Seeing this post over at Notorious’s place, as well as this article that a friend of mine shared on Facebook, has inspired me to post something that I’ve been thinking a lot lately because of the book project, and I think that it connects (maybe) to the way that (many) humanities and arts disciplines are devalued in a culture that has come more and more to emphasize “results” or “discoveries.”
Because here’s the thing: unless my scholarship takes a dramatic left turn, I am never going to discover anything.* I’m never going to produce “findings” that change the world. And if that’s how we define “producing new knowledge,” and if we define research as producing new knowledge, then the work that I do doesn’t actually count as research, even though it involves many of the same activities that people who DO discover things and produce findings do.
For me, my research depends less on making some discovery, or in producing some sort of “findings,” than it is about arriving at new interpretations on the basis of how I’ve evolved as a scholar, through reading, through thinking, and through reading some more, and finally through writing. I know: it sounds wildly exciting, right? But so a result of that is that “scholarly work” for me feels more like meditating than like being on a treasure hunt or doing an experiment. And it also means that everything that’s old is new again.
What do I mean by that? Well, I had this very strange moment yesterday as I was working on what will become the first body chapter of my book. I was reading, and thinking, and writing – you know all the things – and I thought to myself, “somebody wrote about this thing that I’m thinking… I feel like what I’m saying is something slightly different, but I need to use that article…” And then it hit me: I was thinking of the first article I ever published. I have reached the point where I’m in scholarly conversation with the me I used to be. And while I’m still interested in the same broad themes, my perspective has changed and deepened dramatically since 1998. But I’m not actually discovering anything. Nor am I finding anything.
So what is the value, then, in the work that I do? That really is the question that every scholar who does the sort of scholarship that I do asks consistently from graduate school onward. For some people, the answer about politics: by changing interpretations, we make a radical intervention in the possibilities for the ways that people will think about things. For some people, the answer is about preservation: our purpose is to ensure that literature continues to be valued within our culture. For some people, the answer is about the idealistic belief that literature makes us better people, or that it makes us better thinkers or more sensitive human beings.
While I do at various times answer that question in all of the above ways, I think that my answer most of the time is much more self-centered. I think that the value in the kind of scholarship that I do, in its everyday and most frequent manifestation, is that I like how it feels to push myself intellectually and to see what new stuff I can think and argue. That process is amazing for me, and it’s the part of doing research that I like the most. And no, I don’t think that is a terribly compelling argument for my discipline or for the humanities generally, when it applies just to me, but if we broaden the scope of what I’m discussing, then what I’m saying is that contemplation is valuable; deep thought is valuable; engaging with other people who are doing similar contemplating and deep thinking is valuable; adding to the potential interpretations of cultural texts and opening our minds to different ways of seeing cultural texts is valuable. Even if we’re not discovering anything and even if we’re not finding anything. Or, rather, even if the only thing that we’re discovering or finding is our own intellectual potential, our own way of seeing.
*Let me note that this isn’t the case for all scholars in my discipline. Depending on one’s approach, one might be doing a lot of archival research, or one might be doing research with human subjects, which fits better within a “discoveries” or “findings” model.
Reassigned Time 2.0 
But I’m not actually discovering anything. Nor am I finding anything.
Maybe this is just semantics, but as I understand it, your scholarly field is literary interpretation, in which case you are absolutely discovering and finding new things: new ways of thinking about and interpreting literary works.
CPP – Oh, I’d agree with you. But I think that the issue when we talk about “discovering” something or “finding” something is that generally we’re thinking about things in a less abstract way. What opponents of the work that I do would argue is that “anybody can read a book,” and “everyone has their own perspective on literature,” thus “you should be spending your time teaching students how to write grammatically correct sentences; anything else is a waste of taxpayers’ money.” The problem with that model, of course, is it values one kind of knowledge over another, and then that valuation underwrites frameworks for assessment of knowledge that further devalues the work that doesn’t fit into those frameworks.
So, for example, it’s not uncommon for people to say, “Why do you need an actual live human instructor to teach Latin, or Shakespeare? Or to do scholarly work in those areas? Those subjects haven’t changed for hundreds of years. Farm them out to some MOOCs and put money where it REALLY will produce something, like in STEM fields.” (for example, see the comment thread to this piece in The Atlantic. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/07/the-single-most-important-experiment-in-higher-education/259953/)
CPP said exactly what I was going to say. I occasionally get the thrill of capital-D Discovery because I work in archives. But it’s so thrilling precisely because it is so rare. Most of what I’m doing is grunt work, and making a big deal out of small differences.
A couple of things: I think the end of my post actually gets to the point that both of you guys make.
Second, the longer I do this, the more I think that humanities folks’ attempts to convince the haters that what they do is valuable on the haters’ terms is a losing strategy. Why don’t we advocate positively for what we actually do rather than trying to fit ourselves into a model that is, frequently, incompatible with what we do? Frankly, I would never call the feeling that I get when I make a breakthrough in something that I’m writing or thinking about or teaching “discovery,” not unless I’m talking to somebody who forces me into that language. I’m not “finding” some interpretation that was just waiting for somebody to come along and extract it from the text – I’m not just evaluating something that already exists but people didn’t notice it before. I’m making something out of the text in front of me, which isn’t the same thing is discovering something inside of it. A sweater isn’t something that you find in a ball of yarn, there isn’t some essential sweaterness lurking there; it’s something that a knitter makes out of a ball of yarn – and without a knitter (or a crocheter, I suppose), it’s only ever going to be a ball of freaking yarn. (Clearly my theoretical bent is poststructuralist, if you couldn’t tell.)
I’m making something out of the text in front of me, which isn’t the same thing is discovering something inside of it.
I think you are overestimating the extent to which experimental results in what you would feel comfortable terming “discovery-based” research determine the models that researchers in those fields construct. It is much more like knitting a sweater from a ball of yarn you discover than it is like discovering a sweater and being all like “Hey, look! I found a fucken cardigan!”
CPP is right that the “Hey, look! I found a fucken cardigan!” moments in science are rare, at least from what my science friends tell me. (Hilarious extension of the metaphor, CPP!) Most of science is more like “Hey, here’s a better way to knit that sweater that we’ve been working on for half a century,” in which case, it’s quite analogous to “Doesn’t this method of interpretation reveal something we hadn’t noticed before?”
Also, for the record (for the people of the interwebs more than for the interlocutors here), the facts on the ground can and do change and discoveries are made for subjects of study like Shakespeare. In fact, I’d even posit that the older the subject of study in the humanities, the less we know about it, and the more likely there’s going to be a discovery, hidden away in someone’s attic (sometimes literally).
Also, back to your original post, I don’t think the value you posit is entirely selfish, since that process of thinking, reasoning, arguing, and intellectually growing is what we then model for and teach to our students. And if we didn’t do it ourselves, how could we teach it? (That, btw, is what pisses me off about that whole “Those who can’t do…” bs. Yes, goddamit, I *do* what I teach, because I don’t teach creative writing, I teach literary analysis and scholarship.) And what value is it to students? Exactly what you say: contemplation is valuable; deep thought is valuable; engaging with other people who are doing similar contemplating and deep thinking is valuable; adding to the potential interpretations of cultural texts and opening our minds to different ways of seeing cultural texts is valuable.
I like this post and have been sending the link to friends over the past several months. Now I have a question. Because of funding cuts and general ignorance of the value of the contemplative approach to scholarship you describe here, there’s increasing pressure to make our scholarship “publicly accessible” to help make the case for its value. Do you have thoughts about how to do this? I mean for the type of work you describe, where the process matters at least as much as the “outcomes.” How do we prevent big discovery, “problem-focused” work from overshadowing slower, culture-enriching research and writing?