivated by certain theoretical questions and disputes. I remember at one point I decided to write an article on the surge of interest in cosmopolitanism and its relationship to a renewed interest in universalism among poststructuralists. That article was closely related to some of the issues I was thinking through in The Powers of Distance. Then, as I finished the second book, I realized that the concept of character was crucial, that I was really interested in what one could call the character of theory. That is what led me to The Way We Argue Now.
Cerniglia: It seems to me that there's an important revaluation of liberalism going on now in literary studies, and much of it is coming from people trained as Victorianists, like Bruce Robbins and Amanda Claybaugh. How do you account for that?
Anderson: One would also want to mention Elaine Hadley, David Wayne Thomas, Lauren Goodlad, and John McGowan. It's no accident: the nineteenth century is when liberalism emerged as a mode of thought and a self-conscious program, so there's a reason for the coincidence. I'm not sure I know enough about what's going on in work in other periods, so I don't want to recklessly lay claim to some sort of special enlightenment going on in Victorian studies. If you adopt a more flexible category like work on the public sphere, that tends to have a much broader reach across the fields.
Let me backtrack for a minute. New Historicism had a huge impact on early modern, Victorian, and novel studies. There were these very powerful Foucauldian analyses of the nineteenth century by D. A. Miller and Nancy Armstrong that could, especially in the case of Miller, be easily applied and replicated, if not with the same amount of analytical nuance and stylistic panache. So there was a strong paradigm being offered to people in Victorian. That has produced a countermovement: people started to question the reigning paradigms and the hermeneutics of suspicion.
Having said all of that, I also just think that we're at a historical moment now, in the US and in the US academy, where the importance of liberal democracy is being acutely felt, and so you have people who are literary scholars, like John McGowan and Michael Bérubé, writing about liberal democracy. They're in dialogue with a growing body of "post-9/11 theory" and attempting to think through what it means to cheer when the Supreme Court overrules the Bush administration on the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo. You have to think, Well, do I want to write about how the Guantanamo prisoners represent what Agamben calls bare life? Or do I want to acknowledge the inhumane treatment and the unacceptable indignities visited upon prisoners, but also make an argument for the importance of the rule of law? So there's an acutely felt immediacy with respect to questions having to do with democracy and the rule of law. That has everything to do with the last eight years and goes beyond the literary field and the academic sphere.
Cerniglia: I know that you were colleagues with Michael Bérubé at Illinois and that you're interested in similar things, though Bérubé's What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts? is a different kind of book than The Way We Argue Now. I think it would be fair to say that your book is more academic, at least in terms of its style. What kind of choice was that for you? It's written for an academic audience, published by an academic press rather than a trade press. I imagine you could have done a trade book.
Anderson: I don't know whether I could have written a book for a wider readership. I have given a great deal of thought to what it might mean to try to write for a broader audience. So far, when I sit down and write, what comes out is not going to fit the bill. I have occasionally given talks to, say, an undergraduate audience where I've actively written it in what I think is a more accessible way, but it's not something that comes easily to me. I have to be honest and say that I've always prided myself on being a lucid writer, but that does not mean the same thing as easily being able to shift from an academic style of writing to a popular one. It's something I continue to think about but it's not something that I have been able to enact. To answer your question: there was no choice.
Cerniglia: I wanted to ask about your experience in graduate school and what the critical and professional landscape looked like when you took your first job. I know you finished in 89, your first job was at the University of Illinois, and a year later Gender Trouble was published. So it was an interesting moment; theory was transforming.
Anderson: During the time I was in graduate school and while I was an assistant professor, the profession was actively and profoundly engaged by theory and by a series of waves of theoretical contribution: deconstruction, New Historicism, cultural studies. Everybody felt that the stakes were high, and there was a strong sense of its really mattering which position one took. It was a thrilling time to be in graduate school and to be an assistant professor.
When I arrived at Cornell in 1984, it was still dominated by deconstruction, although there was a Foucauldian there, Mark Seltzer, who was an assistant professor at that time. Cultural studies, while obviously starting to have effects, was not really much in play there; there was a very strong poststructuralist emphasis. I found myself from the get-go very skeptical and dissatisfied, but totally engaged by the theoretical discussions.
One of the things that I have been persistently interested in, from the beginning of my career to the present moment, are the normative dimensions of contemporary theory, and in particular the extent to which the normative bases of theory are under-elaborated or incoherent. I don't think it is possible not to have a normative dimension to a theory. The question is what form it takes, how reflective or self-aware it is, and whether it is consistent with the accompanying claims of the theory. For me, the critique of cryptonormativism in Foucault (by Habermas and by Nancy Fraser) was exemplary, revealing the broader incoherence of many of the normative orientations within theory. So a lot of the energy that went into my graduate work and my dissertation took the form of challenging the prevailing paradigms within the literary field. You don't know, at that stage, what to expect. I didn't necessarily think that my arguments would gain much of an audience. And, frankly, I felt like I was in a minority, and it was sometimes a difficult position to be in—I did get resistance from the faculty there.
Cerniglia: Who was your advisor there?
Anderson: It was Harry Shaw. I did not get resistance from him. But I should also say that I'm not the kind of person who gets mentored.
Cerniglia: If you're not the type of person who likes to be mentored, how does that affect the way you mentor your own students?
Anderson: You'll have to ask my students. I have no idea. I have benefited immeasurably from working with graduate students, and I enjoy it. I guess I would say this: I like to promote students' independence. I don't want disciples. It just doesn't feel right to me.
The move from Cornell to Illinois was interesting. It accentuated and brought home the move from poststructuralism to cultural studies in the broader academy. When I got to Illinois it was dominated by cultural studies. The Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory was a hotbed of cultural studies. They held the giant conference that resulted in that big collection, Cultural Studies.
Cerniglia: That was in 1990?
Anderson: That was in 1990, and in the spring of my first year. Michael Bérubé and I sat next to each other diligently taking notes and cracking jokes.
Cerniglia: Who was at the conference?
Anderson: There were tons of people there—Stuart Hall, Tony Bennett, Jody Berland, Homi Bhabha, etc. It was huge. It was five days long, dawn to dusk.
What I loved about the University of Illinois was that it was so intellectually vibrant. There were so many smart, engaged people there, and they were interested in having a collective intellectual life outside of the classroom and the department. The Unit for Criticism was wonderful. They had a bimonthly evening seminar, and we would pick a topic each year. We did critical legal studies; one year we did the history of cultural studies. I went to that religiously, and I loved it. The unit also sponsored a monthly colloquium, which was heavily attended by faculty and graduate students across many departments. In my second year I was asked to do a colloquium paper, and I did a critique of Butler; it was the early version of "Debatable Performances." It was really thrilling and fun to have assigned respondents and such an intellectually diverse audience. Illinois was a great fit for me because people were interested in debating ideas, and theory was emphasized.
Cerniglia: I'd like to talk about your move to Hopkins. There have been plenty of big names in literary studies here—Hillis Miller, Walter Benn Michaels, Stanley Fish. So I wonder what the climate was like when you arrived here and how it has changed since you've been here. How has your experience here been different from your experience at Illinois? Clearly this is a much smaller department than Illinois.
Anderson: That was an adjustment. Whereas every institution I had been in previously had pockets of intellectual intensity, the institutional culture at Hopkins simply is intellectually intense. It's grounded in very concrete practices. Each department has an ongoing, active seminar/colloquia culture. One of the first things the department chair said to me when I got here was that all public talks sponsored by the department were required. All faculty had to attend, unless they were out of town or had strep throat. That kind of situation doesn't obtain anywhere else. Universities are huge, there are many things going on all the time, people pick and choose, some people don't go to anything at all. If you go to give a talk at another university and there's an English faculty of forty, maybe six of them will be at your talk, and that will be good. Not here. If you're invited to give a talk at Hopkins, everybody's there. And it's also a requirement of our graduate program that every graduate student attend every talk sponsored by the department, including job talks. It's considered part of the training.
When I got to Hopkins, the kinds of things I liked about the Unit for Criticism at Illinois were built into the very structure of departmental life. And there are also a lot of cross-departmental experiences. The small size of departments at JHU produces a kind of enforced interdisciplinarity. When I first became an assistant professor, I thought, Illinois is great, I really love the Unit for Criticism, there are a lot of people here with whom I share intellectual experiences, and my intellectual energy has the outlets it needs. On the other hand, you know, there are a lot of people who just teach and then go to Target. There was a feeling of diffusion. I thought, Oh well, graduate school is really intense, and nothing's ever like that again. Hopkins maintains at every level what I thought only characterized a certain phase of intellectual life. I'm not claiming anything special for Hopkins. I know intense intellectual life exists elsewhere. I think in larger institutions it exists in certain pockets. I also think there are certain forms of intellectual initiative that are extra-institutional and necessarily can't occur in the central institutional culture. But it is an astonishing place because it has taken the challenge of its size and turned it into an advantage.
It's interesting to me to think about these issues now because of the way in which communication in the profession has changed. So much of it is online, long distance. It has made being together in the same place less important for the profession at large, and it makes the Hopkins culture seem even more valuable and rare.
Cerniglia: One of the things I've become interested in is the way in which academic work gets carried out. Our days are not structured in the same way as they might be in another profession, even if you don't have to come in at nine and stay until five. I'm curious about how people structure their days. Maybe we can talk about your being chair of the English department, because clearly that changes the kinds of demands on your time. But I'm curious about how you work. How is your day structured?
Anderson: Well I just hope you don't have any scholar-cams installed in my home, so whatever I tell you you'll just have to believe! Before I had kids I had a very set schedule. I worked all morning until lunch, and then I had to take a siesta because my brain didn't work as well between lunch and three, and then I worked straight through until seven or eight, all in all a good, full eight hours. After kids, well, you simply can't waste a minute, so the siesta had to go. And now things are less predictable, so I've had to become ruthlessly efficient. My days vary: it depends what I'm working on. If I'm writing, I get obsessed and I want to work on it every available hour.
With administrative work, I have found—and I think I'm just lucky—that it's a good complement to the kind of energy and attention and focus required for scholarship. I find it kind of soothing and therapeutic to deal with the ten emails in my inbox, to write a memo. It gets done and it's done. It's like solving a math problem or balancing the checkbook. The other thing I like about chairing is that I'm a social creature. I've never been the monastic type and we're in a slightly monastic profession, so I have found it quite pleasurable to have more interaction. I'm also in a small department and I think the chairmanship is very different from what it might be in a large department.
Cerniglia: You've been chair since 2003?
Anderson: I'm coming into my sixth and final year.
Cerniglia: How did you become chair?
Anderson: Through a military coup. More seriously—the way it works is the dean canvasses faculty members individually, so it's a version of democracy, but it's not transparent. They decide who they're going to approach and they approached me.
Can I say something about that? There's a convention among academics of commiserating with people upon their being appointed chair, saying things like, "I'm so sorry to hear that," or "When is your sentence over?" assuming off the bat that it's onerous, it's unrewarding, it's duty performed under duress or under a certain kind of moral obligation. I am not a fan of such discourse about chairing. My own feeling is that it's completely fine for people not to want to do it or to dislike it, but that it's really important work because you're helping to shape departmental and institutional practices. I find it odd coming from people who are otherwise very vocal about their desire to be progressive citizens. I think some of it is disdain for what looks like being co-opted to reform from within. It's not radical enough.
My experience has been that it's a field of action and for that reason highly rewarding. There are things about it that I won't miss, but I've found it really engaging. Again, I was lucky enough to be at a place that's flexible and where there's not a lot of heavy bureaucracy and where you can change practices with ease. I've enjoyed being chair. Improvement is always thrilling.
Cerniglia: What kinds of improvements have you seen since you became chair?
Anderson: One of the things I was most eager to take stock of was how well we were supporting and serving our graduate students. I was very interested, in collaboration with my colleagues, in having more arenas for the airing of graduate student interests and concerns, increasing communication, and trying to figure out ways that would give students the support and structures that would enable them to complete their dissertations in as timely and efficacious a way as possible. That was my primary interest coming in.
A lot of the time I've been here my main activity has been recruitment. It's a very difficult time to recruit at the senior level. But even when it doesn't succeed it is very rewarding to be involved in high-level recruitment.
Cerniglia: You'll be stepping down as chair of English at Hopkins and taking up the directorship of the School of Criticism and Theory. You're moving from one big administrative position to another. You've been involved with SCT since 2006 as a senior fellow, and you were a seminar leader. When I hear people talk about the School of Criticism and Theory, it evokes for me a kind of academic star chamber or scholarly Knights Templar. Can you talk a little bit about what SCT is and how it works?
Anderson: The School of Criticism and Theory was founded in 1976, so it's now 32 years old and has become an established institution. I should clarify that I am not moving to Cornell: SCT is an independent summer institute that has had serial affiliations with the different universities that have housed it. Right now it's thriving at Cornell, and I will spend the summer session there. At its inception, SCT set out to provide an intellectual forum for those forms of continental theory that were starting to have an impact in departments of languages and literature. Murray Krieger was one of the founders, and he and his colleagues thought a lot about the name. They deliberately included both "criticism" and "theory" because they wanted to keep a focus on the practice of literary criticism and on the interplay between theoretical approaches and ways of reading literature. Over time it has become more broadly humanities oriented, and there are increasing numbers of faculty who are from not only humanities departments beyond languages and literature, but also social science departments, such as anthropology and political science.
I was describing the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at Illinois as filling an important need for people who wanted to gather and think through newly-influential theories that had not yet been absorbed into the disciplines. SCT had a similar kind of mission. One of the things it also accentuated, and still fosters, is the importance of energetic, vigorous debate amongst practitioners of different theoretical persuasions. There is an attempt to have a mix of scholars present during any given summer who will be likely to disagree with each other. There is a very strong emphasis placed on "friendly debate" in much of the literature and it is an extremely hospitable place, but there's also a dedication to trying to make sure that there's no chance of settling into something programmatic. I think it's been kept brilliantly vital for three-plus decades.
Another interesting aspect of the school is that it has become increasingly international. We are drawing graduate students and young faculty from all over the country and the world. It's an amazing, vibrant, diverse summer theory boot camp. I think one of the most attractive things about SCT has to do with its providing for participants an alternative arena from home institutions, where local intellectual personalities tend to dominate. You may have very strong personalities at SCT—there's a huge premium placed on intellectual presence when putting together the program—but it isn't going to have the same qualities as a home institution where issues of power may affect interactions. I don't mean to claim that SCT is the ideal speech situation. But as a faculty member, I found the level of confrontation refreshing. It was exhausting too; I'd never experienced anything like that before.
Cerniglia: Did you ever attend SCT as a student?
Anderson: No. When I was a student at Cornell, it was at Dartmouth, and I never attended. Sadly. Many participants testify to the fact that it's a profound, intellectually transforming experience, in large part because they come at a crucial moment in the conception or the writing of a dissertation or a book. There is something about the putting into play of these varying perspectives that can help one crystallize things, even if only by opposition. It puts to the fore the nature of the debates over ideas, which is part of why it's so appealing to me.
It happened by accident for me. I taught there, and then I was elected to the board, and then they needed to appoint a new director. I was thinking, I'm way too busy. As the possibility became more concrete, I realized that it was an unparalleled opportunity to be at the heart of something that's really important to the profession and to the humanities more broadly. It's the perfect mix for me because I do enjoy running things, and what could be better than trying to facilitate and foster intense intellectual debate?
Cerniglia: I wonder if you'd be willing to venture some predictions about the future of the humanities. Certainly the role of the humanities in the university has changed since the time when you decided to become an English major. Do things look bleak to you? And in literary studies proper, there seems to be a move back, to "return" to something—literature or aesthetics or, as you talk about in your book, ethics.
Anderson: I have a couple of responses to that question. I'm not particularly keen on predictions. I think that we're going to be surprised.
I do think that there's been a return to ethics, questions of value, questions of aesthetics, which is a return, in some senses, to literature. At their best, such "returns" remain in a taut dialectical relation to disciplinary methodology and theoretical frameworks. I do think that if the literary discipline is to have any specificity, aesthetics has to be central. What aesthetics is and what literature is are questions that have been engaged throughout the history of theory. I just completed a book on forms of argument that was strictly theoretical, though it brought a kind of literary sensibility to the reading of theory. My next book—it's funny you asked if things look bleak to me—is tentatively called Bleak Liberalism. That project attempts to continue an argument for a more existentially dense conception of liberal thought, one that is often enacted though a complex dialectic of skepticism and idealism or fatalism and utopianism, rather than a simple notion of assured progressivism or perfectibility. Conservatism has often claimed for itself a monopoly on tragic, pessimistic, or realistic forms of political response, and I think that distorts the depth of the liberal tradition. I'm trying to place that problematic in relation to aesthetic engagements with liberal thinking. So I do think that there is likely to be increased engagement with the aesthetic rather than saying, "Well, theory gave us what we need to know but now we have to return to the profound issues surrounding human existence." That dichotomy is not useful.
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