From: msmorris@watsci.waterloo.edu (Mike Morris)
Subject: Re: The Literary Canon
Organization: University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1992 22:28:43 GMT

                                   Thursday, the 13th of August, 1992

What follows after the ***'s is an emailing I have
received from Michael Sean Rooney (rooney@oxy.edu),
who asks me to post this (more directly at the
end of his piece than he does at the beginning), since
he is unable to post from his site.
I've left the letter format unedited.

*********************************************************

Mike Morris--

Let me preface this by saying that I'm not currently able to post on
r.a.b. directly, thus this missive.  (I suppose that if you really
would like to, feel free to post this and whatever reply you might
have, or just e-mail me personally, again, whatever.)

In reply to your recent ruminations on what you consider an ideal
education, I have to take issue.  Frankly, I think you're off by a
bit.  The difference seems to run quite deep, judging from your
numerous recent comments in exchange with Terrence Heath.  I suppose
that in essence, you adhere to a standard of objectivity, particularly
aesthetic objectivity, with which I (among others) disagree entirely.

(I'm trying hard to be brief; in part out of economy of communication,
 also because I've been up all night writing.  Forgive any minor
 incoherencies.)

Let me be specific.  You have mentioned education's purpose as providing
"knowledge and skills", in contrast to "day-care or socialization" [N.b.,
all quotes from memory, sorry if I paraphrase in a distorting manner.]
Education, however, cannot help but be about `socialization'.  Academia
is necessarily an outgrowth of culture.  Now, I sense that your reply
will be akin to your complaint that Tom Maddox's and Terrence Heath's
use of the `political' is too broad a distinction in the manner that
they use it.  However, `pure' or objective knowledge is a limited sphere--
*extremely* limited according to some disappointed nominalists nowadays--
one which encompasses mathematics and the natural sciences (probably,
though, the farther from pure math the more plausibly `subjective' the
knowledge becomes, in my opinion), but not the aesthetic, i.e., the
"canon".  (And it's not really a straw-man.  The "canon" is the one-word
proxy for the doctrine that there are objectively "great" works transcending
historicism.  I figure you agree, but a digression in any case.)

Dammit, I said I was going to get specific and here I go rattling on
for an entire paragraph in generalities.  Okay.  Your ideal of a rigorous
education of knowledge and skills is doomed to failure.  You should keep
in mind that your ideal is an old one, from which the contemporary
educational system which you bemoan directly derives.  The reasons for
its failure are manifold, but simplistically put, you can't interest
most people in something (i.e., Homer or Hardy) without serious societal
incentive.  In the heyday of Latin culture (say, the 1st Century CE),
Roman pups endured Greek and their own (talk about cultural immediacy!)
"great" authors with pain.  Great pain.  Think of Augustine's bitching.
(A late example, yes, but more familiar.)  Most of people didn't bother,
the main reason was because "education" was very much a sign of cultured
distinction, like the Japanese tea ceremony, or complete mastery of
"Street Fighter II".  In the absence of a positive social valuation for
such learning (i.e., other effete Roman snobs to write to), education
fell into an increasingly restricted sphere (and it was already incredibly
restricted), e.g., monasticism.  (The `barbarians' would have heartily
given their "positive social valuation" had they known how, but any
upstanding citizen wouldn't get closer than they could throw their
bribes.)  The ancients, and their post-medieval groupies, were able to
execute such a seemingly "pure" education because their society was very,
very different from our own.  It valued social self-stylization (what
I might, in a less Gadamerian mood, call "pretentious affectation"),
hierarchy, aristocracy (remember Thersites?), was technologically simple,
given to what we might call hedonism, wholly reliant upon slavery, etc.
As times have changed, this self-stylizing-through-education bunch has
dwindled, although the collapse of the spiritualism which nearly crushed
it (Christianity) allowed for its Renaissance in a time when material
wealth again made class distinction a viable opportunity.  However, this
Enlightened lot sowed their own destruction in espousing egalitarianism,
which, coincident with generally higher standards of life, made social
distinctions relatively trivial, especially when one's worth in society
became solely an outgrowth of wealth.  Bingo, this capsule history of
self-stylization through educational distinction comes to the unhappy
consciousnesses of the defenders of the canon (and "culture" in general),
who are growingly marginal in a post-post information, late, real late
capitalism system.  (Civilizations with more persistent histories, e.g.,
Europe and Japan, are less "rootless", although their Guardians of
Culture regularly moan about "Americanisation".)  Thus, while some of us
might be interested in the "classics" (hey--I *enjoyed* taking Greek...
but that's another story), the majority doesn't give a gliding fuck,
and the amount of disciplining that would make the majority enjoy it
would be thoroughly illiberal and classist.  Of course, from a Nietzschean
perspective, so much the better...but most of us would probably hesitate
at such High Straussianism.

Let me tack on two clarifiers.	First, I love the classics (i.e., the
Greeks, and some worthy Romans), and I savor the ability to earn a living
off of their dead, swarthy, male butts.  (One might also see from the
archetype of all academic departments, Classics, that fields like
African-American Studies or Gay and Lesbian Studies are really quite
conservative, traditional methods of growth within academia.)  Second,
"pop culture" (which you deride) is hardly uninteresting.  On the
contrary, it is alive and real -- shaping the daily lives of all of us,
as opposed to Hardy, or even my beloved Joyce, whose importance is quite
limited for the majority of the world.	And pop culture deals, in its
own, muddling manner, with the "great ideas" -- e.g., individual vs.
community is a very dominant problem in contemporary U.S. culture -- and
it's been standard bourgeois antinomy material since at least Rousseau.
Naturally, having read Rousseau and Hegel on the subject might raise
the discussion a few zillion levels of refinement, but ignorance hardly
precludes noteworthy thinking (it worked for Socrates).  Deriding "pop
culture" will make you ignore, say, Phil Dick's fiction (a "greater"
oeuvre than Eliot, for example) or similar culture `of the masses' which
over the the course of time will long, long outlast, say, Hardy.
("This zealot Paul can't write worth shit--and it's in Koine, for
Iupiter's sake!")  The current canon shake-up, is, I think, at least on
par with the introduction of `modern' lit at Oxbridge in the 19th C.,
maybe (hopefully) on the order of the vernacular turn which finished
off the medieval traditions.

Boy, that was long.  Um, could you please post it to r.a.b., if you didn't
mind?  Promise not to ask again.

Apologies in advance and Gadamerian good-will to all,

Michael Rooney