The Defense of Judgment by Michael Clune

Caveat lector: thin-skinned college and university instructors of literature may have trouble getting past the first few pages of Michael Clune's A Defense of Judgment, where accusations of professional "hypocrisy" and "disabling" (3) pedagogy spring from one corner while fulminations against the humanities' self-inflicted political "losses" brew in another. But readers do well to toughen up and soldier on, for Clune develops an acute, deeply informed, and wide-ranging challenge to current professional orthodoxies. Bristling with specificity, his arguments offer much to reflect on and debate. And, luckily, caustic admonishment isn't Clune's sole or even most persistent hortatory strategy. On a crusade to advance the tradition of aesthetic education, so as "to push the project of human liberation beyond the boundaries of the capitalist market" (37), Clune attempts to win converts alternately by scolding, refuting, galvanizing, inspiring by example, and occasionally even humoring members of the profession who likely don't see things the way he does and don't conduct their classes or scholarship the way he does.The book elaborates on how misguided academics have erred principally in two interconnected ways: they have abandoned—or pretended to abandon—an obligation to develop expert judgments about their objects of study and they have succumbed to what Clune calls dogmatic equality such that they no longer distinguish between literary objects that are worthy of attention and those that are not. Pretense obtains when instructors fail to acknowledge that their very selection of materials for a course syllabus entails judgment, let alone the long trail of judgments embedded in even highly materialist research pursuits, such as the investigation of "the paper that makes up a Shakespeare folio" (1), whose legitimacy would be secured by authorial brand recognition. Dogmatic equality prevails when instructors and scholars adopt, unwittingly or not, the logic of the marketplace by discrediting qualitative ranking of literary objects as nothing but subjective preference or opinion. Not surprisingly, targets of Clune's critique include academics who openly "adopt a dismissive, skeptical view of their objects of study" (94), as well as those pursuing the "most rigorously judgment-free project" (191n1) of computational studies. But he also chastises teachers and researchers who apply "faux-interdisciplinary" methods and make "biological, economic, psychological, or historical claims that can't sustain peer review by actual biologists, economists, psychologists, or historians" (185). Interdisciplinary or contextual scholarship earns Clune's further censure for tending to "specify the relevant aspects of that context in advance of a specification of the qualities of the literary work" (170), which reduces a literary object's value to confirming knowledge claims made by nonliterary, nonaesthetic sources.Altogether, then, Clune amasses quite a crowd of errant professionals. No stranger to exaggeration, he frequently invokes paralysis and crisis to underscore the deleteriousness of the situation, as though the profession's betrayal of expert judgment and aesthetic education were the main reason for "our incapacity to defend our discipline at a time when it is threatened on many fronts" (1–2). To be sure, the humanities currently face intense financial, political, and demographic headwinds. Still, it's wishful thinking to expect these forces to subside if professors would only own up to their expertise and admit "that reading Henry James is better than watching The Apprentice" (37). Putting aside such fantasies of consequence, it is worth judging Clune's formidable arguments about judgment on their own merits and examining more closely the implications of his particular vision of aesthetic education.On the one hand, Clune's recuperation of expert judgment appears to dovetail with current concerns about the status and viability of liberal democracy in a global society increasingly shaped by large-scale geographic migration pressures, which in turn provoke liberal societies to reflect on their commitments to cultural pluralism. As the political philosopher Seyla Benhabib (2018: 181) puts it, "In constitutional liberal democracies, the 'burdens of judgment' never cease, and citizens' task in providing each other with reciprocal reasons is interminable." She turns to John Rawls's "more post-metaphysical" writings from the 1990s to elaborate distinctions between "reasonable pluralism" (183) and an "anything goes" mode of "relativism." With reasonable pluralism conceived as both a political framework and "an epistemic condition," liberalism's political, moral, and cultural concepts "rely on judgment and interpretation about their applicability as well as their range" (181–82). Western civil societies, comprising as they do social groups with incompatible values, are beset with the necessity of making difficult choices and putting limits on what they deem acceptable.While the situations requiring judgment that preoccupy Benhabib—a refugee's divided loyalties, a nation-state's internal divisions of religion and ethnicity, and the like—are generally of much more consequence than the contents of a syllabus or academic essay, it is possible to map her operative distinction between reasonable pluralism and anything-goes relativism onto Clune's distinction between aesthetic judgment and anything-goes consumer preference. Where Benhabib envisions citizens and political leaders grappling with illiberal cultural practices and antiliberal political movements by means of rigorously deliberative and reflective judgment, Clune sees expert judgment and aesthetic education as forming a key bulwark against the hegemony of the marketplace (this hegemony being, ironically, one of liberalism's most entrenched effects, whether ideologically intended or not). He concedes the "obvious" point that "aesthetic education in itself will not eradicate the ills of capitalism," but he maintains that it is nevertheless "important in its own right" as a source of "human cultivation" (199n55). Within an "ecology of judgment" (66) that "includes editors, producers, curators, professional reviewers working for newspapers, magazines, and websites," as well as nonprofessional critics, he argues, college and university professors are in optimal institutional positions to withstand market pressures. It's possible to quibble over some of Clune's descriptive claims here (he ignores the corporatization of the university, a critic might demur, and he scants the arguably superior latitude of judgment that nonacademic, high-culture publishing venues afford); but, in general, Clune provides a credible map of current locations of aesthetic culture, one that sets the stage for taking aesthetic judgment as seriously as Benhabib takes political judgment.A narrower but significant point of contact between Benhabib's heuristic framework and Clune's is their embrace of what she calls fallibilism and he calls skepticism. Drawing on American pragmatist philosophy, fallibilists insist on a "tentative" (Benhabib 2018: 181) epistemology in their search for suitable methods of judgment within reasonable pluralism. In Clune's work, notions of skepticism are derived primarily from David Hume's aesthetic philosophy and Michael Polanyi's theory of expert knowing, which travels under the anodyne phrase, tacit knowledge. (Polanyi's more famous sibling was economic anthropologist Karl Polanyi, whose diagnosis of modernity's disembedded market economy, as instantiated by the price system, leverages prominent claims in Clune's first book, American Literature and the Free Market, 1945–2000 2010.) These notions of skepticism provide a similar check on professional claim-making, reining in personal or dogmatic impulses that hamper the formation and, equally important, the transformation of aesthetic judgment. "There is self-transcendence in submitting one's values, concepts, and perceptions to reorganization by the work" of art. This mode of engagement "gives experts an intensified sense of skepticism about their own values and preconceptions" (183); it entails their bodily internalization of the literary work "as a means of transforming and extending their perception of it" (85).What the statements above begin to suggest is that skepticism for Clune's expert is not just a disciplinary or epistemological check on claims issuing from mere preference, official authority, or traditional aesthetic value. It's also an aesthetic—perhaps more precisely, an experiential and existential—prod to transform. For it turns out that Clune's commitment to transformation is quite strong, possibly paramount among his aesthetic and professional values, and seemingly for its own sake. As though attempting to displace Fredric Jameson's famous imperative, always historicize, with another dictum, always internalize, Clune insists that the aesthetic expert eschew Kantian disinterestedness in favor of a "skillful opening of the self to the work" (69). This self-transforming method is how the practiced expert gains access to a literary object's immanent criteria—to the features that make it worthy of attention and interpretive judgment. Leaving aside the quizzical circularity of Clune's logic here—does self-opening determine the literary object's worthiness of attention or does the literary object somehow convey its worthiness in advance of the critic's self-opening?—the main thing to note is the considerable agency this method bestows on experts. It enables them to overcome modernity's conventional distinction between (art) object and (judging) subject, and thus delivers to discerning experts a kind of enriched reenchantment: "There is something about the methods, the skills, and the tacit knowledge of solid expert practice that puts it in contact with the world" (74). The mystifying pronoun something and the metaphor contact do some heavy lifting here, as Clune labors to convince readers of the necessity of this phenomenological mode of aesthetic encounter.If Clune's idea of expert aesthetic judgment thus amounts to a kind of romantic professionalism, it cashes out primarily as a license to discover "genuine novelty" (74) in literary works. It chimes with what the eminent American romantic Ralph Waldo Emerson (1837: 215) would call "creative reading," whereby the reader's spirited, indeed inventive, approach to a book largely determines that book's value. "One must be an inventor to read well," he declares in "The American Scholar." "When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion." (Emerson 1837 2017: 215). The passage in which Clune conveys most directly his commitment to a twenty-first century version of Emerson's project is worth quoting at length, for it also gestures toward guiding criteria that animate his expert attention:The adamancy with which Clune applies the imperative of internalized judgment leaves its indelible mark on the second half of his book, where he models his interpretive approach to poems and novels in three chapters. However much I appreciate close readings, these chapters do not inspire me to abandon Kantian disinterest in favor of a transformative aesthetic methodology. They reveal one expert's rather narrow fixation on "outlandish, weird, impossible states, concepts and effects"—to the point where his discerning judgment looks more like idiosyncratic invention than "discovery." Certain poems he discusses (by Emily Dickinson and Gwendolyn Brooks), with which I have more than passing familiarity, become almost unrecognizable. For instance, in a chapter preoccupied with the "sensation of 'losing ourselves' in sound" (111), he insists that Dickinson's poem, "I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—," depicts a scene of "absorbed listening," one that is "analogous to the experience of death." However intriguing the analogy, the claim that it animates this poem is baffling. It hinges on accepting the later line "With Blue—uncertain—stumbling Buzz—" as evidence of sustained listening, indeed of such intense listening that it effects a total visual "eclipse" (112): "sound replaces vision." Seemingly by interpretive magic, "Blue" and "stumbling" no longer evoke vision-dependent awareness of color and bodily movement in space. Further, Clune's account ignores the poem's decidedly anti-absorptive gallows humor (with that fly buzzing above a corpse in the making) observed by various expert critics and surely worth a classroom's attention. From the standpoint of the classroom instructor, Clune's is not an interpretation to pass on.For here is the rub of Clune's book. It may be all well and good for a critic to encourage other professionals to adopt his methods of developing expertise and issuing emancipatory judgments to one another. The last several decades of academic criticism have certainly demonstrated literary studies' toleration of all manner of interpretive license. But self-transformation more troublingly becomes an imperative in Clune's account of aesthetic education. His commitment to melding critical and pedagogical practices is made clear at the start where he explains how each of the book's final chapters of interpretive judgment "originates in an experience of classroom teaching" (4). Later he claims—again, by means of circular logic—that Hume's "superiority" (20) over Kant's "disinterest" lies partially in Hume's emphasis "on the experiential, educational basis on which the capacity to discern the relevant features of aesthetic objects is grounded." At one point in his discussion of aesthetic education, he appears to ventriloquize what he assumes to be the generic college student's position on the matter: "If you tell me my preference for Fifty Shades of Grey or SUVs is neither better nor worse than a preference for Emily Brontë or public transportation, you are robbing me of the opportunity to enrich my life by transforming my values" (63). Elsewhere Clune chides critics who summon the perspective of "'lay' readers" (94) and who "appreciate elements of student response that we can adapt in our own writing." Now he embraces the student response—albeit one conveniently imagined according to his own lights.More to the point, Clune's flourish of invented ventriloquy could be uttered only by a highly motivated, self-selecting student. There are, no doubt, many real-life undergraduates who yearn to have their aesthetic (and other) values fully transformed and who would thereby meet Hume's criteria of possessing at the outset "a certain talent, a certain sensitivity to aesthetic distinctions" (18). Clune turns to Agnes Callard's philosophy of aspiration and education to underwrite sweeping claims about the purpose of a liberal arts education, asserting that it hinges on "the individual's desire to acquire a kind of value that person currently doesn't possess" (45). But such claims obscure both the practical and ethical realities of undergraduate education. To be sure, virtually by definition education involves one or another version of development or Bildung. And yet, the broad burden of institutional judgment under reasonable pluralism requires openness on the part of educators to all kinds of students with all kinds of ambitions—including the ambition to have one's current values or intuitions confirmed and reinforced. When it comes to pursuits of the good life—to which aesthetic education mightily contributes—the stress on pluralism is particularly vital. To return briefly to Benhabib (2018: 179),It turns out that Clune himself supplies valuable, if indirect, support for the reluctance to prescribe pursuits of the good life. This appears in his personal disclosure of being "prone to bad desires," which is followed by a summary of harrowing details: "having (1) been addicted to heroin; (2) gone broke buying worthless consumer goods; (3) engaged in heroic, albeit unsuccessful, efforts to one-up his close friends; and … (4) spent over three hundred hours of the year 2018 playing a computer game" (60). The swift and startling humor with which he recounts these real-life difficulties testifies to the enduring liberal value of selfendorsement—that is, the essential if at times scary proposition of being able to make mistakes and embracing the capacity later to judge one's actions (or values or attitudes) as mistakes, and then dwelling as best one can with them and oneself. By contrast, Clune's proposition of guiding even self-selected students through a hands-on boot camp of aesthetic internalization would risk preventing the kinds of life experience—tricky, withering, wasteful—which, the above passage implies, enabled Clune himself to grow and transform. It would also risk shutting out those like me whose most transformative liberal arts moment involved coming to understand the salutary implications of Kantian disinterest.I'll conclude on a more mundane pedagogical note that hopes also to speak to Clune's larger project of aesthetic judgment's rehabilitation. Nowadays my syllabi contain a section of "course objectives," in compliance with the "best practices" mission of my university's Center for Teaching and Learning. However reluctantly, I now list predictably banal, loosely germane goals of the course (e.g., to hone skills in close reading, critical thinking, and literary analysis; to gain knowledge about literary history and the remarkable diversity of literary expression; to gain knowledge about the social and political contexts in which the literature was produced; to improve skills in writing persuasive, well-organized, well-supported arguments about literary texts; to improve reading comprehension; and so on). While I'm glad Clune's book has provoked me to reflect on this set of objectives and acknowledge its deficiencies, and while I genuinely hope that students gain a sense of literature's aesthetic powers from my courses, I'm fairly certain that the list will not soon be supplemented by something to the effect of to cultivate extreme skepticism so as radically to transform students' aesthetic, experiential, and existential values. Such an objective would overstep, I think, the elastic yet vaguely determinant boundaries of reasonable pluralism.