I vividly remember my own rude awakening. Each year Johns Hopkins held a competition in which graduate students would submit ideas for a course. The courses would be evaluated by a board of professors from different fields, and the winner would get to teach it. I walked into the interview with my syllabus for a course that purported to explain urban decay, novels, the nature of free-market economics, and the political history of the 1970s in one brilliant synthesis. My interviewers — professors in political science and history — greeted my ideas with withering skepticism. I cited illustrious figures in my field. To my horror, my interlocutors were unimpressed. They actually asked difficult questions about the reasoning behind the stars’ dicta. All I could do was repeat the hallowed formulas about representation and language with decreasing confidence as I realized the heroes of literature-department economic, political, and historical thought had no currency here. Later one of my English professors advised me to forget the incident. "They don’t understand our discipline," he said.
The vampiric Avital Ronell flourished in this disciplinary twilight zone. A widely read
essay by the former chair of the German department who hired her shows her eviscerating the discipline’s norms, skills, and even objects of study. Supported by the dean as a rising star of interdisciplinary theory, Ronell became chair. As a student said of the world she created, "We study in a German department where French theory is taught in English." Books like her own
Crack Wars (University of Nebraska Press, 1992) — in which the obscurity of the prose occasionally parts to reveal an astonishing ignorance of the most basic facts about addiction — were presented as the new models. The eradication of disciplinary limits opened the way to unlimited tyranny. Kramnick defines a discipline as "a body of skills, methods, and norms able to sustain internal discussions and do explanatory work." But in Ronell’s department, the star theorist’s words became the sole standard. Students were expected to cite Ronell or her master Derrida in every essay. And as the famous emails starkly reveal, the boundary separating the life of the student from the total domination of the totally liberated professor dissolved.
Many have interpreted the Butler letter denouncing Ronell’s accuser’s "malicious campaign" as an example of how an elite closes ranks to ward off threats to its power. It is certainly true that the case presents features that can be found in academic cultures of harassment that long predate the Sokal/Ronell era. And the #MeToo movement has starkly exposed the ubiquity of sexual harassment and abuse across all institutions and social spaces. But, in the specific ways it enables and denies such abuse, each institution presents special features. And I think the Butler letter expresses features peculiar to the Sokal/Ronell era in literary studies.
Disciplinary norms, skills, and objects represent for many humanists trained in this era the face of the oppressor. The influence of Foucault — whose most famous book conjoins the words "discipline" and "punish" — shaped an emphasis on systems of oppression, on how power weaves its way into disciplinary structures. Figures like Ronell serve as avatars of anti-disciplinary energies. While few of the signatories of Butler’s letter have written a book as extreme as
Crack Wars, their reflexive identification with Ronell as a laudable source of resistance to power adheres to a broader, anti-disciplinary logic. Everything she represents — from her expertise-ignoring books to her administrative disregard of rules and boundaries — is an assault on the very idea of a discipline. How can someone opposed to every form of discipline be guilty of oppression? Anti-disciplinary thinking helped to create the conditions for Ronell’s abuses, and, once those abuses were exposed, it provided the vocabulary for defending and denying them.
We have seen enough to know that the eradication of disciplinary norms doesn’t create powerful new forms of knowledge by destroying old forms of oppression. Literary studies’ anti-disciplinary thought led to an empty, despised professional discourse while covering an entirely unprofessional intellectual and personal tyranny over a dwindling body of students.
