Playing the Knowledge Game: A Response

Playing the Knowledge Game: A ResponseAuthor(s): Ross ChambersSource: Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Vol. 24, No. 1/2 (Fall—Winter 1995-1996), pp. 40-46Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23536924 .

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Playing the Knowledge Game: A Response

Ross Chambers

Taking

a hint from the Bourdieu passage quoted by Marie-Pierre Le Hir, I'm

going to adopt a heuristic fiction: the idea that genres—in this case a genre of

knowledge called nineteenth-century French studies (NCFS)—can profitably be compared with games. But my point will be that, like games, genres display a

constitutive split between the rules that regulate them and the moves the players make: the moves are sanctioned by the rules but not fully governed by them, so that

they can on occasion lead to a change in the rules. In this perspective,

"pronouncements" made in the course of play by players can be viewed both as

attempts further to regulate the game and as further moves within the field of play: to be blunt about it, they tend to regulate, of course, to the advantage of the player. I'll look to Charley Stivale's paper for initial evidence of a rules/practices split within NCFS and to Marie-Pierre Le Hir's for insight into the function of

"pronouncements"; then I'll turn to Bill Paulson's pronouncement as an example of

a kind of move that is particularly suggestive, because it begins to show how

games, and genres, can and do change. 1. Charley asks us, in his paper, to consider what sort of interactions are made

possible by the institutional practice of the "scholarly conference"; and he basi

cally suggests two options. One, a scholarly conference is about the negotiation and exchange of scholarly evaluations (evaluations concerning the subject-matter of the field, in this case NCFS). Two, a scholarly conference is about professional

networking: the construction of authority, of identities and professional sce

narii—in short, the evaluation of the scholars themselves as members of a profes sional group. Analyzing historically the scheduling of papers at NCFS confer ences, he concludes that this scheduling—that is, the rules of the conference game as

they've been determined by successive "organizing," i.e. regulative, committees—is

designed, on the one hand, to attract a maximum number of conferees, and on the

other to prevent the assembled conferees from attending most of the papers. So, if

you judge our conferences by these game-rules, the conclusion seems inescapable:

they're designed to maximize informal networking among scholars, that is, profes sional business, rather than to favor the alleged business of the profession, which

is (in Charley7s terms) the evaluation of the literature and cultural productions of

the nineteenth century in France.

That conclusion sounds about right to me; but I'd like to throw in a couple of

cautionary remarks. One is that it's usually an error to judge any genre on the ex

clusive basis of either its rules or the way the rules are played out in actual

games—the two are different but can't be separated without the game turning into

something other than a game. The other remark, therefore, is that the production of

knowledge, defined as the goal of the "game" that's played at a scholarly confer

ence, is probably best understood as a joint outcome of the two kinds of business, the business of the sessions and the business of the hallways, the evaluation of the

works and the evaluation of the scholars. We tend to do both of these things simul

taneously and to do them in both kinds of settings, the formally regulated setting of

40



Ross Chambers 41

the sessions and the informal arena of networking; and the distinction between the

two can't really be enforced.

But given Charley's conclusion that conferences are more about networking than they are about the evaluation of scholarly subject-matter, one might have ex

pected him to go on to ask how one might study the evaluation practices of profes sional networking that appear to account for the bulk of what we do at confer

ences. In fact he goes on to ask what can be determined about scholarly evaluation

in the field of NCFS from examining conference programs, looking at them now not

as a scheduling device but as a classificatory system for identifying the different

sub-genres of literary study. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it turns out that whereas, on

the one hand, we've witnessed the emergence of new stuff (interdisciplinary stud

ies and what Charley calls the "return of the referent"), on the other hand the tra

ditional critical genres (i.e. author- and genre-oriented work) have refused to go

away and indeed continue to be generously represented in our programs. So (since

these results are reassuringly predictable), let me ask the kinds of questions that

Charley didn't. How might one study the kinds of professional practices that a

conference is set up to favor but which organizing committees, having done the set

ting up, can't and don't specifically regulate? What are the interactive processes

through which scholarly identities are constructed and authority is determined?

How are these inflected, in particular, by the conference setting and how, in turn,

are conferences inflected by them? If the rules of the conference game as they are

determined by organizing committees are designed to favor the playing out of a

game to which those rules predispose us but which they don't in fact regulate, how

do we study a game of which basically all we know is that (a) it is dependent on

there being conference rules and (b) it differs from the rules?

2. Marie-Pierre brings us closer to an answer to these questions, although her

concern is with another regulated professional arena, that of journals, not confer

ences. Marie-Pierre is interested not only in the divergence between the game of

power scholars play among themselves and what's readable in, and regulated by, the institutional sites by which their discipline defines itself, but also in another,

equally important issue: what is at stake when, as she puts it, instead of "writing about literature," literary scholars "also make pronouncements about the field."

That's an important question, if only because making pronouncements about the

field is what we're gathered together to do in this session today. But it's particu

larly important because, as Marie-Pierre also notes, "academic critics are usually inclined to make pronouncements on their field when a crisis makes it difficult, if

not impossible, to conduct scholarly business as usual." Leaving aside the ques tion whether humanities disciplines are ever in anything other than a state of cri

sis, and whether crisis isn't the very definition of "business as usual" for us, one

should ask, then, what is the crisis that leads us to gather and make pronounce ments today—a question to which Bill's paper is relevant.

But first I'll ask, with Marie-Pierre: what are we doing in making our pro nouncements? And I'll submit that one thing we're doing is trying to determine, by means of commentary, what kind of thing the activity known as NCFS is, given that it is something different from what the "rules of the game" (as they are read

able in conference programs or journals) would lead us to predict. Just so, sports commentators will enthuse, on occasion: "Now that's showing us how to play ten

nis!" or "That's what the game of baseball is all about," secure in the knowledge



42 Playing the Knowledge Game: A Response

that the rules of tennis or baseball don't themselves vouchsafe such revelations.

But the difference, obviously enough, is that we're not just commentators but si

multaneously players and commentators. We're engaged, then, in highly political

maneuverings, since our attempts to describe the present state of play are them

selves part of the play and can be construed, indeed, as quite naked attempts to in

fluence what the state of play will be in the future. Viewed from a certain angle, our pronouncement-making turns out, although it is taking place in a formal ses

sion, to be part of the professional business that Charley described as networking and mutual evaluation.

The Compagnon-Schor polemic was clearly a case in point: a certain amount of

jockeying for power went on under the guise of discussing—in journals rather

than at a conference—the state of the discipline. Marie-Pierre wonders aloud why two such renowned scholars didn't do their scholarly homework better before

venturing to make their pronouncements. The answer, I think, would have to go

something like this: scholarly homework could only have studied, as Marie-Pierre

does in the first part of her paper, that part of our scholarly behavior that is codi

fied and codifiable because subject to regulatory institutions (such as the editorial

board and the organizing committee), whereas what Schor and Compagnon are in

terested in is the part of the game that isn't readable in conference-programs and

journals, the power-game that is in progress and for which the stakes are profes sional authority. They're interested in it and—as I say—simultaneously partici

pating in it, their commentary having a peculiar generic status: it reads as if it was

another genre while nevertheless being part of the same generic game that it's com

menting on. Marie-Pierre finds a model of intelligibility for this curious practice in

Bourdieu's field theory, supplemented by Sosnoski's analysis of the relation be

tween "master critics" and "token professionals" as players in the game of the hu

manities disciplines. And her final diagnosis is a canny one: she sees French mas

ter critics (like Schor) losing ground in the authority-stakes to the discipline of

English and cleaving therefore, as much as possible, to Cultural Studies—the new

version of English—in an effort to erase the memory of their past identification

with French theory. Meanwhile, however, from within French studies, they are

being assailed from below by a younger generation of French master critic wanna

bes (the likes of Compagnon). What intrigues me, though, is the way her initial gesture—her refutation of the

positions of both Compagnon and Schor by means of a content analysis of jour

nals—parallels and, in a sense, repeats Charley's gesture of turning away from

the implications of his own initial analysis of conference programs, in order to do

a content-analysis of the programs rather than looking into how the professional "cuisine" works. In each case, the results are kinda reassuring: although NCFS has

gone interdisciplinary, traditional author- and genre-studies are alive and well; the Compagnon-Schor battle is a war of words, but meanwhile NCFS is still pretty much what it always was, with a stable and agreed canon, a high degree of "inter

national" overlap between France and the United States, and a decent level of gen der-distribution. For what it's worth I find these results—with the exception of

those that concern gender—more depressing than reassuring: in particular, I don't

think the international character of NCFS is necessarily grounds for optimism. That's because I'm inclined to think that lively knowledge is local knowledge, and

that the so-called internationalism of the field is a sign that, in fact, a national



Ross Chambers 43

hegemony is being exercised within it. (Why do we hear only about France and the

USA in this analysis, as if they were the only countries in which French studies

exist?) But leaving that aside, I'm interested in Charley's implied preference for con

ferences that would be about the business of the profession, not professional

business; and in Marie-Pierre's belief that the moves of people like Compagnon and Schor can be discounted in light of the evidence that's in the journals, as if

that were the only evidence, and as if a move was supposed to be right or wrong rather than successful or unsuccessful. And I wonder whether what we're wit

nessing, in this favoring of the rules over the moves, isn't a field phenomenon too.

Is the professional "cuisine" being somehow neutralized—or held at a distance—

here, through its being represented as an affair of master critics and their wanna

bes only (as Marie-Pierre suggests), or as a distasteful by-product of conferences

that ought, by rights, to be devoted to their ostensible goal of literary evaluation

of literary works (as Charley implies)? This gesture of dismissing the "cuisine," I'm

suggesting, is itself a part of the "cuisine," and master critics, master critic wanna

bes and mere token professionals are, in fact, all playing a certain game together. But this game—the political game of making pronouncements—happens to be one

in which (a bit like lawyers who argue the facts when the law's against them and

argue the law when the facts are against them) it's possible either to argue the

rules against the moves (the regulatory instances against the game as it's played), or to argue the moves (the game as it's played) against the rules (and the regulatory

instances). Charley and Marie-Pierre, I think, opt to argue the rules against the

game, whereas I'm arguing the game against the rules (that "pragmatist" stance be

ing habitually adopted, I know, by people such as myself who, having more or less

survived a career of playing the game, have no interest in seeing it suddenly rede

fined on them). ***

3. But then there's the Paulson move, which is more radical than either plugging for the rules or plugging for the game, because what it does is call attention to the

fictionality of the rules themselves—the rules on which both rules and moves, the

whole game-as-it-is-played, depend. This is a slightly cheeky move, as well as a

radical one, especially when it's made by a player. It takes chutzpah to come to an

NCFS conference and point out that, with a slight push, NCFS would topple like

Charles Bovary, revealing itself to have died while no one was paying attention.

And what makes it a cheeky move is that the gesture of pointing to the fictionality of the rules is more characteristically a spectator's move than a player's move, the

spectator's mode of participation in the game being defined, perhaps, as one that

can shift (like that of the theatrical spectator) along a continuum from more or less

complete immersion or involvement—what in game theory is called il-lusio, "being illuded"—to relative (but of course not complete) detachment. There's a current TV

commercial that illustrates this point nicely. It's an ad for male-bonding although it claims to be selling telephone calling cards. A group of guys is watching football

on TV in a bar. To their delight, their team scores. Amid the jubilation, a cry goes

up: 'Time to call Bob!" Our hero (the owner of the calling card, who has already

paid for the beer) calls Bob—but even as he gloats over the unfortunate Bob, there

is a reversal in the game and it's Bob's turn to laugh. "It's only a game!" snaps our

hero as he slams the receiver down. His pronouncement can hardly be taken to




mean that the game doesn't matter to him (that he's not illuded); indeed the point of

the commercial seems rather to be that spectatorship is also a way of playing the

game, even when it takes the form of denouncing the game as a fiction. So it's con

ceivable that a player might, conversely, adopt the spectator position as a move

within the game too.

Now pace Latour—whose understanding of ethnological "detachment" requires that such a move count as nonmodern^—the adoption of the spectator position as

a way of participating in the game (this time I'm thinking of the game of history) is

one of the characteristics of what is called "postmodernity." Human history is thus

viewed as a history of styles that have survived as a kind of cultural bric-à-brac

and are available for us to play with in our turn; but we play with them self-con

sciously and metafictionally, aware of the fictionality of all cultural rules, includ

ing those of our own culture. (Or we can, once in a while, like the most jaded spec

tator, still summon the passion to get involved too, as much of the US population

did, briefly, in the video-game of the Gulf War.) But what I want to say about this

understanding of postmodernity as an age of spectatorhood is that it can itself be

understood in turn as a historical emergence, like earlier periods and their styles.

Postmodernity is in a more or less direct line of continuity from the historical ex

perience of modernity, with which, as Bill points out—and even if it's true that

"nous n'avons jamais été modernes"—we dix-neuviémistes are professionally in

volved. (Modernity is our game, so to speak, even if it is a fiction.)

Many of the "post-" terms that are currently in circulation strike me as being

analyzable as signifying that their root term designates a cultural phenomenon that can no longer be regarded as marginal (as colonialism once was) or as emer

gent (as feminism once was) but must instead be recognized as dominant or hege monic (or at least in some sense culturally "central"). Hence "postcolonialism" and

"postfeminism" are recognitions that colonialism and feminism are cultural forces

to be reckoned with. But dominance itself is only recognizable as dominant

(otherwise it would so merge into the background as to seem natural and pass un

noticed) if there is some newly emergent position from the viewpoint of which the

dominant phenomenon begins to look, not like a "has-been" (to the contrary!), but

like something that can now, already, be seen as historically relativized—a part of history as opposed to "how things are now," and so on the verge of sliding into

the historical past. Thus the new post-war forms of economic and cultural colo

nialism make pre-war imperialist colonialism seem outmoded and, in retrospect, a

bit vulgar; and emergent gender-theory (among other factors) begins to make

women-oriented feminism seem more like a stage in the history of feminism than its

actual definition, as it once did. So too with postmodernity: it involves recognition of the fact that modernity is now globally dominant and of the fact that something has begun to emerge in light of which we can take the spectator position with re

spect to modernity and view it as "history" (in the dismissive but not uninvolved

sense with which one refers in this way to, say, one's former sexual partners). So,

to sum up: (1) the "post-" thing involves a sense of historical spectatorship, and (2)

postmodernity implies there having been something like two different modernities:

a modernity out of which postmodernity has emerged (and which is therefore, to

postmoderns, historically real), and a modernity grounded in false premises, whose fictionality postmoderns can now see (the modernity that permits us to say: "nous n'avons jamais été modernes"). Similarly, Bill sees two NCFSs, the NCFS



Ross Chambers 45

that has organized a conference at which he is speaking, and the NCFS that's al

ready dead and can no longer be subscribed to (so that "nous n'avons jamais été

dix-neuviémistes").

The modernity from which we want now to distance ourselves was, as Bill

tells us on the authority of Latour, the experience of a radical break with the past, that is, a denial of historical continuity. Not surprisingly, then, the modernity from

which postmodernity has inherited, as its successor, was an experience of conti

nuity and emergence, a modernity that might have led people to say, in surprise: "Eh bien, nous avons toujours été modernes!" Balzac would be my figure for

modernity as the sense of historical discontinuity brought about by the various

revolutions of the late 18th and early 19th centuries: there's a severed head in the

short story "Adieu"—severed (melodramatically enough) by a passing ice-floe at

the crossing of the Beresina—that can do duty as a symbol for this disjunctive

reading of history. But modernity was also the discovery that, certainly "our way of life has changed" (and become modern), but that simultaneously, once the fact of

cultural change has been acknowledged, cultural change itself can be seen to have

been the law of history. It then follows that, as Stendhal and Baudelaire liked to

say, every age has been modern in its fashion, so that, although we may be modern

in our realization of it, the fact is that there's nothing new about modernity. This

understanding of modernity, which is contemporary with the emergence of the con

cept of "culture" in its (dare I say) "modern" sense, corresponds to the knowledge

that, whatever the rules of the game that may be in force at a given cultural moment

(and in a given cultural locus), the playing of the game wül end up changing the

rules, in such a way that, viewed from the post-position, the rules will appear to

have been what they always were: fictional (and hence, changeable).

Modernity in this sense was thus always potentially postmodern, and it

strikes me as emblematic that in Le Peintre de la vie moderne, Baudelaire discusses

the modem (exemplified by Guys) as an episode in the history of styles, and makes

no bones about comparing Guys's sketches, not only with 18th century fashion

plates, but also with "hieratic" Egyptian art (presumably the most remote style from Guys's that Baudelaire could think of). There's something playfully post modern beginning to emerge in that famous essay, as there is in the supposedly

"great poem of modernity" that is "Le Cygne," with its reading of a swan in an ur

ban gutter alongside of the noble Sophoclean (or Virgilian, or Racinean) figure of

Andromache, the tragic widow. Baudelaire is struggling to think of modernity in

terms of a dynamic of emergence that will, in due course, make modernity itself just another historical period, just another episode in the history of styles, just another

game that was played according to rules whose now observable fictionality en

sured that the playing of the game would, in due course, change them.

Once, in the game of cricket, bowlers regularly bowled under-arm. In an effort

to equalize the chances of bowler and batter, a practice emerged that the mies nei

ther required nor forbade—the practice of overarm bowling, which in due course

the regulatory body was led to specify, as a rule. Football in North America was

once a running game very like rugby, until a practice emerged that was judged to be

"not football" although the rules didn't disallow it. Players would form a tight

phalanx around the ball-carrier and charge down the field, leaving a trail of

wounded opposing players behind them. So a new rule was invented to "open up the game," and forward passing became legal; within a generation or two, today's




passing game had become standard. Thus, both cricket and football have the same

names now as they had in the 19th century; but they're spectacularly différent

games. NCFS, which began as Bill points out when the practice of century-division as a saucissonnement began in the context of the cultural politics of the Third

Republic, is a 19th century game that has outgrown its primary rule ("There are

centuries and the nineteenth is one of them"), so that the fictionality of that rule is

now evident, even as we continue to pay it lip-service. Will it—like cricket and

football—become a spectacularly different game under the same name? or will it,

as Bill suggests, diffuse through the network of knowledge (or of knowledges), un

der different names and in different forms. I think it scarcely matters.

The point being that games do change, in part because of the constitutive split between the rules of the game and the game as it is played, and in part because of

the fictionality (in the sense I'm giving the term) of the rules, that is, their change

ability. And players can make games change thanks to their ability, on occasion, to

perceive the fictionality of the rules and to elude il-lusio, as if they were specta tors. The game Bill Paulson is playing isn't quite the game of killing off NCFS by

declaring it to be already dead (having never existed)—that would be a gesture of

historical disjunction or denial of continuity, comparable both to perceiving

modernity as disjunctive with respect to its past and to declaring that "nous

n'avons jamais été modernes." His game looks to me like the game of changing the

game in the process of playing it out, and of doing so by showing that the rules

have outlived their usefulness, and need to be changed. And that's a gesture of con

tinuity—one that's entirely consonant with the fact that it's modernity itself, as a

historical reality, that has made it possible for him now to go "beyond modernity"

by declaring it to have been a fiction (the fiction that it also indubitably was). I don't want to say that the game of eluding il-lusio is the only game in town

these days. It clearly isn't. There's also illuded game-playing (still the best, 1 think, if you can manage it); and there's the game of making pronouncements (which per

haps lies somewhere between the other two). But eluding il-lusio is certainly a

game that we modern (postmodern) intellectuals play with alacrity. The only hitch

is that it has a precondition: eluding il-lusio depends on there being such a thing as

il-lusio, otherwise the game of elusion has no point. We must first have been dix

neuviémistes before it begins to be fun for us dix-neuviémistes to say: "nous

n'avons jamais été dix-neuviémistes."

The University of Michigan Department of Romance Languages Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1275

Note

Truly exceptional events must have weakened this powerful mechanism [of modernity] for me to be able to describe it today with an ethnologist's detachment for a world that is in the process of disappearing" (Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, translated by Catherine Porter [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993], 34-5). Note, however, the greater subtlety of Latour's original French: "avec cette distance et cette sympathie pour un monde en train de dis paraître" (Bruno Latour, Nous n'avons jamais été modernes, Essais d'anthropologie symétrique [Paris: La Découverte, 1991], 51).



Playing the Knowledge Game: A Response

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