Introduction to Special Issue on Michael W. Clune’s A Defense of Judgment

Introduction to Special Issue on Michael W. Clune's A Defense of Judgment Robert S. Lehman (bio) In the few years since its publication, Michael W. Clune's A Defense of Judgment has already become a touchstone in debates concerning the present and future of literary studies—an occasion to rethink some of our discipline's most fundamental concepts. Here, I want to provide a brief introduction to some of the book's central themes, followed by a survey of the contributions to this special issue.1 Clune presents A Defense of Judgment as an apologia for a practice, aesthetic judgment, that is, in the modern humanities—or at least in those disciplines within the humanities that seek to instruct their students in the critical appreciation of works of art—both unavoidable and unfashionable. Aesthetic judgment is unavoidable, Clune explains, for it will necessarily have informed our choice, as teachers, of what to teach, our decision to have our students read The Bluest Eye in place of The Crying of Lot 49, for example, or to eliminate The Plumed Serpent and spend an additional week on Nostromo. But aesthetic judgment is also—and it seems to me that Clune hardly needs to argue this point—unfashionable. Or more exactly, because aesthetic judgments are really being made all of the time, both in and out of the classroom, what is unfashionable is the very idea of expert aesthetic judgment: the idea that some aesthetic judgments End Page 207 are made with special authority, and that to contradict these judgments is to be not only possessed of a different opinion, but also (quite possibly) wrong. Where does this aversion to expert aesthetic judgment come from? "Capitalist democracy is founded on the formal equality of individual choice," Clune writes, "such that every effort to set up a positive value system counter to that of the market is vulnerable to the charge of elitism" (9). This charge, elitism, is as likely to come from the well-intentioned left—from those members of the left who take the equality of all persons to be an inviolable assumption of any progressive politics—as from the anti-intellectual right. In any case, the upshot is the same: who are you to tell them (or me) what to enjoy? A Defense of Judgment is a defense of expert judgment, not only because the latter is unavoidable—once again, it's what we do as critics working in the humanities—but also, Clune argues, because it's something desirable, something with a significant role to play in setting up "a positive value system counter to that of the market." This is a big claim; and to make sense of it, it's important to understand what Clune does and does not mean by expert judgment. For if he does not mean mere subjective opinion—which reduces judgment to consumer choice and makes art into yet another consumer good—neither does he mean the evaluation of each artwork according to some immutable standard. Rather, Clune writes, judgment "takes place on the basis of interpretation" (87), where interpretation describes "a process of disclosing particular features and qualities. The value of what is disclosed is sometimes implicit—as in qualities like 'a beautiful line,' 'a surprising word choice'—and sometimes established with respect to a particular context—as when making a claim for a historical, philosophical, or political insight expressed or embodied by a character, metaphor, or description" (85). As this list of features and qualities makes clear, what the expert judge will disclose is bound up with the skills and knowledges that they possess, as well as with the particular challenges and insights presented by their object (this specific poem, that specific novel). What makes their judgment expert is not only that it will have been developed through careful reading and interpretation of many works but also that it will have been been refined in conversation with, and will be open to criticism by, the relevant expert community. It is the binding of judgment to a constantly renewed activity of interpretation, and the opening of judgment to assessment by a community of experts, that should prevent judgment from ossifying into a...