On This Campus: Champagne and Moody Junk Course in Critical Thinking and Theory

The new director of undergraduate studies in the English Department, Professor Rosaria Champagne, and the new chair of the Department, Professor Patricia Moody—both adamantly anti-analytical administrators who are devotees of reading-as-pleasure—have announced that English majors will not have to bother with the required course in critical thinking and theory for the next two years. In a logic that gives vast quanta of pleasure to any consummate bureaucrat, they both have persuaded the Executive Committee of the English Department (not that that congregation of the old guard needed much persuasion) to suspend the requirement of ETS 241 for English majors “for the current and following academic year."

ETS 241—a crucial course for those who take their English major seriously and have plans for going on to graduate work in cultural studies and related areas—is the only course in critical thinking on the sophomore level. The course was regarded to be a fundamental one when the new English and Textual Studies curriculum was planned; but, since the very beginning, traditionalists have tried to drop it from the curriculum. It is in this course where, according to the traditionalists, many students learn the subversive knowledges that become the basis for the kinds of questions they then put forward in other classes and that the traditional instructors of the old theme/topic/genre approach cannot answer. In other words, for traditionalists, ETS 241 has always been a source of “trouble”; and now the Champagne-Moody administration has taken care of the “problem” and simply removed the “cancer” in the curriculum (as some call the 241 course). The suspension is now “temporary," but, of course, the “temporary” is simply a preparation for the “permanent”. In fact, the Republican Faculty Club in the English Department is already saying: Do we need 241 as a requirement for majors? The “temporary” suspension, in short, is a device to create a climate in which the course can be dropped entirely and the “trouble” ended. Dropping or adding courses to the curriculum is in actuality not just a matter of faculty infighting (as the media likes to represent it), but a fight over the very structure of consciousness of the rising labor force. The Champagne-Moody coup d'etat is one big win for the managerial and owning classes.

These days the Department of English at Syracuse University is facing the growing contradictions in its practices (the enormous contradictions between what it publicly says it is doing in terms of pedagogy and curriculum and what it is actually doing). While the Department has in place a progressive and innovative undergraduate curriculum, one that has become a model for many undergraduate programs elsewhere, it has been taken over by a group of reactionary faculty who have no use for anything which smacks even vaguely of “progressiveness." For them, the limits of the “progressive” is trade unionism, Women's Studies, and the revision of the canon! Buoyed by the Republican Wave in the country as a whole, this retrograde group has decided to get rid of the progressive practices previously established in the Department by “re-inventing” the Department! The tropes of “invention” and “re-invention” have long been favorite and tested strategies of capitalist and conservative crisis-management. Whenever capitalist institutions and bourgeois entrepreneurs run into a dead end in their current practices, rather than facing and explaining those limits historically, they simply cut the present off “cleanly” from the past and “re-invent” themselves, as though, by an act of will, they had launched themselves into a completely new historical space. “Re-invention” is a favorite business management practice and the new Republican faculty are now busy applying this practice in the University. Along this line of evading history, the current chair of the English Department, for example, recently announced that she had appointed a committee to “re-invent” the Department. It evidently does not matter to the chair of the department, for example, that the Syracuse graduate program in English was rated by the National Research Council way below average (ranking 76th) in the nation. Instead of facing that hard, historical, and material reality, the chair has appointed a committee not to critique the practices of the Department but to “re-invent" the Department. Similarly the Director of Undergraduate Studies has recently organized workshops for graduate students in which they will learn to “re-invent” themselves professionally. In short, instead of dealing with the issues analytically, this reactionary faculty group has decided to take a page from the corporate “book of wisdom” and has embarked on a PR campaign of “re-invention"! Having junked critical thinking and theory, the reactionaries are now using the strategy of “self-invention” by which students and the department as a whole are being taught how to avoid facing material and historical conditions and instead to exercise their “desire” by reinventing themselves in “pleasing narratives."

The elimination of the course in critical thinking and theory—a key element in this “re-invention” program—is taking place at the very time when the English Department (the biggest humanities program in the University and therefore the one where most of the training of the labor force in “consciousness skills” takes place) is (re)emphasizing such traditional sophomore courses as “Themes in Literature," “Myth, Symbol, Archetype," “American Self Definition”... and the huge lecture series on “Living Writers." The “Living Writers” course is typical of the battle over the “consciousness skills” of the rising labor force. The course completely abandons any critical theory and critical thinking and “teaches” students how to “experience” literature. As we will indicate, this learning how to “experience” is in fact the crucial lesson necessary for workers in order to cope with the unresolvable social and economic contradictions of life under capitalism. The coup d'etat in suspending the ETS course in critical thinking is, of course the affirmation of this pedagogy of experience.

The curricular coup d'etat in the English Department is in line with the new retrograde curricular moves going on at the present time in the humanities curriculum. In the wake of the ascendancy of the Republican Party and the New Right, universities and colleges across the country are erasing the progressive gains of the 1980's and in the early 1990's in the humanities curriculum and going back to the theme/topic/genre/canon approach. In the 1980's and early 1990's it became clear that the traditional “great books” approach (and its many varieties) were essentially courses which, contrary to what they claimed, indoctrinated students into a canon of writing and thinking that naturalized the world according to the interests of white Europeans and their political and economic system—bourgeois democracy and capitalism. In place of such indoctrination, which was sold to students in the name of “imagination," “vision," “beauty” and "truth," the progressive pedagogues of the 1980's and 1990's planned new curricula which de-constructed the prevailing structure of power and representation in all forms of writing and texts of culture. The progressive curriculum de-centered “literature” (the name of the kind of writing which did most of the ideological work of the ruling classes) and put it in the context of all modes of writing—from film and opera to fashion and sexual politics. In other words, the progressive curriculum asked such questions as how those works called “great works of the imagination” come to be regarded as “great” in the first place and thus helped students to see that there was really nothing “great” about any of those great works except that they greatly facilitated the ideological work of the ruling class.

What is this “ideological work” and how do “humanities” courses, such as courses in English, do ideological work for the ruling class? Humanities courses (such as “American Self Definition” or “Experience and Imagination in the 19th Century” or “Postwar Literature in the US")—in the guise of teaching great works of imagination—actually teach students how to become efficient members of a workforce that can provide the owners of the means of production with a high rate of profit. How? How does reading Nabokov or reading obscure works like Zoonomia or watching “film noir” construct an efficient labor force? And why is ETS 241 a resistance to such ideological brainwashing?

"Consciousness skills” are those skills that the workforce needs in order to act according to the rules and laws (most of them non-written cultural codes) that ensure the smooth working of capitalism. In spite of what the official curriculum and pedagogues of the ruling class say, these cultural codes are in fact the ONLY “subject” of the humanities.

Briefly: for the owners of the means of production to maintain a high rate of profit, it is not enough that their workers be merely “skillful” in the handling of technical matters. They have to also be adept at handling cultural matters. Cultural skills are as important as technical skills because they teach the workers how to cope with the contradictions of social life under capitalism. Capitalism is basically a regime of work which is aimed at generating profits for the few rather than meeting the needs of all. In doing so, it unleashes a great deal of violence against the majority of people—all who have to live by the wages they receive for their labor power. One of the things that “consciousness skills” teach the worker is, for example, to regard various forms of violence (the violence of hunger, unemployment, lack of access to health care, lack of day care, the violence of illiteracy, the violence of mindless consumption... ) as “natural” and unavoidable aspects of life.

The “ideological work” of the humanities in teaching “consciousness skills” is to give workers those “skills” that protect them from the violences introduced into their lives by the daily invasions of the contradictions of capitalism. For example, these “consciousness skills” teach the American worker how not to become disoriented and thus distracted and consequently inefficient in his/her job when in her day-to-day life everything that her official culture has taught her proves to be nothing more than a hoax.

How, to be specific, is such a worker to face the gap between the promise of American capitalism ("The American Dream") and the daily actualities that negate and contradict “The American Dream”: the gap indicated in such problems as the increasingly lower wages workers get (when the bosses are getting higher salaries every year), the absence of an even average universal health care system (in a country which has the most advanced medicine in the world), the inaccessibility of higher education (in a culture where many colleges are actually closing because of lack of paying students)? How can the worker maintain her loyalty to capitalism (which is the other name for the “The American Dream") and work with dedication while she is facing these violent contradictions?

In short, how does capitalism subject the laborer to the most brutal exploitation while it promises him “The American Dream” (a home of his own, education, health care for her and her family, a good-paying job,...), and not let him become cynical?

In the way these courses teach students to “read” their social situation, the humanities (English courses) do this ideological job. They immunize the workers against such violent contradictions by teaching them “values” which serve to neutralize, in the name of “higher realities” of “imagination," these contradictions in the mind of the reader. In other words: capitalism in its materiality (pursuit of profit) creates actual, economic-social contradictions that get resolved in the “mind” (imagination) of the workers by means of patterns of intelligibility taught in English and other humanities classes. What is unresolvable in the actual practices of capitalism gets “resolved” in the imaginary of the worker. The course in “American Self-Definition” and the text of Zoonomia, in other words, teach students (the future members of the workforce) how to cope with such unresolvable contradictions: they “cope” by not seeing them as part of the pathologies of capitalism but as instances of the “paradoxes," the “subtleties," the “complexities” of life. In other words, what are actually the outcomes of a particular historical economic system—the system of wage-labor—are, in humanities courses, presented as the very conditions of human life. This is, of course, not the only way that “consciousness skills” teach workers how to cope with daily realities. “Imagination," “style," "genius,"... are some of the names under which this “ideological work” also takes place.

The point is this: it matters a great deal to the ruling class what students are taught in their humanities courses because what they are taught directly affects their efficiency as workers (managers, etc.) later on. The ruling class emphasizes traditional literature courses because it is in these courses that the consciousness skills necessary for maintaining a high rate of profit for the owners are most effectively taught. The courses in which this ideological work is done are legitimated as courses where “Great Literature” is taught and “values” are discussed.

In courses such as ETS 241, the structure and logic of the “ideological work” of capitalism and the logic of the humanities in which these “consciousness skills” are taught are demystified. After students have taken ETS 241 they become more aware of what is being sold to them as “imagination” and “vision” and “beauty” and “truth” in the “masterpieces” of the “great authors." They see that behind all this is the need for the ruling class to have a workforce that sees the world in terms favorable to them--as a world in which contradictions are to be resolved “in the mind."

The recently engineered suspension of ETS 241 is a coup d'etat for the ruling class because it makes it easier for students to be taught to see the world in terms favorable to capitalism. The administrators of the English Department who have “administered” this coup d'etat are basically saying to students: Be pragmatic; do not resist capitalism--it is too powerful! Their message is this: Don't worry, just sit back, have a “nice” day (after all, we're all smiles here in the English Department)!

The suspension of ETS 241 is—as we have argued—important in itself, but it is also symptomatic of something more. It shows that all the talk about the importance of undergraduate teaching at Syracuse University is basically just nothing but PR. When students are recruited for Syracuse, they are told that the University is very committed to undergraduate studies and especially to the core requirements—the lower-division courses that everybody is required to take. In actualiy, [sic.] however, the lower-division courses are the least important courses as far as the faculty is concerned. The fights in the English Department are never over who gets to teach lower-division courses, but who teaches upper-division and graduate courses. In fact, if you look through the lower-division offerings to see who is teaching them, you find that the majority of the teachers are part-time instructors and graduate assistants. There has to be accountability here: What is the relation between what the Department, College, and University say in their formal representations of themselves and their actual courses and teaching? How are University resources (mostly income from tuition) being used? At the present time, the resources in the English Department are being used merely to satisfy the pleasures of the faculty and NOT for what is most useful to students. In the new Republican English Department curriculum (where the pleasure of the faculty is privileged), it is deemed more important for student-citizens who are living every day more and more in the world of virtual reality and cyberspace to take a course in “British Literary History” and read Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield, Beckford's Vathek, and Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, than for them to read Baudrillard's Simulation, since the latter—which actually bears on the manner in which virtual reality is being conceptualized in contemporary society—just won't leave enough room in the course for the teachers's humanistic pieties about imagination and compassion, which even the teachers themselves know are nothing but a bourgeois hoax.

ENJOY YOUR EXPLOITATION!