From
Academic Questions (Spring 2004),
59-66, reposted here with the author's kind
permission
Postmodernist
Classics
T |
he
death of
postmodernism has been prematurely announced many times in the past few
years,
but it continues to exert a destructive impact on the study of the
Classics.
Despite the many confident assertions within our discipline that the
postmodernist body has long been interred or is so decayed as to
present only a
mere nuisance, the inaugural speech of this year's president of the
American
Philological Association provided a superb example of its tenacious
reach and
influence. The president serves for one year and represents the public
and
administrative face of Classics. What he says matters to the future of
the
profession, and he took the occasion in 2004 to announce his allegiance
to
postmodernist ideology in the strongest possible terms.
President-elect
James J. O'Donnell, Provost of Georgetown University, delivered his
address,
entitled “Late Antiquity: Before and After,” to a packed audience on
the 4th of
January at the San Francisco Hilton. In a glib, rhetorically adroit
performance, he called for Classicists to embark on a heady form of
self-demolition: they should as professionals and teachers disavow
their own
discipline because it was based on false premises about the origin,
content,
and history of Greco-Roman culture. Indeed, they should abandon the
notion that
1
It is
no accident
that Professor O'Donnell used “narrative” so frequently in his spoken
and
written speech. He was declaring himself to be a dedicated
postmodernist. But
he gives us even more evidence: the terms “construction(s),“ “construct,” and “constructed”
are woven
into the text 22 times including the notes, always in the postmodernist
sense
of the social, psychological, or linguistic process by which we create
and
maintain our beliefs in ordinary concepts such as mental illness,
gender
differences, truth, empirical facts, and virtually everything that
falls under
the accusation of “naive realism.” In constructivism, all actions are
performances that we process in our mental bias laboratory to
create—construct—fictions with varying degrees of potential for
aggression
across the social, cultural, or psychological landscape. We know from
his Law
of History that all stories (=narratives) are false. Thus, at every
single
point where Professor O'Donnell wants to eliminate a narrative, he must
construct another narrative to supplant it. Those who live by the
narrative
will infinitely regress by the narrative.
2
Professor
O'Donnell
applies postmodernist narrative theory to mount two main arguments
against our
current understanding of the Classics profession.
The
first is
designed to cast doubt on its validity as an empirical discipline that
can
objectively sift evidence for truth. In a key passage, we learn that
“The
traditional construction of 'classics' as a domain of study depends on
a
narrative. We are not like philosophers or theologians or economists,
who have
a body of subject matter and a set of techniques; or like biologists or
chemists or physicists, who divided their tasks by the scale of the
natural
phenomena they studied; or like historians or political scientists, who
have a
potentially unlimited domain of inquiry but a collection of disciplines
and
practices.” In good postmodern style, he never provides an exact
definition of
the Classical narrative. He chooses to leave it vague because an open
statement
would show the full scale of what he wants to remove. Talk in
postmodern codes
is much safer.
We may,
however,
conceive the unnamed narrative to be triple-stranded:
one strand is the evolution of the
Greco-Roman literary heritage as detailed by some two centuries of
critical
study; a second strand is our increasingly precise understanding of the
Greco-Roman world that has emerged from cross-disciplinary research in social,
political, economic,
administrative, and military history; and a third strand is the sense
of a
shared Western cultural identity based, overtly or covertly, on the
first two
strands. All three strands are woven closely, but I suspect it's the
third that
he thinks is the most erroneous, especially the pervasive myth of
It is
virtually
impossible to understand the main line of European literature from
Petrarch to
Pope without deep familiarity with Classical culture. Most importantly,
the
Classics continue to revivify modern thought and art in the most
striking and
unexpected ways. The triple-stranded discipline that Professor
O'Donnell takes
for a narrative actually constitutes a clear body of subject matter
that we can
only discard by an act of cultural suicide.
Over
and above the
thoughts and writings that have been passed down, Classics equally has
a core
of techniques as much as history or political science: papyrology,
textual
criticism, philology, numismatics, archeology, and of course history
itself.
The domain of their application is also potentially unlimited,
especially if we
extend its purview down to the Renaissance. Classics certainly has a
far more
empirical set of techniques on which to ground its research than
theology and
philosophy. The death of metaphysics and the retreat of philosophy into
language analysis or Heideggerian obfuscation highlight the
comparatively
greater health of Classics. The conclusion he draws from this
subjectless and
techniqueless narrative is, then, patently false: 'We share features of
self-definition with each of those groups, but our work has been
critically
defined, for at least the last two hundred years, by a story.”
All the
work that's
been done the past two centuries to recover and understand the
Classical
heritage is no more defined by this undefined “story” than the effort
to
recover the texts of Akkadian or Old Norse literature are defined by
some other
equally specious “stories.” We want to restore the literature of many
different
cultures because it's inherently worth preserving in the most accurate
form
possible. Professor O'Donnell would make a better case for himself if
he simply
came forward and said straight out, “The scholarly attempt to recover
Greco-Roman culture is motivated primarily by the false ideological
narrative
that
Professor
O'Donnell
now turns to his second argument against the traditional study of the
Classics.
He wants to inaugurate drastic changes in Classical education and
pedagogy with
a three-part agenda of things we need to keep in mind.
He
announces the
initial item on his agenda in full schizophrenic mode:
“First:
the
traditional narrative will and should persist, even as we withdraw our
allegiance from it.” The three sub-reasons he gives for this argue that
the old
narrative will persist not because it has any innate truth, but solely
because
of (1) its ideological influence in shaping the ancient world, (2) its
hold on
us through our research tools and scholarly literature, and (3) its
sheer
longevity as an aesthetic criterion, since “The notion of the 'classic'
that
shaped the emergence of tastes and styles may be factitious in its
genesis but
is indubitably real in its effect.” That is, the persistence is
essentially an
illusion. The “truth” it does contain is a fetching lie. The only
reason to
continue teaching the Classical curriculum from Homer to the Silver Age
is
pragmatic and prophylactic. We don't want to commit the mistake of
dismissing
the old narrative—it's too dangerous—any more than attributing anything
substantive to it. The language used in this section is again pure
imperative.
He is without doubts about his own newly-devised master narrative: “A
narrative
so powerful will always deserve to be taught, even if it must then be
untaught.”
Exactly
how one is
to unteach the false narrative of Classics and its foundational
importance for
the West is never explained, though he does suggest that “The line of
least
resistance leads to teaching [students] about golden and silver ages,
to be
sure, and so it will take patience to teach and unteach the old stories
at
once, but it must be done.” The line of least resistance is to continue
teaching the phony golden and silver ages because they are so embedded
in our
cultural assumptions, but somehow to undermine them in the process.
Imagine the
confusion that could result from giving students both the old and new
narratives simultaneously. Imagine what misunderstanding we might sow
by
teaching the Classics as nothing but a failed narrative that must be
remembered
for practical reasons, while teaching a new narrative of presumably
truer but
ephemeral antecedents. These are the serious pedagogical consequences
of “narrative”
talk. Their very absurdity is a testament to Professor O'Donnell's
membership
in the Grand Academy of Lagado.
The
second of the
three things we need to keep in mind while changing the intellectual
program of
the “classics” is a straw dog: “As we make our message new and as we
stand
apart from the traditional narratives, we run real risks of competition
from
the representatives of an audience that doesn't want to let go of the
familiar.” I would agree completely with the claim that we need
accurate popularizations
of Classics. New scholarly approaches are in fact bubbling everywhere,
some
making their way into decent popularizations, but I don't see a vast
reactionary movement by representatives of the audience—unnamed1
but
presumably media moguls—to restrict reading and analysis to the
“familiar". What Professor
O'Donnell doesn't like is the popular dominance of that old, persistent
narrative. Interest in the Classics is actually enjoying something of a
mini-renaissance
in the electronic and print media these days, but I can predict with
certainty
that no new popularizations will ever try to teach and unteach the
Classics at
the same time. This fails as pedagogy and as entertainment.
The
third thing we
need to keep in mind while reforming the “classics” is never identified
by a
rhetorical or syntactical marker. This is hardly surprising. Professor
O'Donnell's English rarely indulges much logical clarity, swinging as
it does
from hyperbole to opacity, from cliché to aphorism, from clotted
reference to
sharp imperative. But I would guess that it begins with the implied
reminder
here: “In the end, the opportunity that offers itself to us is too
important
and too powerful to neglect. The deepest unease I have about our
traditional
story is the way in which it has led us into connivance with
3
Having
dispatched
the old defunct narrative, advocated a new narrative that we are to
teach simultaneously
with the old, and reminded us what we need to remember in changing the
intellectual program of the “classics,” Professor O'Donnell then
explodes his
own carefully-laid argument with a bravura display of illogicality. In
the coda
of his address he draws the following fatal conclusion from his
analysis: “I do
believe that scholarship learns as it goes, if only by remembering the
errors
that have been left behind, and that each generation tells better
stories than
the last—but also, in consequence, each generation has an obligation to
tear
down the old in order to build the new.” The cardinal issue raised by
Professor
O'Donnell throughout his APA address is the need to abandon an old
narrative
and replace it with a new one. But now we are told that this is
strictly a
provisional replacement. Every generation has a moral obligation to
destroy the
old stories so new ones can flourish. Taken literally, such a duty
invalidates
Professor O'Donnell's message from late antique scholarship to the
modern discipline
of Classics: “the old story won't work any longer.” The new narrative
has no
more veracity than the old, though it may be “better” in some vague
ideological
or pedagogical sense. After its 20-or 30-year lifespan, the new
narrative he's
taken such effort to build will land on the intellectual midden and
other
stories will assume a little temporary credibility. The destructive
whirl of
constant narrative replacement leaves no place for truth. Professor
O'Donnell
refuses to acknowledge the existence of objective truth for the simple
reason
that it places distinct limits on incredulity toward narratives, the
very
things we are to demolish and build. Thus Classics becomes a vortex of
stories—all of which, remember, are false—spinning into nihilistic
regression.
What we
as
Classicists require, however, is not constant fabrication of narratives
but
constant vigilance in the deployment of our conceptual schemes for
analyzing,
synthesizing, and organizing knowledge. Each generation has an
obligation to
tear down the old intellectual paradigms only if they are
false,
inaccurate, one-sided, or destructive. More seriously false is
Professor
O'Donnell's belief that each generation tells better stories than the
past. We
have plenty of evidence for what I might call entropic narratives.
There
isn't much of
a likelihood that Professor O'Donnell's educational agenda will ever
engage our
contemporaries so effectively that they rush to study “classics” rather
than
Classics and fund “classicists” rather than Classicists. The agenda
would in
fact have the opposite effect, driving one more nail into the coffin of
Greek
and Latin studies. But if he actually persuades some “classicists” to
carry out
his educational program, I hope they will “ask themselves whether
adding to the
quantity of confusion and untruth in the world is a good use of the
gift of
life or an ethical way to earn a
living.”6
Notes
1. The URL for
the speech is
http://www.apaclassics.org/Publications/PresTalks/jod.html. All
further quotations are from it. Please note that Professor O'Donnell
consistently prints Classics as 'classics' in the written address to
indicate
his belief that there is no such coherent, historically valid
discipline as
Classics.
2. Cassiodorus (Berkeley:
University
of California Press, 1979); Augustine, Twayne's World Authors
Series
TWAS 759 (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1985); Augustine. Confessions,
3
vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Avatars of the Word ( 3. Avatars, 16.
For a balanced
consideration of the book's strengths and weaknesses, see my review in Phi
losophy
in Review 19 (1999): 210—272. Many who reviewed the book
positively avoided
any engagement with its postmodern substratum.
4. http://www.edge.org/q20047q04_print.html.
Steven
J. Willett
is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Shizuoka
University of
Art and Culture in