Land of Lime

OK, strictly for University geeks, here is an essay in the Chronincle for Higher Education by Lindsay Waters, who makes fun of an essay (appropriately entitled ‘The History and Future of the Footnote in Critical Inquiry’) Critical Inquiry published recently ranking the greatest literary theorists cited in its pages. Here is the relevant quote:

But even granting CI its conceit, the second surprise (I’m lapsing into the ranking mode myself) was the relatively huge gap between the four most frequently cited theorists and the rest: Jacques Derrida (177), Sigmund Freud (174), Michel Foucault (160), Walter Benjamin (147). Then we drop down below 100 citations: Roland Barthes (92), Jacques Lacan (80), Fredric Jameson (79), Edward Said (77). Harvard philosopher Stanley Cavell ranks at No. 12, tied with Friedrich Nietzsche with 57 citations. The majority of the rest of our most-cited theorists huddle together with more modest numbers to their names. Harvard lit crit Homi K. Bhabha (an editor of CI) ties with Aristotle at No. 27, each with 38 cites; Harvard’s Greenblatt ties with MIT’s Noam Chomsky at No. 80, with 17 cites; Henry Louis Gates Jr. (again Harvard) ties with Friedrich Kittler, a media theorist from Germany, for 57, with 24 cites. Barbara E. Johnson (Harvard) is named but unranked with 12 cites. Once you get past the Europeans, the list is heavily East Coast, heavily establishment, and hardly does justice to what was once the fun of reading CI (although it may indicate what the journal has become in recent years).

But then what is the nature of scholarly engagement with these much quoted thinkers? Waters points out one example that the authors themselves cite:

The authors of the ranking, Anne H. Stevens, an assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and Jay W. Williams, Critical Inquiry’s managing editor, note that “Benjamin’s works are cited nonargumentatively,” which I think is a nice way of saying his ideas are just window dressing, not engaged with. That must be why he ranks high as one of the most perfectly citable authors of all, because you can cite him reverently without having to figure out what he said. With Benjamin a citation is the academic equivalent of the purely ritual move, like a ballplayer’s sign of the cross.

But the genuflecting to Benjamin points, perhaps, to something hocus-pocus about this whole counting exercise.

Here is Waters’ sobering conclusion:

More tragic is the harm such lists do, especially (as Merton speculated) in the humanities, where thinkers tend to mature much more slowly than in the sciences. Such lists harm because they freeze things; they tend to favor those who were precocious young; and they positively discourage the slow-to-mature, causing the system to lose whatever the last people might have contributed. The human cost of such list making is wastage. The learned duplicate unthinkingly the worst behavior of society as a whole, celebrating the celebrities, not even pausing to think about the fruit wasting on the vine, whose cultivation might have benefited us all.

Now I should get back to serious matters, liking quoting significant theorists and agreeing with them.