Stop Discovering Philology (already)

What follows may have only tandential relevance to "future of the book" type stuff, but I thought I should say it somewhere in case the editors of the PMLA decide not to print it.

8 May 2010

Dear Editors and Readers,

I’ve thought to myself on several occasions that it really is a shame most academic journals do not have  space set aside for readers’ letters.  Perhaps no one thinks to write a letter.  The average “reader” of an academic journal—I prefer to think of myself as a scavenger—is herself an academic, so the appropriate response to an article of concern would be to compose one of one’s own and therein demonstrate through detailed analysis where the article under consideration is deficient and supplement it with a “superior” reading.  When said article is published a year or two later, perhaps people will even remember what the original article was about.  This should serve as a sufficient parody of how scholarly discourse functions.

I write this letter to the PMLA, because it is everything an article ought not to be: hasty, immediate, a gut response, ill-conceived, angry, rash, and perhaps poorly argued.  I finished reading the three articles and introduction in the “Philology Matters” cluster of the March 2010 issue and was left irritated and bewildered.  I was irritated with how often philology has been rediscovered of late, even though philological methods (word study, historical linguistics, and textual criticism, to name a few) have been going strong and progressing with the work of numerous critics, who, perhaps, would never self-identify as philologists, though perhaps some would.  Jerome McGann, Susan Stewart, Anne Carson, Virginia Jackson, and Katherine Hayles spring immediately to mind.  McGann in particular has been at the forefront of theorizing new ways to relate textual criticism/editorial theory to literary interpretation (see especially The Textual Condition and Radiant Textuality) and at the forefront of pulling his hair over why this relationship has yet to catch on more broadly (The Scholar’s Art and The Point is to Change It).

I’m bewildered as to why these “rediscoveries” of philology are so dead set on looking backwards.  What I mean is the critics I mention above represent, to my mind, the foresight of philology and philological methods (e.g. their relevance to the so-called new media or using the materiality of texts to reconsider conceptions of genre), whereas the Romance philologists Warren trots out, Auerbach and Curtius (though, curiously, not Spitzer), represent philological hindsight.  Even the more recent critics Warren invokes, Said and Glissant, understand philology retrospectively, not as a means toward novel modes of investigation and interpretation but to bolster what they (and by a certain logic “we”) are already doing.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the thematic link Warren provides for the articles in the “Philology Matters” cluster, “the ways they excavate and activate silence.”  I had the privilege of sitting in on the dissertation defense of a friend and colleague of mine, Michael Kicey, who expressed the problem with these excavations of silence far more eloquently than I ever could.  If I understood him correctly—and, as you can imagine from the scatter-brained prose contained herein, that I may not have—the “gotcha” tendency in treating discursive silences, be they proper to a text or to criticism, is fundamentally wrong-headed.  “To reconstruct what has been lost,” as Warren says, is indeed prime philological territory, but the additional tendency to supplement those silences with what often (though not always) amounts to rank conjecture simply reproduces the critical blindness for which old school philology so often comes under fire.  Additionally, to merely point to a silence with a cheap “aha!” is not productive.  These silences are almost never (as far as I am aware) grappled with as silences, as irrevocably lost, as lacunae (figurative or literal) never intended to be filled or explained.  To treat silence as silence is ridiculously hard, because it would attempt to understand how meaning is made (and unmade) in a space of absolute indeterminacy, where the only appropriate response is restraint: not to say or only to ever say provisionally.  Carson’s translation of Sappho (If not, winter) is a decent but somewhat flawed example of how to go about doing this.

If what I have said here should strike you, O Benevolent Readers and Editors of our fair PMLA, as absurd, unfair, or irresponsible; remember that I am a nobody, no longer possessed of real academic privileges, unemployed, no one significant in any academic field or critical discourse, whose future career is entirely up in the air.  You may very well never hear from me again (or at all).

Your Scavenger,
Nicholas A. Theisen