Conflict in the Academy A Study in the Sociology of Intellectuals 9781137521309, 9781137521286, 9781349506606, 1137521287, 1137521309

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Conflict in the Academy

DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0001

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DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0001

Conflict in the Academy: A Study in the Sociology of Intellectuals Marcus Morgan University of Cambridge, UK and

Patrick Baert University of Cambridge, UK

DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0001

© Marcus Morgan and Patrick Baert 2015

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-52128-6 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978-1-137-52130-9 PDF ISBN: 978-1-349-50660-6 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. www.palgrave.com/pivot doi: 10.1057/9781137521309

Contents Acknowledgements

vi

About the Authors

vii

1

Introduction: A Storm in a Teacup?

Part I

The ‘MacCabe Affair’ in Context

1 10

2 Chronology of Events

11

3

23

Contextualising the Dispute

Part II Symbolic Struggles and Performative Positioning

41

4 Examples of Symbolic Strategies Employed by the Pros

44

5

Examples of Symbolic Strategies Employed by the Antis

60

6 Conclusion

74

Bibliography

82

Index

93

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v

Acknowledgements We would like to express appreciation to our interviewees for sharing their recollections and reflections, Vicky Aldred and the Cambridge English Faculty Board for granting us access to their archives, Jacqueline Cox and Frank Bowles at the Cambridge University Archives for helping us consult them, Jonathan Drummond at the Times Literary Supplement for permission to reprint an advertisement from their pages, Harriet Barker and Palgrave Macmillan’s anonymous reviewers. Thanks also to Jonas Tinius who generously read and provided valuable comments on a draft. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under Grant Agreement no. 319974 (INTERCO-SSH) and was aided by the stimulating intellectual atmosphere provided by the members of this collaborative group: Christian Fleck, Johan Heilbron, Victor Karady, Marco Santoro, Gisèle Sapiro and Gustavo Sora. Finally, thanks to Lorena Cervera and Emma Murray, for all manner of things.

vi

DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0002

About the Authors Marcus Morgan is a fellow and college lecturer at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, and a research associate in the Sociology Department at the University of Cambridge, UK. Patrick Baert is Professor of Social Theory in the Faculty of Human, Social, and Political Science at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge, UK.

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vii

1

Introduction: A Storm in a Teacup? Abstract: This introductory chapter poses the question of how a dispute that erupted in the early 1980s over whether a young Assistant Lecturer in the Cambridge English Faculty was to be made permanent became such a widespread controversy. We explain the significance of our book in the context of existing literature, and detail our methodological approach and the empirical resources we will draw upon, including interviews, archival research and content analysis of various forms of published material. We also elaborate our pragmatic approach to theory, and the critical synthesis we forge between positioning theory and cultural sociology. Finally, we briefly summarise the case, and lay out the broad structure of the book. Keywords: cultural sociology; MacCabe Affair; positioning theory; pragmatism Morgan, Marcus and Patrick Baert. Conflict in the Academy: A Study in the Sociology of Intellectuals. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. doi: 10.1057/9781137521309.0004.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0004

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The research for this book is based upon the reconstruction of a historical case in which neither of the authors was directly involved. This case involved a dispute over whether a young University Assistant Lecturer in the English Faculty at Cambridge University would be upgraded to a permanent position. What might conceivably have been quickly forgotten as merely a trivial and routine difference of opinion within the workplace very quickly turned into a cause célèbre, seen as illustrative of fundamental shifts taking place within both the university system in England and within the particular discipline of English Studies at the time. The event rapidly swelled to heroic proportions, drew vast media attention and became invested with considerable moral and symbolic consequence. One of the first questions directing our research is how and why this took place. It is not our concern in this work to evaluate the common assumption that academics tend to overestimate the significance of their own internal squabbles.1 However, we would like to suggest that tired clichés of ‘ivory towers’ and ‘dreaming spires’, or even more self-complementary myths of universities as platonic institutions directed towards disinterested enlightenment lead to an unhelpful black-boxing of these zones of social life from attentive sociological enquiry, usually on the odd assumption that the ‘real world’ is somehow always going on elsewhere. This book intends to contribute toward a growing literature that refuses to content itself with such popular accounts of academia as a withdrawn and therefore somehow asocial zone, and which instead takes the reflexive academic analysis of the social processes of academic life seriously (e.g. Bourdieu, 1988; Camic, Gross, Lamont, 2011; Collins, 1998). Of course it is true that much of any debate, including this one, can be explained – or we would rather, explained away – by recourse to the individual ‘personalities’ of those involved, and since academia may have a tendency to attract and inflate already overblown egos and then set them competitively against one another like few other sectors of work, it would seem likely that such personalities would play an even larger role within academic disputes than within controversies elsewhere. To add to this, it has been suggested, somewhat unfairly perhaps, that ‘self-obsession, never rare in academe, is especially common in English Departments’ (Bayley, 1981: 135) and so it may be tempting to disregard what came to be known as the ‘MacCabe Affair’ as a simple case of egotistical pettiness getting the better of collegiate civility. But such egos are neither born, nor shaped, nor expressed outside of social space, and this book attempts to DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0004

Introduction: A Storm in a Teacup?

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show the distance that can be travelled in understanding such disputes without resorting to psychologising their participants. In other words, it attempts to mark out elements of the specifically social and performative dimensions of such affairs and suggest that a case-analysis of this particular dispute might reveal insights into academic controversies more generally, and in so doing reject Simpson’s doubt that ‘the conclusions one might draw from these events can be extended beyond particular individuals in particular institutions at a specific time’ (1990: 268). A couple of caveats are however necessary. Firstly, whilst it is our belief that the social sciences neither can nor should entirely avoid normativity (Baert, 2005; Morgan, 2014), our interest in this dispute is primarily analytical. Many of the participants involved will no doubt take issue with some of what has been written. Where erroneous information has been included or accurate information excluded, we appeal to the reader to trust our good faith in seeing this as a product of the difficulties involved in reconstructing even a relatively recent past event from disparate artefacts, rather than our own attempt to take a stake in the affair. Secondly, and this applies particularly to the following chapter, in any episode that brings to the surface enmity in the way that the MacCabe Affair did, differing accounts of what constitutes the ‘facts’ inevitably abound, and no doubt our own description cannot entirely avoid this process of presenting a located perspective on reality, as reality itself. Even the uncontested ‘facts’ of the narrative we offer are themselves, of course, never free from mediation. Later in this book we attempt to show how the performative fixing of these ‘facts’, as facts – what Goffman (1959) called ‘defining a situation’ – for the interested audiences, as well as for posterity, was a key element in the strategic unfolding of the dispute itself. We feel that the historical case study is a valuable tool for sociological analysis in that it allows theory to be developed organically from within a natural setting. Even though, since the event has passed, we do not have direct access to this natural setting, we feel that we are able to reconstruct elements of the event in a manner that retains many of the strengths of the extended case method as it was developed by the Manchester School of Anthropology. The case study approach is particularly useful to our aims in that it provides the possibility of identifying actors’ own projected ‘definitions of the situation’, and offers the ability to analyse the various sedimented layers of social meaning that go into creating complex relational social interactions. Whilst in comparison to more DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0004

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extensive approaches to social research, intensive case analyses no doubt lose out in terms of generalisability, they nevertheless gain in their capacity to revive holistic accounts of social behaviour that are key to theory construction and modification (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). We reconstruct this particular case from a variety of empirical sources – interviews with direct participants and onlookers, contemporaneous media reports, more scholarly accounts of the case that were written both at the time and retrospectively, a published transcript of a debate that took place in the University’s historic Senate House and became the most visible and staged public performance of the affair (in what follows SHD citations refer to this document), archived correspondence of the English Faculty, and archived minutes from English Faculty Board meetings. We use these empirical resources in two main ways. Firstly, in the more conventional manner of the historian – in order to gather direct and contextual information about the episode. In this manner, the empirical resources serve as springs of information from which we are able to resurrect a version of the past (as seen from the present). In this mode, we pick and choose from the range of resources as and when they prove useful. Secondly, however, we also analyse many of these empirical materials as instances of the dispute itself. We treat them, in other words, as examples of the performative enactment of the affair. In this second manner, we try to show how the different empirical resources each occupies a different level of public address so that for example, in the case of letters written to national newspapers or comments made on the television, the audience is clearly maximally undefined, whereas comments made inside closed Faculty Board meetings were instead performed to a very limited and clearly circumscribed set of known individuals. We argue not only that these different zones of public address affected the resultant performances themselves, but also that the level of public address itself became a site of contestation in the affair, with one camp attempting to open it up as widely as possible (e.g. by requesting exemption from confidentiality rules governing Faculty Board meetings), and the other attempting to close it down as narrowly as they were able (e.g. by claiming that it was only locally comprehensible, and denying any validity at all to the frenzied media accounts that circulated it). Since the episode unfolded three and a half decades ago, methodological problems arise in that some participants are no longer with us, and the memories of others have faded (‘mercifully’, in the words of one interviewee). However, since the Owl of Minerva only spreads its wings DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0004

Introduction: A Storm in a Teacup?

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at dusk, retrospective distance from the event also provides the advantage of seeing the event in the context of its broader historical landscape. Therefore, in comparison to many of the reports that were excitedly penned in the immediate wake of the events, our study is afforded the possibility of more adequately judging the controversy’s status as expressive of definite shifts in the history of English Studies, higher education in England, and England as located within an evolving international scene more broadly. Similarly, whilst our own disciplinary location outside of English Studies provides challenges in terms of discussing a field with which we are substantively unfamiliar (we do not assume to offer much in the way of insight into the literary-critical content of the debate), it also allows us the possibility of approaching practitioners of the discipline as a somewhat exotic species of intellectual labourers, and diminishes any emotional temptation to take sides in assessing the affair. What can be said of chronological and emotional distance, however, cannot be said for institutional distance, and some familiarity with the workings of the University, we feel, has been useful to our project. Theoretically, the book endeavours to demonstrate the virtues of adopting a pragmatic approach to theory selection and development, which sees theory not as separable from the particular empirical situations it is called upon to understand, but rather marshalled on the basis of its expedience in helping elucidate such specific settings (e.g. Baert, 2005; Mills, 1959; Morgan, 2014). Moreover, building on insights that challenge the philosophical marginality of metaphor to the human perception and comprehension reality (e.g. Blumberg, 2010) we regard the use of concepts and metaphors as not so much ways of uncovering hidden truths than as ways of re-describing and reformulating social phenomena. Sympathetic to Richard Rorty’s (1980) philosophical stance, we see an important value of sociological research in its capacity to put a new spin on old ways of seeing the world (Baert, 2005), and therefore argue for something of a bricolage approach that selects and combines different theoretical frames on the basis of their ability to cast the research object in a new or interesting light. In particular, the book shows how positioning theory is able to augment a cultural sociological perspective in analysing intellectual disputes and controversies. We find the new school of American cultural sociology, which itself takes critical inspiration from a variety of disparate sources (including the late Durkheim, Parsonian functionalism, phenomenological sociology, symbolic anthropology, Turner’s (1957) pioneering account DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0004

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of ‘social drama’, and structuralist semiotics) to be analytically productive in its refusal to understand disputes and controversies as natural effects of the occurrences out of which they are built, demonstrating instead the importance of drama, performance, ritual, symbolism and notions of the sacred to understanding how ‘events’ become culturally constructed as such (e.g. Alexander, 2003). Nevertheless, as we elaborate later in the book, we find it necessary to disregard cultural sociology’s methodological guidelines of ‘bracketing out’ non-symbolic factors (e.g. Alexander & Smith, 2003) by instead first analysing the various material pressures that helped facilitate and shape the affair (Part I of the book). On the other hand, we find positioning theory – which has already been used in order to analyse both intellectual interventions (Baert, 2011) and the possibility of resolving disputes (Harré & Slocum, 2003) – helpful in its emphasis upon the relational strategies that lie behind struggles over meaning-making, showing how social actors compete, both in isolation as well as in ‘teams’, to position themselves, others and ideas in meaningful relation to one another. ‘Positioning’ here, refers to the way in which any intellectual intervention, as interpreted by its audience, attributes characteristics to the author and to others (Baert, 2012). It also offers a more dynamic alternative to the relatively static notion of ‘role’ as frequently employed in dramaturgical analysis (Davis & Harré, 2007), and helps emphasise the manner in which locating oneself and others in social space is always a relational affair; occurring against or alongside some other. For instance, we describe how one camp in the struggle attempted to position the other as retrogressive, and in doing so, implicitly cast itself in the structurally progressive role. We also show how it is not just actors, but also ideas themselves, that become objects of positioning moves, and describe the way in which labels, such as the term ‘structuralism’, were pushed and pulled in opposing directions, one side working towards elaborating positive connotations, the other invested in positioning such labels, and those to whom they are ascribed, as toxic. We treat intellectual interventions (such as speeches, lectures, books or media articles) as both performances, that is, as social relationships between actors and audiences, as well as performative, meaning that we see them as doing something – bringing something about – and feel that the notion of ‘positioning’ captures both these dynamics particularly well. Such positioning occurs continuously in social life, but becomes particularly visible in cases of dispute as such cases are characterised by DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0004

Introduction: A Storm in a Teacup?

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the breaking down of the collective norms governing cultural classifications and the reassembling of social reality from the liminal wreckage of shared symbolic life. As there appears to have been a general awareness prior to the staging of the aforementioned centrepiece of the affair – the Senate House debate – that departure from the University of the Assistant Lecturer in question was more or less a fait accompli (e.g. Kermode, 1997: 267; MacCabe, 2014), we suggest that rather than an actual debate that might have feasibly led to a reversal of decision on the matter of his being appointed, the affair, and in particular the Senate House discussion as its emblematic scene, is better understood as having opened up opportunities for those involved to dramatically position themselves, their opponents and their ideas, in front of a captive audience. The metaphor of the stage underscores this performative perspective, which explains why we will pay special attention to the setting and other dramaturgical props and devices that accompany and influence positioning. We shall learn how positioning and counter-positioning always takes place against a background of values, some of which are shared even amongst the fiercest of rivals, showing, for example, how opposing camps in this case both made a huge effort to position themselves and their allies in line with the core principles of their shared academic profession. At the same time, however, we acknowledge the problems involved in importing what was originally a social psychological theory into sociological analysis proper and we overcome these issues by emphasising the different levels of social context that acted to structure and inflect the positioning moves that were made, and through stressing that positioning is often the product of teamwork, and especially so in this particular case. We see this research as filling a gap within the existing literature in the sociology of intellectuals, which has typically centred its attention on the intellectual trajectory of writers – their social background (e.g. Bourdieu, 1991), their formative years (e.g. Gross, 2002; 2008), their intellectual development (e.g. Camic, 1987; 1992) or their influence (e.g. Lamont, 1987; Baert 2011). Rather than conflict, this literature has tended to focus on the cohesive or collaborative aspects of intellectual life – how writers or thinkers come together and develop networks, or how intellectual schools are formed and maintained (Collins, 1998; Farrell, 2001). In distinction, since the 1970s, and inspired in part by Thomas Kuhn’s work, a great deal of literature has emerged paying attention to the empirical study of controversies within the natural sciences. Such studies have been interested in the moments at which ‘normal science’ has been put DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0004

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into question through the accumulation of anomalies within a governing paradigm, and a controversy has resulted. This research agenda has typically focussed upon empirical observations of knowledge-inthe-making and shown the deeply social mechanisms through which scientists struggle to assert authority over particular fields (e.g. Barnes, 1977; Martin, 1991; 2014; Latour, 1988; Shapin & Schaffer, 1985). However, nowhere near as much empirical research has been conducted during this period into controversies as they have unfolded within the humanities, in part, no doubt, because the notion of paradigm shifts holds far less traction in these more multi-paradigmatic, porous and pluralistic disciplines. There are notable exceptions, such as Sapiro’s (1999) study of the conflicts between French writers during the Second World War, but they tend to operate outside the university structure and are usually set in politically charged contexts. Whilst certainly illuminating a variety of other ways, even Bourdieu’s celebrated attempts at uncovering the power structures underlying French higher-education institutions do not dwell on the actual conflicts that take place within the system itself (Bourdieu, 1988; 1996). Collins’s (1998) broad-sweeping historical account of the acrimony arising from conflict over limited ‘attention space’ within the philosophical intellectual field (Collins, 2002) and Abbott’s (2001) acknowledgement of the role of conflict in the evolution of academic disciplines are similarly informative, but lack systematic fine-grained empirical detail. Alongside certain isolated recent contributions (e.g. those appearing in Gingras’s (2014) recent edited collection), this book provides one of the first systematic sociological attempts to provide a detailed empirical enquiry into conflict within the humanities, as located within the modern academy. Part I of the book provides a chronological description of the events of the affair and an account of some of the functions that the dispute served for both the participants and the ideas involved. It locates these events within their broader (socio-historical) and narrower (institutional) contexts, emphasising the manner in which such contexts impinged upon the form and content of the resultant controversy. Part II investigates the symbolic strategies and counterstrategies of the debate directly, highlighting the manner in which staging, sacralisation, identification of pollutants, use of narratives, appeals to universality and ascriptions of stigmatising or dignifying labels were all drawn upon in the struggle to position and ultimately fix reality in a manner that accorded with the different participants’ positioning strategies. The book ends with DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0004

Introduction: A Storm in a Teacup?

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an elaboration of the theoretical implications of the study, and with a final note on the fact that such reality fixing is a Sisyphean task, forever unfinished, and therefore that social constructions of reality must be understood as perpetually provisional and contingent achievements. Throughout the book, the terms ‘pros’ and ‘antis’ have been used as shorthand to describe, respectively, those in support of inquiring into the conditions surrounding MacCabe’s failure to be appointed (which it should be noted is a slightly different category to those necessarily in support of MacCabe’s appointment) and those against such an inquiry. Though there appears to have been a high degree of internal heterogeneity within these two camps,2 in most cases, where one stood in relation to the issue of whether or not to investigate what had occurred is, even in retrospect, relatively easy to discern and so allows for a crude initial organisation of the material, which has been refined where necessary.3 Moreover, as one would expect sociologically, and without the need for complex statistical techniques such as Multiple Correspondence Analysis, it will hopefully become clear that taking up certain positions within the debate had a definite tendency to go hand-in-hand with the adoption of certain others.

Notes 1 For example, Noel Annan suggests that ‘to anyone outside a university, the frenzy which appointments and elections produce seems petty and absurd’ (1974: 68) and John Carey writes with reference to Oxbridge in particular, that there exists a firm belief ‘that their grouses are of national importance’ (1975: 19). 2 Tanner, for example, claimed of the pro camp, that ‘[o]ur group has very little in common but that we’re pluralists open to new ideas’ (Fisher, McGee, Rich, 1981: 1). 3 Distinct camps were apparently clear to the participants at the time: as Lisa Jardine recalls, ‘we all knew where we lined up’ (1994).

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Part I

The ‘MacCabe Affair’ in Context

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Chronology of Events Abstract: This chapter provides a chronological description of the events of the affair. To the extent that it is possible, we try to avoid analysis altogether at this point, providing as matter of fact an account of what occurred as we see possible. Where facts are disputed, we draw attention to the matter, highlighting the dissension rather than attempting to resolve it via our own authoritative reading. The purpose of this chapter is both to acquaint the reader with the ‘facts’ of the episode, as well as to provide a description of the ‘raw material’ out of which the controversy was forged. Nearer the end of this chapter, we discuss some of the functions the controversy ended up serving for both its participants, and the ideas involved. Keywords: academic controversy; events; functions of disputes; MacCabe affair Morgan, Marcus and Patrick Baert. Conflict in the Academy: A Study in the Sociology of Intellectuals. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. doi: 10.1057/9781137521309.0006.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0006

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Colin MacCabe had been both an undergraduate and then PhD student at Trinity College, Cambridge, until 1974, and then a Research Fellow at Emmanuel from 1974 to 1976. In the year that his Research Fellowship came to an end he was awarded his doctorate, became a Fellow and College Lecturer at King’s College, and was appointed to the nowabolished position of ‘University Assistant Lecturer (UAL)’, which was reviewed for the possibility of upgrading to the effectively permanent position of ‘University Lecturer’ at the end of a five-year term.1 In this position MacCabe was charged with the responsibility of teaching ‘English language in relation to literature since 1500’ (Inglis, 1995: 279), and even prior to his term ending, unease with his presence within the faculty was evident from the fact that after he had been appointed to the Degree Committee, Professor Christopher Ricks resigned in protest, prompting MacCabe himself to then resign, and Ricks, after some time, and with some prompting from the Secretary of the Faculty Board, Mike Long, to then return back to the committee (Correspondence relating to nomination for election to various Faculty Board committees, 1970–82). In spite of such early skirmishes, and Kermode’s claim that a ‘row about literary theory was already brewing in the 1970s’ (1997: 254), the conflict on which this book focuses only truly came to a head in 1980 when decisions for appointments for the coming academic year began to be made. Three separate bodies were responsible for implementing this decisionmaking process: the Faculty Board (charged with ‘ensuring that teaching within the faculty is appropriate and of a high standard’), the Upgrading Committee (a subcommittee appointed by the Faculty Board, charged with the responsibility of making recommendations for upgrading), and the Appointments Committee (who acted to ratify the Faculty Board’s Recommendation). On 10 March 1980, the Upgrading Committee met to review the UAL’s performance and recommend upgradings. The subcommittee received reports from three senior professors, Christopher Ricks, Raymond Williams, and Frank Kermode, as well as others, including John Barrell and Richard Axton, who had all been to observe MacCabe’s (and the other two UALs’) lectures, had read work written by the candidates, and had received references from their chosen referees. In reference to MacCabe’s lectures, whilst Kermode recalls that both he and Ricks had ‘found great improvements in them’ (Kermode, 2008), Ricks remembers it differently – that he ‘did not think that they were very good’ (2013). Inglis informs us that whilst Williams’s reports were ‘full of quiet praise’, DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0006

Chronology of Events

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of Ricks’s two reports (he had been to observe MacCabe’s lectures in both the third and fifth year of his assistant lectureship term), the first was ‘mildly approbatory’, the second ‘flatly hostile’ (1995: 280–1). The Upgrading Committee voted twice – first for election, next against. The outcome was that Heather Glen was put forward for election, a second candidate was unsuccessful, and MacCabe was voted 3 in favour, 4 against (Reserved Minutes of the Faculty Board, 24 April 1980). On 22 May 1980, the Faculty Board met in order for a vote to take place requesting new lectureships to be created by the General Board. At this meeting, extracts from MacCabe’s (1979) book on Joyce were apparently mockingly read aloud by Mike Long, provoking John Barrell to formally complain to the Chairman that the procedure of assessing his work had been uncivil, biased, and unprofessional. Interestingly, in light of the debate at the time within English Literature departments over whether a critic should approach a literary text on a more intuitive or a more formal basis (a debate we shall return to later on), a key criterion upon which MacCabe’s work was apparently judged at this meeting, seemingly in a somewhat sarcastic manner, was its discernible ‘distinction’, a criterion that certain members of the Board objected to on the basis of its subjective vagueness (Inglis, 1995: 281). The outcome was that Heather Glen was voted into her University Lectureship (which was subsequently temporarily ‘revoked, because of flagrant discrepancies in treatment, the animosity of the debate, and disputes over criteria’ (ibid.)), and the outcome of MacCabe’s vote was 7 votes in favour, 7 against, and 2 abstentions (Reserved Faculty Board Minutes, 22 May 1980). This led the Chairman of the Faculty Board (Leo Salingar) and the Assistant Registrary2 to seek the advice of the Secretary General of the Faculties on how to proceed, and on this advice a new Faculty Board meeting was called. In advance of this meeting, the Regius Professor, Frank Kermode, wrote to his colleagues appealing for ‘measured tolerance’ so as to ensure that ‘our differences, and the effect they may have on the application of our criteria for upgrading, should not interfere with our professional judgement when the careers of University Assistant Lecturers are at issue’ (quoted in Inglis, 1995). On 5 June 1980, the Faculty Board meeting reconvened to consider ‘whether or not to recommend the temporary upgrading in the academical year 1980–1 of the University Assistant Lectureships’ (Reserved Faculty Board minutes, 5 June 1980) and in spite of Kermode’s appeals, passions had in the meantime only grown. Inglis reports Ricks outrightly asserting that ‘Dr MacCabe’s book is a bad book’, after which Long is DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0006

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said to have delivered ‘a twenty-minute malediction’ over it (Inglis, 1995: 282). Nevertheless, the motion for the Board to agree to recommend MacCabe’s upgrading, which was proposed by Kermode and Williams, was carried by a vote of 10 in support, and 9 against, and Heather Glen was also recommended once again for upgrading with strong support. In respect to the MacCabe vote, Richard Axton and Christopher Ricks asked ‘that their opposition to this motion be recorded in the minutes’ (Reserved Faculty Board Minutes, 5 June 1980). The Chairman, Dr Beer, had apparently abstained from voting, for which, it was reported, he was later ‘heavily criticised’ (Fisher et al., 1981: 1). Erskine-Hill later presented what happened in this meeting as the Board ‘overturn[ing] the recommendation of its Upgrading Committee’, an action which he suggests ‘was, so far as I know, without precedent’ and one that was ‘rare for it to try’ (SHD: 337). This vote, though narrow, acted to create the full Lectureship for MacCabe to fill (Witherow, 1981c), but he still had to wait for the outcome of the Appointments Committee to ratify the faculty’s recommendation and appoint him to the post. The saga continued ... The Appointments Committee met in October 1980 and was composed of some the same individuals as the Faculty Board (including Frank Kermode, Raymond Williams, Christopher Ricks, Leo Salingar, and Richard Axton), though in a smaller number (five) plus two UTOs not from the English Faculty, Edward Miller, the Master of Fitzwilliam College, and Gordon Johnson, a historian and fellow of Selwyn College (Stevens, 1981: 189). At the meeting, they voted on MacCabe’s appointment and the outcome was 3 in support, and 4 against, acting to overturn the Faculty Board’s recommendation.3 This generated a problem, expressed by Raymond Williams as ‘when a Faculty Board, by however narrow a majority, has recommended an upgrading and then a Committee of much the same people plus two, do not accept the decision, what happens? Where can it go?’ (SHD: 346). In a meeting of the Faculty Board on 6 November 1980, it was reported that Heath Glen had been appointed to her University Lectureship, that Colin MacCabe had not, and that ‘at a future meeting the Board should take stock of its procedures in connection with proposals for the temporary upgrading of posts’ (Reserved Faculty Board Minutes, 6 November 1980). In the interim, ‘backstage’ manoeuvring had apparently taken place so that on 13 November 1980 at the Annual Meeting of the Faculty Board, two of MacCabe’s most influential supporters, who were also two of the most famous names in literary studies in England at the time, and two DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0006

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of the most senior figures in the English faculty – Frank Kermode and Raymond Williams – were voted off the Appointments Committee. Two other supporters of MacCabe, Stephen Heath and John Barrell, were similarly voted off the Faculty Board. Since Williams and Kermode were both professors, they remained members of the Board ex officio, but whilst Williams ‘decided to stay on and fight on the Faculty Board’, Kermode, the Edward VII professor, resigned from it, according to some reports in protest (Walker, 1981a), and according to others due to ‘personal and health reasons’ (Fisher et al., 1981: 1). Tony Tanner, another supporter, resigned from his post as secretary of the Faculty’s Degree Committee in disapproval (Walker, 1981a), and John Barrell resigned from the Upgrading Committee ‘in light of the elections that had just been made to the Appointments Committee’ (Reserved Faculty Board Minutes, 27 November 1980). Derek Brewer, an English fellow at Emmanuel College who had been named to the reconstituted Appointments Committee, was subsequently contacted by MacCabe to request that the vote be retaken, and after some consideration, he decided to call for it to be so (MacCabe, 2009). The vote was duly retaken, and the outcome this time was 4 in support of MacCabe, 3 against. In order for MacCabe to be appointed, however, 5 votes out of the 7 were necessary. After the Christmas vacation, on 23 January 1981, Williams and Kermode spoke to an open meeting, attended by more than 600 students, on ‘the troubles within the faculty’ (Walker, 1981c). John Beer refused to attend, as did Christopher Ricks who, adapting a famous phrase by Leavis, commented that ‘to come is to condone’ (Walker, 1981d). On 28 January 1981, the English students passed a vote of no confidence in the Faculty Board, demanding that it be suspended until an independent inquiry had been conducted into the procedure surrounding MacCabe’s non-reappointment (Witherow, 1981c; Rich and Tolmie, 1981). Stephen Heath, a University Lecturer and passionate supporter of MacCabe, collected the signatures required by the University for a meeting of the Senate (all holders of a Cambridge MA, or higher, degree) at the University’s Senate House.4 The meeting was presided over by the Vice Chancellor, the mathematician Sir Peter Swinnerton-Dyer,5 and nearly all of the main players attended (excepting MacCabe, who was on a British Council lecture tour of Europe, and Ricks, who had no interest in being present); the majority also contributed. The debate took seven and a half hours over the 3 and 4 February and those who had DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0006

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supported the call for the meeting requested that inquiries into both the general ‘state of the English Faculty’, as well as the more particular case of MacCabe’s non-reappointment be launched, during which time they saw it fit that the faculty be suspended. On 11 February, the General Board of the Faculties (12 senior members of the Faculties plus the Vice Chancellor) met to consider the MacCabe Affair, prior to which they had appointed a special committee to examine what had occurred (Walker, 1981h). At the end of February, Christopher Ricks delivered a lecture responding to the theoretical issues of the affair, and denouncing the importance of ‘theory’ to advancing literary criticism (Walker, 1981i), which was later published in the London Review of Books (Ricks, 1981). In March, Raymond Williams also delivered a lecture to the faculty, also later published (1983), on ‘The Crisis in English Studies’, which attempted to both clarify the underlying theoretical divisions of the controversy, as well as to shed light on the term ‘structuralism’ that had been bandied around with casual imprecision throughout the episode. It is unclear which camp first drew the media’s attention to the event, and accusations of orchestrating the various media were hurled from all sides in the affair (e.g. Simpson, 1990: 264; Heath, SHD: 330; cf. Beer, SHD: 353; Sykes-Davies, SHD: 335). Nevertheless, involved they certainly got and the quarrel was reported at university, local, national, and even international levels, in print (including front pages, and replete with witty puns),6 radio, and television (including the BBC’s widely watched Newsnight), with interest peaking around January and early February 1981. Part of this clearly followed the well-worn path of media amplification, with the student newspaper, Stop Press, insisting that the attention was unwarranted, and – somewhat ironically in an issue in which they dedicated their lead cover story to the affair – ‘deserving of the label of the most overblown media story of the year’ (1981: 4; also Cohen, 1981: 4). A little later, it was reported that MacCabe and Heath had brought a libel case, which was subsequently dropped, against John Harvey, and the University’s own historic special appeals court – the Septem Viri or ‘council of seven’ – were claimed to have been called into action over charges that information from confidential meetings had been leaked (Walker, 1981e; The Times, 1982; Williams & Collings, 1981: 46). However, the student newspaper, Stop Press, quickly corrected the national and international press, reporting that Heath ‘denied that he ever intended DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0006

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any legal action’ and further, that to ‘the best available knowledge the Septem Viri has not been convened for over forty years’ (Moss & McGee, 1981: 1).

Functions Commonsensically, we tend to view social conflict as a dysfunctional, destructive, even pathological form of social interaction, harming individuals and groups through tearing the cohesive social fabric, and there is of course much to justify understanding disputes in this way. However, it is also clear, as Lewis Coser (1964) argued, that social conflict is able to serve a variety of productive social functions, such as allowing for the communication of dissatisfactions, defining group boundaries, providing an impetus for more adequate forms of social organisation, and even increasing social integration, especially, of course, for in-group members. There is also evidence that once the ‘MacCabe Affair’ became public, social pressure increased for participants to take sides. In this sense rather than simply revealing pre-existing divisions, the controversy also acted to create and solidify them, strengthening and simplifying antagonistic identities. Using a classic Mertonian phrase, Axton (2014) describes the episode as in part a ‘self-fulfilling prophesy’, commenting that once the media got involved, ‘people were forced to show allegiances that may not have previously been there’. Political agitators and organisers of public demonstrations are well aware of this polarising capacity of social spectacle; the manner in which dramatic events are able to elaborate and radicalise contradictions, provoking participants into providing a simple and mutually exclusive ‘this’ or ‘that’ response to the question of, in the words of Florence Reece, ‘which side are you on?’ Since such polarising processes go well beyond simply communicating information about where participants stand in advance of a public conflict, and also since they can perform a divisive role in removing nuance and in fact manipulating, rather than reflecting, social situations, it is not clear to us how helpful it is to understand such actions in classical functionalist terms exclusively. Nevertheless, one preliminary observation about the ‘MacCabe Affair’ is that it certainly did help serve certain functions for the careers of both its participants and the ideas involved. In terms of the participants, it was noted at the time ‘the capital that is being made out of what remains an internal dispute, however bitter DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0006

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its nature or far-reaching its implications’ (Jenkins, 1981: 112). Inglis remarks that ‘everyone in Cambridge had enjoyed the frisson of celebrity’ (1995: 283) and Simpson confesses that ‘it was hard not to feel a bit more important than one had felt before’ (1990: 246). Public disputes, by their nature, garner attention, and as well as generating grist for the journalistic mill, that attention also enables participants to engage in what Norman Mailer called ‘advertisements for myself ’ (also Collins, 1998: 38). Very soon after the events, King’s College proposed to extend MacCabe’s fellowship for another year, upping his salary to the same remuneration he would have received had he been successful in being appointed to a permanent University Lectureship, reportedly doing so on the basis of their perception that he’d been given a ‘raw deal’ (The Times, 1981b; Rix, 1981). However, MacCabe had no need to take up their generous offer, for he was, at the age of 31, presented with the more attractive proposition of a permanent professorship at the University of Strathclyde (THES, 1981; Walker, 1981j: 26; Witherow, 1981f), becoming not only the youngest professor in the United Kingdom, but also one of only two professors in a department of 15 lecturers. The other professor and chairman of the department, Alan Sanderson, described MacCabe as ‘one of the ablest men of his generation’ (Witherow, 1981f). From untenured, straight to Professor is an almost unheard of leap up the British academic ladder, and even if it was in part a result of the ‘Affair’, it may also add some support to what Simpson described as ‘a radical disjunction between Dr MacCabe’s two reputations, inside and outside Cambridge’ (SHD: 350). MacCabe’s subsequent career – three years later he was Head of Production at the BFI, the following year, Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, and a little later, Professor of English at Exeter University – renders the notion of him as ‘victim’ somewhat of a misnomer, as he himself readily admits, the ‘ “MacCabe Affair” ... enabled me to leave Cambridge trailing clouds of glory and an overinflated reputation’ (MacCabe, 2010a). His academic writing also benefited from events; his publishers quickly cottoning on to the commercial value of what was described as ‘Cambridge’s worst academic controversy for a generation’ (Mulhern, 1981). With impressive speed, and only two weeks after the Senate House discussion, his publishers took out an advertisement in the TLS, daring potential customers with the explicitly allusive strapline ‘Controversial and Original: Three books by Colin MacCabe’ (Figure 2.1). DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0006

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figure 2.1

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Times Literary Supplement, 27 February 1981, p. 233

Source: Reprinted with the kind permission of the Times Literary Supplement

Kermode resigned from the Edward VII Professorship in exasperation at the whole episode, crossing the Atlantic to take up a post at Columbia University in New York, commenting that ‘I packed it in as I got so tired of it all ... it was making me ill’ (Kermode, 2008). He later offered the bitter reflection that ‘Cambridge, of course, is exceptionally hostile to any kind of thought at all, as far as the English Faculty is concerned’ (Kermode, 1987: 105). This left the senior professorship vacant, and Christopher Ricks – a lead figure in opposing MacCabe’s appointment – was promptly appointed in 1982. Inglis (1995: 285–6) implies that Williams’s own retirement in 1983 (five years early) may itself have been partly connected to a sense of disillusionment with the English Faculty, contributed to in no small measure by the MacCabe dispute. DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0006

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In terms of the careers of ideas, rather than people, focussing upon the immediate victory of the antis in blocking the possibility of MacCabe being appointed to a permanent position diverts attention somewhat from the fact that the kinds of nouvelle vague theory MacCabe was understood to represent have now become more or less mainstreamed as at least one essential element within the plurality of approaches taught in English departments throughout the United Kingdom, including Cambridge. For better or for worse, Erskine-Hill was simply wrong in suggesting that ‘such positions ... must be regarded merely as a passing folly’ (SHD: 338). Surveying the current paper options available from the Cambridge English Faculty, Ricks is likewise off the mark in commenting that ‘everyone now teaches, at least at undergraduate level, in a rather valuably old-fashioned way’ (quoted in Wroe, 2005);7 as Higgins remarks, ‘if anything has come to dominate contemporary literary studies, it has been the combination of theoretical and textual analysis’ (2013: 140).8 After the decision had been made not to upgrade MacCabe, a students’ report to the Faculty Board stated that ‘many students consider it very important that the field of study in which Dr MacCabe worked should be continued to be represented within the Faculty’ (Unreserved Minutes of the Faculty Board, 22 January 1981), and the evidence appears to show not only that it did continue to be represented, but also that its representation has, since the 1980s, in fact grown. A final interesting function that the affair served, apparently thanks to the distraction that the spectacle produced, was the introduction of a feminist paper into the Cambridge English curriculum. Lisa Jardine talks of how, since ‘feminism was no part of the poststructuralist debate’ that was taking place around the figure of MacCabe, the proposal of a new paper on the ‘Literary Representation of Women’ managed to go through a Faculty Board meeting ‘on the nod’ and ‘under the cover of darkness’ (Jardine, 1994).

Notes 1 At Cambridge University, admissions, and small-group or one-to-one ‘supervision’ teaching is conducted within the colleges where students live, and which employ a certain number of College Teaching Officers (CTOs) who usually do not hold any University post. Most lecturing however, is delivered by the university’s relevant faculty or department, via

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2

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4

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University Teaching Officers (UTOs). Many UTOs who are employed by the faculty or department also have college positions (including College Lectureships), though increasingly some choose to opt-out of college membership altogether. Many of the participants suggested that the post of University Assistant Lecturer (which was only abolished in the 1990s) was an undesirable one (Holloway, SHD: Cribb, SHD; Gathercole, SHD: ErskineHill, SHD; Stevens, SHD; Beer, SHD), an issue that Ricks claims even united two of the main opposing protagonists in the fracas: ‘MacCabe and I, we discovered, agreed that Assistant Lectureships ought to be abolished’ (Ricks, 2013). MacCabe recalls things differently however: that ‘I always defended Assistant Lectureships as a way that Cambridge could try people of promise without committing to them for 40 years’ (2014). Either way, a ‘Proposal for the Abolition of University Assistant Lectureships in the Faculty’ by Ricks received wide support (Unreserved Minutes of the Faculty Board, 5 March 1981). For those who did oppose them, the objections focused on two main points: firstly, Holloway claimed that ‘Assistant Lectureships are not fully open and competitive appointments ... no single appointment at that level has brought someone in from another university for over twenty years ... Lecturers upgraded from Assistant Lecturer are persons originally appointed after in effect internal competition only, and then given a permanent appointment on no competition at all’ (SHD: 342). Secondly, since the post did not exist in other English universities and was therefore ‘anomalous in comparison to methods of appointing elsewhere’ (Axton, 2014), its status in terms of the Faculty’s long-term commitments to the employee were apparently unclear; as Ricks (2013) put it, there was ‘uncertainty over whether the lectureship was, or was not, renewable. There was a kind of dubiety as to what the status of the position of Assistant Lectureship was’. The ‘Registrary’ is another archaic term unique to the nomenclature of the University of Cambridge, referring to the senior administrative officer of the University, assisted in the post by three subordinate officers, of which the ‘Assistant Registrar’ is one. In a further Faculty Board meeting on 16 October 1980, Stephen Heath ‘expressed his disquiet about procedures which had preceded ... the Appointments Committee [meeting] during the Summer’ (Reserved Faculty Board Minutes, 16 October 1980). On this occasion, the university made the unusual decision to dedicate half of the seats in the Senate House to English students who did not yet hold their MA degree (Walker, 1981b). Interestingly, in spite of rising to the apex of its administrative structure, Swinnerton-Dyer himself recounts twice applying, and twice failing, to be appointed to a University Assistant Lectureship in mathematics at Cambridge (Swinnerton-Dyer, 2008).

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6 For example, ‘Unquiet Flow the Dons’, wrote Newsweek (Williams and Collings, 1981), and ‘Cambridge Scholars Wage Literal Warfare’ was the title of a Times Higher article (Midgley, 1981). 7 There is also now a popular MPhil in Screen Media and Cultures at Cambridge, for which MacCabe has acted as external examiner, and the incumbent King Edward VII Professor of English Literature has written widely on screen media of various kinds. 8 For a similar, though more critical, assessment of this ‘domination’, see Maskell and Robinson (2001: 174).

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3

Contextualising the Dispute Abstract: This chapter locates the affair within both its broader (socio-historical) and narrower (institutional) contexts. Firstly, it draws attention to the post-Robbins expansion of higher education, the relatively more rapid expansion of the social sciences vis-a-vis the humanities and the changing nature of English studies via its incorporation of insights emerging from the social sciences and from French theory. It stresses how these factors both facilitated and provided symbolic weaponry in the dispute. Secondly, it highlights the role played by Cambridge University’s relatively unique collegiate institutional form in structuring the resultant conflict, showing in particular how colleges provided pools from which ‘performance teams’ were recruited. Overall, it argues that such material contextualisation is essential for fully comprehending the symbolic dimensions of the affair addressed in Part II. Keywords: Cambridge University; English studies; French theory; massification of higher education; Oxbridge colleges; performance teams; social sciences and humanities; structuralism Morgan, Marcus and Patrick Baert. Conflict in the Academy: A Study in the Sociology of Intellectuals. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. doi: 10.1057/9781137521309.0007. DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0007

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Socio-historical context: the Robbins reforms and the rise of the social sciences In order to avoid the blind spots created via an exclusive focus upon specific ‘disciplinary histories’ at the expense of ‘intellectual history’ more generally (Collini, 1988), this section attempts to situate the MacCabe Affair within its broader intellectual historical context. This chapter highlights the importance of the rise of the social sciences that occurred alongside the explosion in scale and demographic heterogeneity of students within British universities during the 1960s (Savage, 2010). It suggests that this unprecedented shift in the form and scale of the British higher education sector was linked to a cleavage of what Lamont (2009) calls ‘epistemological styles’ within English Studies, one side of which intended to retain the discipline’s mooring within a traditional humanistic frame, and another which instead hoped to shift both the discipline’s methods of analysis, as well as its object of study in accordance with insights developing out of cognate disciplines, in particular, the burgeoning social sciences.1 This section also intends to show how English Studies’ late establishment in England, and especially in Cambridge where the subject initially faced resistance, combined with Cambridge’s subsequent influence in defining what came to be seen by many as an almost paradigmatic approach across the discipline in the United Kingdom (the situation was more complicated in the United States and elsewhere), contributed towards creating a situation in which perceived threats to this particular centre of the discipline, and its established approach towards criticism, were felt particularly acutely. As will become clear in the second part of the book, these broader socio-historical and education policy developments can also be seen to have provided resources of symbolic weaponry that were subsequently deployed in the performative enactment of the ‘MacCabe Affair’. We would like to suggest that the story of the MacCabe controversy ought to be placed within a broader account of disciplinary professionalisation, one which raises the question of what exactly a discipline is – a question much easier to answer in the so-called hard sciences than in the humanities. Is it, as Rorty (2006) has suggested, simply a matter of the ritualistic reading and referencing of one set of books rather than another, and the justifying of one’s claims to one community of practitioners rather than another, or does it point towards something more essential in method and content? One thing that appears clear is that disciplinary reproduction DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0007

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is unable to take place effectively without to some extent disciplining those who refuse to operate within its prescribed confines. Most of the time this disciplining (or what might otherwise be called ‘boundary policing’) happens in tacit ways through rewarding work that builds upon, and can be understood and judged in terms of, a discipline’s established corpus, and punishing that which does not. Such mechanisms help ensure a necessary focus to branches of intellectual endeavour and a coherence of aims and criteria of judgement which allow for the discipline to reproduce and extend itself in a recognisable form throughout time. However, operating simultaneously to this imperative of disciplinary reproduction, there is also an equally important countervailing pressure for disciplinary innovation and development, and such innovation often occurs through contact with, and importation of approaches from, other disciplines. Even though English Studies eventually rose to occupy one of the most central positions within both the academy and the national school curriculum, the formal study of its own national language was institutionalised strikingly late within English universities (Doyle, 1986). English first emerged not in England at all, but rather in Scotland, India, Germany, and France (Baldick, 1987; Doyle, 1986; Finkenstaedt, 1983; Viswanathan, 1989). In England, it was initially considered a rather lowly pursuit – a pastime for leisured bourgeois women, or a civilising and calmative force for the lower classes and colonial populations.2 Reading literature was considered capable of elevating minds and lowering passions, impressing upon its participants the cultural achievements of the more refined classes, and providing an arena for vicarious wish-fulfilment, where bourgeois or aristocratic lifestyles could be safely lived out in fantasy by those denied access in reality, and as such served similar ideological roles to religion (Eagleton, 1983: 23). When it did first institutionalise in England in the 1820s, its home was in the newly established University of London, rather than the medieval universities of Oxford and Cambridge, though it had arrived at the Scottish medieval University of Edinburgh, in 1762. It gained much ground as a discipline in England with the explosion of the redbrick universities at the beginning of the twentieth century, and in 1921 the Government’s Newbolt Report, ‘The Teaching of English in England’ (Board of English, 1921), was published, which set out the foundations of the way in which English Studies was to develop as a professional discipline, defining a canon of works, and used subsequently for the training of school teachers in English. The principal reason for the exaggerated tardiness of its arrival at Cambridge – the first actual Professorship of English Literature did not DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0007

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arrive at Cambridge until 1911, with a School of English and only being established in 1917 – was the dominance of the Classical curriculum.3 To put this in context, the first department of our own subject, sociology – usually considered a fledgling discipline – was established at the LSE some ten years earlier, in 1907. Prior to the establishment of the School of English at Cambridge, the subject had been taught as one section of the Medieval and Modern (later Modern and Medieval) Languages Tripos, and until a full English Tripos arrived in 1919, the subject was only intended to be studied as a specialisation (a Part II, in Cambridge parlance4), after having initially studied another subject, most likely Classics, for the first two years of one’s degree. A full tripos of Modern English Studies, without an AngloSaxon element, did not appear until 1926 (MacKillop, 1995: 207; 212). In spite of this late start, after the Great War it began to develop very rapidly, eclipsing the Classics as the central humanities discipline, with the Cambridge School, characterised by its critical and analytical approach (in distinction to Oxford’s philological and scholarly one) playing a central role. The influential, zealous, bolshie, and highly opinionated F. R. Leavis was key in championing the essential importance of the discipline in Cambridge and beyond, and in establishing what arguably became the orthodox humanistic approach to analysing literature until at least the 1960s and to some extent, and in some locations – as this particular case shows – far later too.5 The influence of Leavis, and his wife, on the manner in which the Cambridge English School developed far exceeded, however, the institutional recognition that the university offered to either of them. When faced with the indignity of being offered the opportunity to provide a term’s lectures Q. D. Leavis strongly declined, reminding a representative of the Faculty that ‘without the contribution made by my husband and myself to English studies at Cambridge there would have been no English School here for people like yourself and the Chairman of the Faculty Board to flourish in’ (Cambridge University Archives, June, 1965). For F. R. Leavis the close analysis of great works was understood to be at the heart of literary criticism and this analysis was considered a deeply moral pursuit, whereby the critic employed his or her whole intuitive humanity as a test for the work’s sincerity and merit, so that reading well was seen to hold the possibility of cultivating the moral sensitivities of the reader. This centrality of the basic instinctive human response to literature, over and above any methodologically formalistic model of analysis extended to Leavis’s distrust of other formalised modes of rationality and thought, such as those that characterised scientific reason and, DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0007

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as he saw it, the utilitarian presumptions of modern society more broadly (e.g. Leavis, 1980). Leavis’s impact also extended beyond the universities through many of his disciples becoming influential secondary school English teachers, preaching his gospel far and wide throughout the land. In some quarters, the experiences of WWII had provoked suspicion towards this antebellum belief in the humanising forces of an education in English Literature, since, as Steiner pointed out, it was now impossible to ignore how little humanistic acculturation had done to avert the barbarity of war. ‘We know now’, he wrote, ‘that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning. To say that he has read them without understanding or that his ear is gross, is cant’ (Steiner, 1967: ix). Forces of pluralism had also slowly battled their way into the study of English literature during the late 1960s and 1970s (Easthope, 1991), especially outside Oxbridge. In part this occurred through the arrival of a more socially diverse student and staff body and a broadening of the gaze of the discipline to include cultural creations that had traditionally been excluded from the narrow version of the canon that Leavis’s ‘great tradition’ (1980 [1948]) came to represent.6 Awareness was also beginning to dawn that different forms of English were being spoken and written by a diverse array of people throughout the anglophone world, and to match the new subjects of study, a new plurality of theoretical perspectives (feminist, Marxist, semiotic, psychoanalytic, phenomenological, hermeneutic, structuralist, and by the time of the ‘MacCabe Affair’, poststructuralist and deconstructionist) also began to arrive on the scene (Jones, 1981: 9). Notions of the wholeness or completeness of a literary work were made problematic, and the historical, social, and political contexts in which texts were produced (a matter that had been self-consciously bracketed in Cambridge under the influence of I. A. Richards’s formalism)7 were put back into the centre of critical reading. The shift is expressed well by the novelist and literary professor Malcolm Bradbury in his description of his own career through English departments: During the 1950s, when I was a student, the dominant mood in the study of English literature was a moral and humane one; literary studies were the essential humanist subject ... But with the expansion and hence the increased professionalisation of the subject, the tune changed: there was a hunger for literary science. By the 1960s, a volatile mixture of linguistics, psychoanalysis and semiotics, structuralism, Marxist theory, and reception aesthetics had DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0007

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begun to replace the older moral humanism. The literary text tended to move towards the status of phenomenon: a socio-psycho-culturo-linguistic and ideological event, arising from the offered competencies of language, the available taxonomies of narrative order, the permutations of genre, the sociological options of structural formation, the ideological constraints of the ‘infra-structure’. (1981: 137)

These transformations occurred alongside, and in part as a consequence of, the explosion in higher education that followed the Robbins Report in 1963, which prompted a profound change in the demographic makeup of the universities: massification of higher education meant that the university was no longer the preserve of a white male ruling class it had once been. Moreover, independently from the composition of the new students and staff, the teaching strain of the unprecedented post-Robbins leap in numbers studying English during the 1960s, combined with the recession that hit in the later 1970s, and the longanticipated funding cuts that followed,8 appear to have had a particular bearing on the feelings of unease within the Cambridge English Faculty around the time of the dispute. One of the few points of relative consensus within the storm that erupted was that the student–staff ratio in the faculty – which had reached 25:1 at one point, and was 22:1 at the time of the affair, compared to 12:1 as the recommended national norm (Williams, SHD; Stevens, 1981) – was at least a facilitating factor (e.g. Knights, 1981; Stevens, 1981; Cribb, SHD; Beer, SHD; Williams, SHD; Heath, SHD; Kirk, SHD; Sykes-Davis, SHD; Holloway, SHD; Wilson, SHD). Some blamed the colleges, since they admitted students whom it was then the Faculty’s job to lecture (e.g. Williams, SHD: 346), others argued that the Faculty itself had been ‘sheltering behind the Colleges’ (e.g. Cribb, SHD: 348; Clemmow, SHD: 360),9 whilst still others blamed the university for not providing enough posts to the faculty and failing to enforce a quota system to cap the burgeoning student numbers (Holloway, SHD: 342). Whether the issue was to be resolved by increasing the number of University posts (e.g. Heath, SHD; Barrell, SHD) or by cutting the number of students (e.g. Sykes-Davis, SHD), most agreed that at present there were simply not enough University posts for the number of students, nor adequate material resources to accommodate the enlarging faculty (Knights, 1981). However, whilst the humanities were expanding at a fast rate during this post-Robbins period, they were not (at least outside Cambridge) expanding anywhere near as rapidly as the social sciences, whose theories DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0007

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and methods were making significant incursions into the humanities themselves (Savage, 2010). Importantly with regard to the MacCabe Affair, the emergence of ‘Theory’ in English departments was not merely an import from abroad (most obviously from France), but (with notable exceptions, such as the work of Barthes) also an import from other disciplines, in particular, the social and human sciences (Steiner, 1981: 135). Whilst exogenous insights from the social sciences were not entirely neglected by the Leavis model of criticism (MacKillop, 1995, has in fact claimed that a sociological sensibility was central to the Leavis crowd vis-a-vis the Bloomsbury set), and whilst the aspiration to science, and an interest in anthropology in particular, had in fact been linked directly to Richards’s earlier project,10 as Donoghue notes, for Leavis, ‘a critic’s relation to other pursuits, notably philosophy, history, and sociology, was a vital matter only when it had the effect of making his criticism more aware’ (1981: 135). Such thinking was welcome, in other words, only to the extent that it might be used to aid the primary concern of serious valuation of a work. Many of the social scientific influences could be perceived as undermining the established mode of English criticism, due to the possibility that it might dissolve, or at least ‘de-centre’, the central category on which literary study was assumed to be based: literature. Wider society had begun to turn away from poems, plays, and novels as their primary source of cultural expression and experience, and a certain minority of the Cambridge English Faculty were suggesting that those media to which their attention had increasingly been drawn could themselves be productively analysed in a similar manner to literature (even if the interest in this broader range of media within the Cambridge Faculty more generally extended nowhere near as far as other English departments elsewhere in the country). Heath, for example, was interested in cinema, Williams had been introducing film into his lectures, MacCabe had just published his book on Godard and the Dziga Vertov Group (MacCabe, 1980) and after the affair went on to develop ‘screen theory’ with Heath and others.11 The expansion of the term ‘culture’ to cover practices and creations beyond the more restricted zones of what might here be called ‘high culture’ was of course a characteristically social scientific – and in particular, anthropological – move to make (Tyler, 1891), and one that Williams (e.g. 1958) had been hard at work elaborating. Leavis, by contrast, had been clear that genuine culture could only ever be the preserve of a gifted ‘tiny minority’ whose role it was to DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0007

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protect against the majority’s philistinism, and where to possible guide the cultural discrimination of the masses (Leavis, 1930; Carey, 1992, for variations on this theme); his, like Richards’s before him, was a vision of modern cultural decline. As had previously been the case with the Classics, a Newmanesque idea of the university (the ‘creative centre of civilisation’) and in particular English Studies within it (as ‘chief of the humanities’), was key to Leavis’s elitist account of how this decline was to be countered, and an idealised version of Cambridge,12 and indeed Leavis’s, and his collaborators’ role within Cambridge, provided the immediate model (Leavis, 1943). Leavis had been born and raised in Cambridge (and eventually died there), and he wrote about his Scrutiny colleagues in an oft-repeated quote, and seemingly without any sense of possible overstatement, that ‘We were – and we knew we were – Cambridge – the essential Cambridge – in spite of Cambridge’ (2013 [1962]: 76). Echoes of Leavis’s famous public feud with C. P. Snow (Leavis, 2013 [1962]; Snow, 2001 [1959]) over the relative merits of the more ancient humanistic mode of understanding, and the more modern scientific one, can be readily discerned amidst the din of the MacCabe Affair.13 Whether or not it was in fact accurate, as we shall see later, Snow’s disparaging description of the ‘mainly literary’ ‘traditional culture’ as ‘behaving like a state whose power is rapidly declining ... occasionally letting fly in fits of aggressive pique quite beyond its means’ (Snow, 1956) bears more than a passing resemblance to one of the main strategic positioning characterisations of the antis, which the pro camp intended to fix. Snow, moreover, had been in support of the social sciencefavouring Robbins expansion, whereas Leavis had been deeply opposed (Collini, 1993: xl), and another of Leavis’s public feuds had been with Noel Annan – a key champion of the importance of the social sciences to universities, and in particular, a key supporter of the introduction of sociology into Cambridge. Further evidence that the MacCabe Affair was related to the perceived threat of social scientific approaches to the more humanistic modes of criticism (and hence two distinct ‘epistemological styles’ having developed within the Faculty) comes from the fact that both the pros and the antis associated the kinds of work MacCabe came to represent with the social sciences. At the time, Francis Mulhern, for instance, drew attention to the influence of the Althusserian sociologists Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst on MacCabe’s work (Mulhern, 1981), and Sykes-Davis DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0007

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used the term ‘linguistic sociology’ (SHD: 336) to mock what he saw as MacCabe’s defective approach (an epithet that might reveal as much about the perceived status of sociology at Cambridge, or at least the status in which it was held by the speaker, as it does about MacCabe’s own work, e.g. Rose & Ziman, 1964: 121). Kirk, a professor of Greek at Cambridge, defended the perspectives ‘that anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and psychology have opened up for us’ and chastised factions of the English Faculty for ignoring them (SHD: 345; also Beaton, 1981: 199). Malcolm Bradbury used the term ‘literary science’ in the passage quoted earlier, and MacCabe discusses how the radical Parisian theory of the 1960s, from which his own work drew inspiration, was grounded in a ‘fundamentally anthropological approach’. He went on to claim that whilst Cambridge had been ‘the pre-eminent English school through the middle decades of the 20th century’, by the time he arrived, ‘it was desperately in need of rejuvenation’ from ‘the vast new resources being opened up by linguistics and anthropology’ (MacCabe, 2009; 2010a). The situation was also described in similar terms in a letter written to the Times Literary Supplement: In an age in which the powerful intellectual movements of Marxism and modern sociology and anthropology have cast convincing doubts on the absoluteness of cultural values, and in an age of active contact with cultures in which literature and literary studies have not enjoyed the privileged position they traditionally have in our own, the elite status once claimed for them, particularly at Cambridge, must now be actively defended if it is to be maintained. (Beaton, 1981: 199)

One of the more drastic solutions proposed by members of the pros’ performance team in order to overcome the evident fractures within the Faculty was the possible foundation of a break-away Department of Modern English Studies headed by Frank Kermode (Heath, SHD: 331; a proposal seconded by Clemmow, SHD: 362), and the primary reason offered for this radical proposal again centred on English Studies’ ambivalent relationship to the social sciences. As Williams put it, In Cambridge especially we have to ask a hard question: can radically different work still be carried on under a single heading or department when there is not just diversity of approach but more serious and fundamental difference about the object of knowledge (despite overlapping of the actual material of study)? Or must there be some wider reorganisation of the received divisions of the humanities, the human sciences, into newly defined and newly collaborative arrangements? (Williams, 1983: 211) DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0007

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England was therefore late to institutionalise the formal study of the English language and its literature within its universities, and that the University of Cambridge was even later than elsewhere in the country. Once it did become established, however, it managed to displace the former central humanistic discipline, Classics, and establish itself as the core humanity. What’s more, Cambridge English, through its charismatic proponents such as Richards, Empson, and Leavis, came to be seen by some as definitive of the paradigm, not just in the universities, but also outside them, in part through the Cambridge extra-mural ‘extension lecturing’ system (Doyle, 1986), and in schools too, both through its control of a widely used examination board, and through its former students going on to teach in secondary schools up and down the country. This contextual environment had two primary effects upon the MacCabe incident. Firstly, since English had only relatively recently secured its professionalised position in Cambridge and elsewhere in England, and since the paradigm of English studies in general was understood by many to be so bound up with Cambridge English in particular, this set the scene for great potential anxiety arising once this centre was considered to be under threat, especially from an enemy within. Leavis’s primary concern, after all, had been to ensure that English became disciplined: ‘isn’t a discipline notably what English has, in this period of emancipation and high prestige, not provided? The charge is hard to resist’, he wrote (1943: 33). Too much pluralism, too quickly, could be understood as undermining the discipline’s recently won status. Christopher Ball, an English don at Oxford, wrote at the time that the fears produced through the accommodation of ‘theory’ in English studies might have in fact concealed a deeper anxiety common to all relatively young disciplines: ‘the possibility that the subject is not really an academic discipline at all’ (Ball, 1981: 136). As Wyn Grant has noted in reference to the history of the discipline of Political Science in the United Kingdom, ‘intellectual openness and tolerance of eclecticism has its merits, but if it is allowed to become too uncontrolled it can lead to a lack of rigour in the deployment of methodologies and techniques, which undermines the systematic comparison that the subject has to offer if it is to be distinguished from polemic or idle speculation’ (2010: 24). Similarly, English Studies appears to have been attempting to maintain this precarious balance between pluralism and innovation on the one hand, and coherence and continuity on the other. In reference to John Beer’s suggestion in the Senate House (SHD: 355) that five separate strands of scholarship had emerged in the Cambridge English Faculty DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0007

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(traditional, international, close reading, analysis of literature in social and cultural contexts and an alignment of the study of literature with more popular media), Bergonzi writes that In one sense such pluralism is admirable, a fine instance of the multiplicity of interests and the free play of minds which one expects in a great university. Yet not all approaches can easily coexist; choices may have to be made, and voices imply exclusions ... What looks like desirable diversity from inside a subject can seem mere fragmentation and incoherence to those outside it, or not very securely within it. (1990: 16)

Institutionalising and sustaining the coherence of disciplines within the humanities, which are by their very nature ‘fissiparous disciplines’ – inherently prone towards internal division, may involve far more selfconscious ‘disciplining’, in Leavis’s sense, than is necessary in the more commonly mono-paradigmatic sciences. Secondly, even though many of the theoretical shifts in approach that were being debated during the MacCabe Affair had already taken place long before in other English Studies departments elsewhere in the country (Williams, 1983: 211), Cambridge had to some extent come to be perceived, or at the least perceived itself to be (and it was the perception that was important) an ‘indispensable’ touchstone for any mainstream shift in the discipline’s character, something similar to what ActorNetwork Theorists have called an ‘obligatory passage point’ for legitimising a redefinition of the discipline (Callon, 1986). Since it was considered to have played such a significant role in English Studies’ recent establishment, the possibility of any drastic local changes to its form could be understood to involve far more profound and wide-ranging cultural ramifications, and therefore the symbolic effects of an incident such as the MacCabe controversy could become inflated well beyond any of its actual local and practical consequences. Finally, though it is not necessary for our purposes to elaborate here on its details, a broader socio-historical contextual factor worth noting, and one that again had wider symbolic repercussions, was the election in May 1979 of Margret Thatcher as Prime Minister, an event that immediately signalled the end of the post-war neo-Keynesian consensus. Later, we will suggest that even before the most radical cuts to universities that arrived in 1981, this recent shift in national government and the political polarisation it automatically produced throughout the country, generated a public climate in which narratives that played upon struggles

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between the conservative Right and the progressive Left gained a degree of symbolic resonance that was in many ways unthinkable before Thatcher’s arrival at No. 10.

Proximate contexts: colleges, collective cultures, and performance teams As well as the conflict being embedded within, and partially facilitated by, broader socio-historical contexts, the fractures that revealed themselves and became further developed in the MacCabe Affair were also embedded in more proximate institutional settings, which helped organise the divisions and allegiances that arose and shaped the symbolic form of the public dispute. This chapter suggests that taking into account the institutional particularities of Cambridge is important both to understanding some of the pressures within the English Faculty at that time of the affair, as well as helping explain the form that the subsequent debate took. It argues that colleges were both the primary pools from which members of ‘performance teams’ were enlisted, as well as the entities that helped solidify corporate bonds and organise collective thought and action (Douglas, 1986), and therefore that these institutional structures played an important role in determining aspects of the symbolic dimension of the conflict in a manner that cannot be captured through the methodological move of ‘bracketing out’ such factors in advance. Beyond Cambridge, it also shows how other institutions, national and international, became enlisted as actors in the affair. Whilst the idea of an academic college, like the idea of ‘Literary Theory’ itself, came initially to England from Paris, and then to Cambridge via Oxford, some historians have even made the claim that the distinct ‘idea of a collegiate university was born in Cambridge’ (Brooke et al., 1988: 92). The collegiate system itself, and the relationship among the colleges, the Faculties, and the central university administration, means that the university cannot be adequately understood as a singular institutional entity, but must instead be seen as a pluralistic federation of heterogenous, occasionally imbricated, and to borrow a structuralist term ‘relatively autonomous’, institutional settings. Though the university predates the colleges, during the 15th and 16th centuries the colleges became dominant, and retained this dominance up until the 19th and early 20th centuries when – especially with the reforms brought about by the 1922 DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0007

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Royal Commission on Oxford and Cambridge – the university was enabled to reassert itself. It is in this sense – as the separate legislative and administrative body known today – that Halsey has claimed that it ‘would be no outrage to assert that until recently, there has been no university’ (1992: 150). Nevertheless, though they are less autonomous than in Oxford, the colleges still hold much of the power in their control over admissions, in some cases in their vast wealth, and in the provision of a large proportion of (especially undergraduate) teaching and academic posts. Colleges are often not merely workplaces, but homes too, for both students and also for some of the fellows. Each college provides a distinct self-governing institutional arena in which a unique culture is given the opportunity to develop, often one rather different from that found within other colleges, as well as that found within the Faculties. The various overt rites and rituals which still take place within the colleges and the more or less participatory and formally democratic nature of their governance, at least for fellows, help promote and serially reconfirm senses of shared solidarity. Moreover, the less formalised everyday ‘interaction rituals’, as Goffman (1967) called them, that occur within all institutional settings but especially those that operate within a common physical space, help solidify their participants as members of a moral community, defined in distinction to, indeed often against, the various other moral communities under the university’s broad umbrella. Ritualised face-to-face encounters develop around Committee Meetings, within shared office corridors, in Senior Combination Rooms or Fellows’ Drawing Rooms, and across High Tables, promoting the creation and solidification of the college clans in senses of mutual moral obligation. If the forging of moral community proves effective, then each college member comes to believe that his or her own college represents the best the university has to offer. Further, whilst nestling loyalties, solidarities, and friendships are encouraged to congeal within colleges, rivalries are likewise ritually fomented between them, both formally, through such things as sporting, academic performance, and internal league table contests, and informally through competition for the highest quality student applicants, the most eminent university post-holders, the most agreeable entertainment, or the most generous donor benefactions. As was noted by some outside of the Faculty at the time (e.g. Dougherty, SHD: 356), colleges are also especially important for large subjects such as English studies, in which a single college usually employs DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0007

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multiple fellows and in which, compared with the more laboratory-based sciences, small-group supervised discussion remains at the centre of an undergraduate education. A representative of the university’s administration even told The Guardian that the ‘English Faculty is the only one at Cambridge that has still not moved from College-based teaching to a Faculty system’ (Walker, 1981b). One consequence of the particular importance of colleges to the English Tripos was that the manner and content of what was taught to students varied greatly among different colleges. As an undergraduate put it at the time, a ‘student who has been taught at Pembroke might as well be in a different universe from a student being taught in Jesus. ... For most English students, if all Faculty teaching was swept away tomorrow it would leave a barely noticeable gap in their education’ (Evans, SHD: 351). On top of this, it appears that there was little guidance nor incentive for those teaching within the colleges to make their tuition accord with the faculty’s vision, so that as Penny Wilson put it, from ‘the point of view of someone in my position as a College Lecturer, and from the point of view of most undergraduates, the Faculty exists primarily as an examining body’ (SHD 358). Lectures in the English Faculty were notoriously poorly attended (e.g. Kermode, 1997: 253), and one student revealed to the Senate House audience that, ‘one of the first things that I was told by my supervisor last term was it was “not necessary” to attend lectures or seminars organised by the Faculty in order to pursue the course with success, or satisfaction’ (Johnson, SHD: 358). As well as structuring emotional solidarities and rivalries, in the MacCabe Affair, colleges also supplied pools from which colleagues could be extemporaneously enrolled into what Goffman called ‘performance teams’ and mobilised as allies in the symbolic struggles that ensued. Goffman stressed that such ‘performance teams’ are often ‘secret societies’, in that ‘if a performance is to be effective it will be likely that the extent and character of the cooperation that makes this possible will be concealed and kept secret’ (1990 [1959]: 104). This ad hoc use of pre-existent organisational ties – what Bourdieu (1986) called ‘social capital’ – has been well documented in protest movements (e.g. Calhoun, 1997), and others (e.g. Collins, 1998; Farrell, 2001) have shown the importance of considering collaborative intellectual networks in understanding the evolution and content of ideas themselves. As Goffman described it, a performance team is ‘a set of individuals whose intimate cooperation is required if a given projected definition of the situation is to be maintained’ (ibid.). They are DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0007

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therefore a coordinated set of actors collectively aiming to produce or maintain a particular sense of reality. King’s and Jesus – two colleges that were notably detested by Leavis – were also the two principal institutional pools from which the pros’ team was recruited. Jesus was home to Raymond Williams, Stephen Heath, and Lisa Jardine, and King’s to Frank Kermode, Tony Tanner, John Barrell, Norman Bryson, Gareth Stedman-Jones, and David Simpson, all of whom spoke out in support of MacCabe. It was also, of course, home to MacCabe himself. Kermode, who as we noted earlier left his university job for America in a state of exasperation at the faculty’s apparent recalcitrance on the issue of reform (Watson, 1981), nevertheless retained a life fellowship at King’s, which he described as a ‘pleasing connection’ to an institution to which he continued to feel a sense of loyalty (Kermode, 1997: 258). Simpson describes the King’s English fellows at that time as a ‘group diverse enough, indeed, but sharing a common distance from the mainstream of the faculty’ (1990: 256). Howard ErskineHill, a vocal opponent of MacCabe’s, appears to have reconciled the lack of fit between his institutional home within Jesus College and his opinions concerning Literary Criticism, by leaving his fellowship at Jesus in 1980 and moving to what was perceived by some as the far more traditional Pembroke College, in which two other members of the anti team (Ian Jack and John Dougherty) resided. Lisa Jardine, another English fellow of Jesus at the time, who also ‘stood up to be counted’ as a pro (Jardine, 1994), claims that Heath and Erskine-Hill were unable to even talk to one another. Richard Axton, who Stop Press reported was ‘widely believed’ to have, with Christopher Ricks, gone ‘counter to the earlier decision of the Faculty Board and voted against [MacCabe’s] upgrading’ (Fisher et al., 1981) was a fellow, alongside Ricks, at Christ’s College. Even for those allies who were not directly involved in the teaching of English at Cambridge, but who were nevertheless recruited into performance teams to take part in the MacCabe spectacle, college location appears to have remained important. For instance, the economic and political historian, Gareth Stedman-Jones who spoke in support of the pros’ concerns in the Senate House debate, was also a fellow of King’s, just as John Dougherty, a mathematician who spoke against them, was a fellow of Pembroke. Outside Cambridge, the pros’ network was broadened through their relative success in enlisting more distant elites in their performance teams, whose apparent absence of immediate stakes in the dispute may have appeared to add implicit legitimacy to their cause. For instance, from Oxford University they received a petition signed by DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0007

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300 academics, written support from Richard Ellmann, Goldsmiths’ Professor of English literature and expert on James Joyce (the subject of MacCabe’s aforementioned book), and an article published in Time Out by Terry Eagleton (1981). Eagleton, it is worth mentioning in light of this discussion of networks and institutional settings, had been a doctoral student of Raymond Williams, and subsequently went on to take up a research fellowship at Jesus College, Cambridge, too. It was also reported that the pro camp received letters from Yale University, home to the ‘Yale School of Deconstructionism’, which had by this point become emblematic in the United States of many of the kinds of theory apparently at stake in the MacCabe dispute, as well as from several French universities, all ‘urging a reconsideration of the MacCabe Issue’ (Walker, 1981h).14 Beyond the manner in which Cambridge’s actual institutional form may have influenced the shape of the affair, later on we will also discuss how cultural ideas of Cambridge circulating within the public imaginary – what we might call the university and its colleges’ popular ‘symbolic form’ – also helped organise and frame the conflict that took place.

Notes 1 Specified in a much looser manner to Kuhn’s notion of a paradigm, Lamont defines ‘epistemological styles’ as ‘preferences for particular ways of understanding how to build knowledge, as well as beliefs in the very possibility of proving those theories’ (Lamont, 2009: 54), and although she is more concerned with ‘epistemological styles’ as they map onto discrete ‘disciplinary cultures’, the term appears equally relevant to when multiple ‘epistemological styles’ develop within a single discipline. 2 A sense of its social standing can be grasped from a participant in the congregation debate before its establishment at Oxford opining that ‘women should be considered, and the second and third-rate men who were to become schoolmasters’ (Palmer, 1965: 111). 3 Heath quotes from a participant in an early discussion in the Senate House over a proposed English Lectureship who suggested that ‘learning English ... should be kept within the first ten years of one’s life ... literary attainments should be acquired through erudition in the Greek and Latin languages’ (Heath, 1994: 23–4). 4 At Cambridge University, a bachelor’s degree is organised into a ‘Tripos’, which is divided into two parts, each typically lasting either one or two years depending on the discipline. DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0007

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5 A journalist wrote at the time of the MacCabe quarrel that ‘the shadow of Leavis hangs heavily over Cambridge’ (Jenkins, 1981: 112). 6 In particular, for example, at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University (founded in 1964), thanks to an exile from English Studies – Richard Hoggart. Under his, and subsequently Stuart Hall’s leadership, not only was French and Italian theory incorporated into cultural critique, but the object of critical attention was itself also vastly expanded to include a focus upon ‘low’ as well as ‘high’ cultural expressions. 7 Richards’s approach to literary analysis had a profound effect on systematising and formalising the discipline and distancing it from its earlier dilettantish and belletristic characteristics, which acted to retard its institutionalisation. Part of his influence was to produce a method of literary analysis that could be readily examined in a methodical manner. His method of ‘practical criticism’ emerged in the mid-1920s from his practice of distributing brief poems, highly variable in quality, and with no indication of author or date, to students who were to provide written feedback on them. He published the results of these exercises in his landmark (1929) Practical Criticism in which he documented in detail the various ways in which the students failed to respond appropriately, critically, or with originality to the poems. He prescribed a close encounter with texts themselves which focused on an analysis of the complex relations between their internal compositional elements. Whilst this approach to textual analysis, and its later development by Empson, allowed for formalisation, it also had the effect of treating texts as autonomous things, abstracted from the contexts of their production. This was both different from the traditional manner of approaching a literary work through paying attention to the work itself alongside an understanding of the author and his or her times, as well as the more recent work inspired by Williams, which re-embedded literary texts within the contemporaneous social forces which helped give rise to them. 8 Though Thatcher had previously been Education Secretary in the early 1970s, it was soon after her arrival as Prime Minister that the most stringent Higher Education cuts were announced. In 1981, the Treasury gave the Universities Grants Committee a month to plan an 18 reduction in their budget over the next 3 years, involving a loss of approximately 3,000 posts. 9 Kermode (2008) recalls discovering ‘that there were undergraduates who had been through their three years and had never been taught directly by a member of the Faculty’. 10 Malinowski had in fact written a supplementary chapter to Ogden and Richards’s (1923) The Meaning of Meaning, which had been interested amongst other things in the ‘sociological and scientific understanding of language’. However, it was precisely over this issue of allying English Studies too closely with more scientific forms of analysis that Leavis (far from

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uncharacteristically) fell out with Richards, even though he had earlier attended, and been inspired by his lectures as a student, and in many ways carried on much of his critique, and his wife, and close collaborator on Scrutiny, Queenie Roth had been supervised in her PhD, and likewise heavily influenced by him. To complicate the picture, Ricks, a prominent anti, had already begun his, later much elaborated, project of treating the popular lyrics of Bob Dylan as worthy material for serious literary analysis (1975). In his (1943) ‘Sketch for an “English School”‘, the Cambridge English tripos is the illustrative case throughout. Leavis’s reputation for relishing public controversy, combined with his avoidance of the Faculty that had done so much to retard his, and indeed his wife’s, promotion, earned him the affectionately satirical moniker from a grateful former student of the ‘Ogre of Downing Castle’ (Jacobson, 1963). Institutional contact also appears to have been important in framing the tumultuous relationship between Ricks and Kermode who had worked together at Bristol before Kermode had moved to Cambridge via UCL. Kermode described how he ‘thought it would be a help to get Christopher Ricks, whom I admired, here ... but that was like dropping a match into the powder, after which there was bitter enmity on all sides; I knew Ricks well and thought we were not so different in our views about things and that if we worked together we might be able to make some sense of the place, but we couldn’t; ... one issue was Colin MacCabe ... Ricks was violently opposed to him, not without reason’ (2008).

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Part II

Symbolic Struggles and Performative Positioning Having discussed the socio-historical and institutional contexts of the affair, this section intends to deal with the symbolic and dramaturgical aspects of how the dispute itself was enacted, focussing, in particular, on the Senate House debate. Controversies can be understood as liminal events since they are defined by a breakdown of collective norms and subsequent struggles over the reconstruction of symbolic classifications (Turner, 1974). We demonstrate how these struggles are best captured through adopting a pragmatically synthetic approach which combines elements of recent cultural sociology with the perspective of positioning theory that has been developed elsewhere in relation to public intellectual interventions and engagements (e.g. Baert, 2015). The former is seen as helpful in decoding the symbolic landscape upon which the performances depend in order to compel their audiences. It therefore highlights issues such as staging, sacralisation, play, fantasy, pollution, appeals to universality and the deployment of stigmatising or dignifying symbolic labels. The latter is seen as productive in its ability on the one hand, to show how actors strategise both alone and in teams to position and fix social reality, and on the other, to emphasise the contextual constraints and enablements that act upon symbolic manoeuvring. DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0008

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We begin from the assumption that the pure fact of MacCabe’s failure to receive tenure was simply that: an empirical occurrence without inherent significance in its ‘facticity’ one way or another. Facts, such as those described in the ‘events’ section earlier, are unable to speak for themselves, but rather need to be told in a particular way in order to acquire symbolic meaning (Alexander, 1984: 303). Facts only acquire meaning, and become more than ‘mere facts’, once coded in meaningful ways and located within culturally comprehensible narratives from which they derive their significance. Further, the presence of such narratives is itself contingent upon the wider cultural context in which the particular telling of the events takes place. It is worth mentioning, for instance, that nothing much was made of the fates of two other University Assistant Lecturers who also came up for tenure at the same time as MacCabe, one of whom succeeded, the other of whom failed to be appointed, raising the obvious question of how and why a controversy occurred in the specific MacCabe instance. Drawing upon anthropological insights into symbolic classification systems, as well as elements of structural functionalist sociology, Alexander’s (2003) analysis of the Watergate Scandal suggests that a symbolic hierarchy exists within which the facts of events can be publicly narrated, and that controversies are defined by the presence of significant disputes over both the systems of classification into which particular events are to be placed, as well as (drawing implicitly upon Parsons) the level of value-generalisation at which such facts are told. Narrating facts at the more profane level in this symbolic hierarchy signals that whatever has occurred has done so within the terms of a continually and tacitly functioning set of norms and values, and is therefore remarkable – in the literal sense – only to the extent of reporting activity aimed towards the achievement of everyday goals and interests. Narrating facts at a more sacred level in this symbolic hierarchy signals that collective norms, or at an even higher level of generalisation, shared societal values, have been brought into question and therefore that a state of systemic crisis is at hand. Though far more consequential than the MacCabe Affair as an event, the Watergate scandal was in fact more simplistic in its symbolic dimension. Effectively, the struggle was over whether the facts of the break-in to the Watergate Hotel were to be told at the level of everyday goals and interests (i.e. the level of ‘politics as usual’) as the Nixon administration wished, or, as eventually took place, at the more sacred levels of societal norms and values, hence signalling systemic crisis and the need for fundamental purification and renewal. As we describe in the following DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0008

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two chapters, the MacCabe Affair, by contrast, was more complicated, in that different parties tried to position the narrative of events so that different aspects of the controversy were seen as either sacred, and therefore in need of protection, or profane, and hence easily dealt with at the level of workaday faculty administration. Moreover, whilst we find this model very useful in bringing to the surface the often latent and undetected symbolic substratum of social life, our concern works against reaching for levels of abstraction necessary for modified forms of general functionalist theory, and instead towards paying due attention to the distinctness of empirical contexts, developing theory in a more ad hoc, pragmatic, and grounded manner to address such specificity. In what follows we provide examples of strategies and counterstrategies employed first by the pros, and then by the antis, in order to position both actors and ideas in relation to each other, as well as in relation to the Durkheimian poles of the ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’. These strategies and counterstrategies are understood as performative since their successful enactment was aimed towards bringing into being, or solidifying, some meaningful social reality that was not present, or not consensually established, in advance (Austin, 1962). In other words, the performances were not merely reports on what had occurred or opinions on what should occur, but rather forms of social action aimed at bringing about certain changes in the arrangement of the symbolic landscape through which the affair was interpreted by those who bore witness. Although some attention is paid to the performative success or failure of these strategies, the focus is primarily on simply highlighting their presence and delineating their form. Since the majority of the actors made their living from the professional analysis and use of the English language they were therefore highly sensitive to the power of drama, oration, and rhetoric, as well as the seduction of linguistic aesthetic, which added both to the quality and clear theatricality of the events, thus rendering them particularly amenable to dramaturgical analysis.1 Furthermore, argumentation, by its very nature, has a tendency towards rhetorical escalation, a process which often triumphs over whatever pacifying intentions actors may start out with. For instance, reflecting back on his own intervention, Kermode, who was by all accounts far from pugnacious in temperament, laments that ‘in the course of the controversy I had unwittingly acquired the polemical manners of the opposition’ (1997: 256–7). Nevertheless, we intend to demonstrate that the fruitfulness of such an analysis need not be restricted to cases of symbolic dispute in which the dramatic is so clearly pronounced. DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0008

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Examples of Symbolic Strategies Employed by the Pros Abstract: This chapter provides three examples of performative positioning strategies employed by those we dub the ‘pro’ camp, showing how they were in turn met with counterstrategies. Firstly, we stress the importance of staging the centrepiece of the dispute in the hallowed ground of the university’s historic Senate House. Secondly, we show how raising the issue of MacCabe’s non-reappointment to the level of the sacred was a key strategic investment for the ‘pro’ camp. Thirdly, we show how the ‘pros’ attempted to position the ‘antis’ as a conservative grouping, both culturally and politically, and therefore implicitly position themselves as progressive, as well as attach the affair to a well-worn narrative of an out-of-touch, stick-in-the-mud Old Guard resisting necessary progress. Keywords: conflict; dramaturgy; narrative; performance; sacred and profane; staging; strategies and counterstrategies Morgan, Marcus and Patrick Baert. Conflict in the Academy: A Study in the Sociology of Intellectuals. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. doi: 10.1057/9781137521309.0009. 

DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0009

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Holding the debate in the Senate House Stages, and their sets, convey crucial background information to an audience about the context and significance of an act, and are therefore key to framing successful performances (Goffman, 1974). Control over a stage means control over a central aspect of what Alexander calls ‘the means of symbolic production’ (2004: 91). One strategic achievement of the pro camp was securing the Senate House as the stage upon which the main debate would be acted out. Whilst Cambridge is more generally a highly ritualistic university, the Senate House in particular holds a privileged place within the university’s ritualistic geography. It is in many ways the university’s main agora, and is considered distinctly hallowed ground. It is where many of the key ritual events of the university, such as students’ graduation ceremonies, take place, and previously where the most powerful governing body (the Council of the Senate) would meet in order to periodically reconfirm or revise the collective values and unified actions of the university.2 It is a space, in other words, transformed into place through ritualised performance and the sedimentation of historical meaning and myth (Massey, 2005); a place radically separated from the mundane working spaces of everyday faculty life. Where faculty meetings are limited and closed spaces of performance, debates that occur in the Senate House implicitly address the university at large. The simple achievement of securing the Senate House as the stage for the exchange of views that took place therefore signalled that an intervention into the conscience collective of the university may well ensue. In addition to the event itself, a transcript of the debate that took place was published in the Cambridge University Reporter, the official journal of the university. The transcription of the proceedings into an object that could be consulted and scrutinised beyond the finite time and space of the Senate House debate itself vastly broadened the reach of the debate as an effective ‘means of symbolic production’, and so too, the extension of the network of those potentially invested in the affair.3 As the speakers made their interventions in the Senate House, they did so by addressing their comments to the Vice Chancellor as ‘Sir’, adding to the dramatic effect of a courtroom or parliamentary house. Therefore, whilst no inquiry had been launched (nor in fact ever was), on the symbolic level, the format and mise-en-scène of the proceedings gave the impression that the faculty itself was standing trial, and that some misdemeanour against the sacred was at issue. DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0009

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But of course on the level of the real, the faculty was not on trial, and the antis well knew it. The contribution that a stage and its set makes to what Coleridge called the ‘willing suspension of disbelief ’ is only successful if the actors collude in playing by the script which accords with the set, and the antis had no intention of doing so. The antis’ counterstrategy therefore involved lowering the tone of the proceedings so as to desacralise the event, deprive it of its ritual status, expose the performance as mere verisimilitude, and so return it to the level of the profane. One tactic to this end involved employing humour and casual indifference to undermine the pros’ efforts towards ‘impression management’ (Goffman, 1990 [1959]). In contrast to the sacred and solemn tone that was, quite literally, set by the austere neo-classical building, the jocular triviality with which many of the antis delivered their own performances signalled to the 600 strong audience not only a sense of security in the knowledge that MacCabe’s supporters had already lost the battle and nothing that happened in the Senate House would reverse the Appointment Committee’s decision, but also that the ‘MacCabe Affair’ had nothing at all of the sacred about it. For instance, commenting upon the term ‘structuralism’ which had, as we shall see later, become a key semantic weapon in the debate, the surrealist poet Sykes-Davis whimsically joked that ... like all words that end in the suffix -ism it has no ascertained meaning – always excepting ‘prism’, and perhaps ‘schism’, for the sake of its usefulness in discussing the English faculty though, I am glad to learn that there is no schism here ... I can for example, say quite grammatically, and what matters more, truthfully, that not all members of the Faculty of English are brushed with the same tar. If you see one or other of them smeared with a gooey black substance, you should not assume that he has rubbed against some structure or structuralist. He may be a perfectly honest man. (SHD: 336)4

Humour, especially in the affective responses it is able to evoke in the form of collective and contagious laughter, has the advantage in symbolic struggles of encouraging shared ‘effervescence’ (Durkheim, 2001 [1912]), helping solidify a sense of community amongst those who are ‘in on the joke’. Further, it has the added benefit of avoiding the necessity to employ outright invective, which runs the risk of losing favour with one’s audience. The use of humour, if effective in eliciting amusement, acts as a shield and alibi for degrees of offence that would be unthinkable in its absence. Bakhtin (1941) famously described this subversion of the DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0009

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dominant projected text as ‘carnivalesque’, and showed how it greatly enlarged, if just for some short time, the range of possible acceptable behaviour. The capacity of humour to draw factions of the audience and performer together in shared amusement was also often combined with a variety of other rhetorical techniques, such as sarcasm, insincere politeness, pretend sympathy and surrealism, all of which drew their performative power from the dramatically potent realm of play. Long, for instance, affected the transparently disingenuous notion that he was ‘not, of course, for a moment, suggesting that Dr MacCabe himself leaked all these private and confidential matters to the press’, and feigned his concern that ‘the whole business subjects Dr MacCabe to cruel exposure’ (SHD: 343). Erskine-Hill’s carefree contribution discussed the events as if they had occurred in a parallel universe and university. Alluding to Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, a novel in which the central protagonist is himself blocked from access to the university, and summoning a performance within his own performance, he told the fictional tale of the non-reappointment of ‘Mr Y’ at the ‘University of Christminster’, and how a press campaign had been launched in protest in ‘The Grauniad’ and identified as such in the ‘Christminster Evening News’, claiming that the whole episode had, like his story itself, a ‘surreal, somewhat fabricated air’ to it (Erskine-Hill, SHD: 338).5 He concluded his show on an equally arch note by implicitly poking fun at literary theory’s grand pretensions, reporting that when ‘I last visited Christminster it was still a moot point whether Mr Y had been helped or hindered by these events, for he had become as it were deconstructed in the crisis, and reconstituted rather as a configuration of conflicting signs than a man of fact’ (ibid.). The antis’ disruption of the pros’ projected definition of the situation did not go unchallenged however, and the pros worked away at reinstating a fitting solemnity and realism to the proceedings, reasserting their claim that a crisis had indeed occurred. Heath, for example, retorted that ‘[w]e can’t put our heads in the sand anymore. We can’t lull ourselves with stories of Christminster anymore. When Dr Long tells us that we shall have to put things off and let a lapse of time go by, we have to disagree. The state of the Faculty needs urgent attention’ (SHD: 362). Such confident nonchalance and attempts at either casting the events in a surreal light or else mischievously lowering the tone were all conducted in the spirit of play. Performance is saturated with play and it is no coincidence that we refer to formally framed performances as ‘plays’. Whilst the ritual of the Senate House debate projected an enforced DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0009

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and rule-bound rigidity, the playfulness of the antis’ jibes and fantasies aimed at subversion, at a ‘loosening up’ of the show, and an ushering in of a more permissive atmosphere. On a performative level, what play has going for it is its seductive quality – its tempting call to ‘let go’ and ‘feel good’, a siren song which when sung effectively, only the most joyless audience is capable of resisting. However, whilst play, and especially the heightened form of play found within direct humour, vastly expands the range of permissible behaviour within a scene, it is, like all performance, also a delicate balancing act – constantly running the risk of blithe flippancy. Just as the pros’ attempts at demonstrating the gravity of the injustice that had occurred could, if not carried out with care, fall into an unappealing po-faced humourlessness, so too the antis’ quipping and projection of a lighter, more spirited sense of play, risked being received as instead misjudged facetiousness. These examples point to a more general insight into social performance – that audiences collude in determining a performance’s dramatic success, and that the performers themselves are aware of this fact. In this sense, a successful performance ought properly be understood as always to some extent a co-creation involving necessary input from both actors and audience, an implicit rule that structures all dialogic social interaction. Both sides of the social interface that constitutes a performance are required to ‘play along’ in order for the symbolic communication inherent within it to come off effectively. If an audience remains incredulous, then the performance has failed, and in the Senate House, the audience was not only the official audience (those who had filled the seats to watch the debate, and those who subsequently read its printed transcript), but also all those who were themselves also participating in the debate. And so one element of the strategic struggle went on – the pros in their performative earnestness, struggling to elevate the debate to the higher realms of collective norms and values; the antis in their performative playfulness, equally intent on demonstrating that so little was at stake in the proceedings that it was hardly worth taking them seriously at all.

MacCabe’s non-reappointment as a sacred issue As we have mentioned, in order for the pros’ case to hold any legitimacy, it was crucial that they were able to raise the central issue at stake – MacCabe’s non-reappointment – to the level of the sacred and DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0009

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demonstrate that his failure to receive a permanent lectureship revealed that the central values of the faculty, and by responsibility and association the university more generally, were under threat if his dismissal went unanswered. They attempted to achieve this by showing that the events had not only threatened propriety in terms of breaching the meso-level norms regulating proper employment procedure, but even further up the symbolic ladder, that a violation of the higher values of fairness, intellectual openness and pluralism had taken place. Achieving the goals of this strategy would mean a necessary acknowledgement that a crisis had occurred and that ritual purification and renewal was therefore necessary. One common tactic within this strategy was to demonstrate that prejudice and bias had triumphed over sober and disinterested judgement in considering MacCabe’s suitability for upgrading. As Lamont (2009) has shown through an analysis of the usually confidential world of academic evaluation involved in ‘peer-review’, the search for ‘quality’ is a particularly difficult matter when standards of assessment are at variance. Rather than actual skullduggery at play, Chapter 4 could be read to suggest that it was actually a matter of incompatible, yet sincere and well-intentioned systems of professional judgement at work, a possibility in fact proposed by some of the participants reflecting back on the incident (e.g. Axton, 2014; Glen, 2014). In this case, the ‘MacCabe Affair’ could be understood as at least in part a case of two well-meaning, yet irreconcilable ‘epistemological styles’ of professional peer-assessment arising within one unfortunate faculty.6 One strategic effort of the pros’ camp, however, was aimed towards demonstrating that this was not in fact the case and that ulterior interests had indeed served a greater role than ought be acceptable. Kirk, for instance, asserted the obviousness that there had been ‘some anomaly in the process of assessing this young scholar’s claims’ (SHD: 346), and Williams similarly suggested that ‘most people who listened to it [the upgrading meeting] would know that it could not be summarised as a dispassionate enquiry into an individual’s specific contribution’ (SHD: 347). Heath likewise suggested that ‘the proper standards and procedures of intellectual judgement did not obtain in the consideration of his work, that anomalies have been rife throughout the proceedings pertaining to his upgrading ... that Dr MacCabe was in no way treated in an equivalent fashion to other candidates for upgrading past and present’ (SHD: 330). John Barrell, bound by the confidentiality DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0009

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rules of faculty meetings and so unable to make public the exact details of what had taken place,7 assured the audience that notes he had taken during these meetings ‘would, I am sure, convince any reasonable man that, if the decision not to upgrade Dr MacCabe was not entirely based on an objection to the kind of approach he was taking, nevertheless such objections were influential on the discussion to quite an improper degree’ (SHD: 332), and Stedman-Jones argued that ‘no coherent rationale of the basis upon which the upgrading decision was made has yet been produced’ (SHD: 360). Some members of the anti team also failed to help their own cause on this point by unwittingly providing the pros with apparent evidence in their charges of bias. For example, ErskineHill, in reference to those in support of new forms of theory, told the Times Higher Education Supplement that ‘anybody who encourages that sort of position is not likely to be at the top of the list for an appointment’ (Midgley, 1981: 3). Occasionally this strategy of positioning the antis as biased also spilled over into accusations of wilful cruelty, with the effect of positioning MacCabe’s figure closer to that of victimhood, or even (in the more portentous interventions) martyrdom. For example, Inglis called the Faculty Board meeting in which Long had delivered his ‘twenty-minute malediction’ over MacCabe’s book a ‘tribal blood sacrifice’ (1995: 281), Steiner (who felt he had himself, at an earlier moment, experienced comparable injustice at the faculty’s hands) characterised the faculty as having ‘become notorious for its internecine detestation and incivilities’ (Steiner, 1981: 135), Kermode referred to MacCabe as a ‘victim’ (1997: 258) and a ‘scapegoat for corporate guilt’, and described having witnessed ‘repulsive behaviour’ (SHD: 335; Walker, 1981c), Heath told The Guardian that it felt as if ‘a McCarthyite purge of the faculty’ was taking place (Walker, 1981a: 28), and Tanner described it as ‘the most unjust thing I have seen in my academic life’ (Walker, 1981a: 1). MacCabe later described himself as ‘the victim of parochial envies and jealousies’ who had felt ‘like a small boy ... set upon by a gang of bullies’ (2009). As a counterstrategy, the antis attempted to disrupt this projected ‘definition of the situation’ and de-sacralise MacCabe’s non-reappointment by claiming that the decision was in actual fact taken at the profane level of routine appointments considerations. John Harvey, for instance, told The Guardian that the ‘debate about Dr MacCabe turned very largely upon his teaching performance, his ability and his competence’ (Walker, 1981e: 22), and Long told the Senate House that whilst it ‘is intrinsically DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0009

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possible – indeed I think very likely – that Jacques Lacan might help a Joycean to write well, especially on Finnegans Wake, [that] does not mean, if one may say so at this moment with delicacy, that it has actually been done’ (SHD: 344). The counterstrategy, in other words, aimed at ‘defining the situation’ as that of a relatively straightforward case of a job candidate being beneath the standards required for the appointment; positioning him as simply not up to the task at hand, and therefore the decision against making him permanent, as a routine, clearheaded, unremarkable, and profane one. Whatever the actual underlying mechanism that had drawn all the attention upon the English Faculty, it is clear that on the performative level, the very fact that so much attention was indeed being paid to the events could be taken as an indication that something untoward must indeed have occurred, or otherwise, why all the fuss? A student in the Senate House, for instance, suggested that ‘[i]f all were well in the English Faculty we would not be here’ (Clemmow, SHD: 360). The very fact that the debate had been called, and the very fact that the national press was still busy printing stories about the events (whether or not these stories were in substance behind the pros’ cause) sustained a performative risk of undermining the antis’ claims that this was simply ‘business as usual’. This placed the antis in somewhat of a ‘Catch 22’ predicament, since their substantive efforts to inform audiences that the scandal had indeed been overblown or orchestrated (e.g. Sykes-Davis, SHD: 335) continually ran the performative risk of simply drawing further attention to an affair which they were invested in claiming was no affair at all. To perform nothing – an absence – is a very difficult performance to pull off, revealing how although the performative and the actual levels of social reality may frequently act to support one another (‘facts’, needless to say, add credence to a dramatic case), they do not necessarily do so since they operate under different rules, and on occasion the one may in fact act to undermine the other.

Positioning the antis as a conservative Old Guard Performative success also involves telling a compelling story that is able to resonate with the audience to whom it is addressed. Another example of a strategy employed by the pros to secure such success was to position the antis as out-dated and conservative, both culturally and politically, DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0009

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and so attach the affair to a well-worn narrative of generational conflict: that of an out-of-touch Old Guard stubbornly resisting necessary progress. Abbott’s analysis of the fractal development of academic disciplines suggests that every 20 or 30 years a new generation of scholars comes to the fore and displaces the old (2001: 23–5). Collins has also suggested that ‘conflict in intergenerational lineages is nothing anomalous; indeed it is a main pattern of intellectual history’ (Collins, 1998: 13; also Outhwaite, 2009). Here, however, we are not so interested in evaluating the veracity of this account of generational strife (certain obvious facts, such as that two of the main protagonists in the pro camp – Williams and Kermode – had entered their 60s, appear to contradict it), as in the manner in which the narrative served as an available resource to be deployed within the struggle. Alexander discusses how social performances, like theatrical ones, symbolize particular meanings only because they can assume more general, taken-for-granted meaning structures within which their performances are staged. Performances select among, reorganize, and make present themes that are implicit in the immediate surround of social life – though these are absent in a literal sense. (2004: 91)

The generational narrative expressed itself within the controversy through allegations that the antis were a ‘reactionary caucus’ (Fisher et al., 1981: 1) of ‘superannuated Leavisites’ (MacCabe, 2011) who had failed to confront their own ‘professional bankruptcy’ and instead irresponsibly embarked upon a policy of ‘planned parochialism’ (Steiner, 1981: 135) involving a confident ‘march boldly into the past’ (Simpson, SHD: 350). A student suggested that it was ‘about time that they [the antis] responded to the needs of the times’ (Dettmer, SHD: 359) and Tony Tanner told Stop Press that ‘there is a group in the faculty who are frightened of any thought of change and can therefore properly be called reactionaries’ (Fisher et al., 1981: 1). The same student newspaper reported that Erskine-Hill – who was later to become a lead figure in opposing Cambridge’s offer of an honorary degree to Derrida, and even later defected from the Anglican church on account of their decision to ordain women priests – had been ‘described by one of his colleagues as “reacting to new criticism like most people react to nuclear war” ’ (ibid.). Even the international media lent its support to this narrative, Newsweek reporting that ‘the MacCabe dispute is at bottom a battle between conservatives and experimentalists’ (Williams & Collings, 1981: 45). In effect, the pros were attempting DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0009

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to position the antis as confronting a situation of what Pierre Bourdieu (1984: 142) called ‘hysteresis’, that is a state in which their habituses, formed as they were within another cultural field, were no longer suited to the imperatives of the field of contemporary English Studies. The dinosaurs could either evolve to their newfound environment, or die out. The additional fact that almost all the young students that spoke in the Senate House spoke out in support of an enquiry, and that the undergraduate student representative on the Faculty Board reported that an ‘almost unanimous motion’ had been carried in support of MacCabe at an open meeting of the undergraduate students, likewise provided additional ‘sticking power’ to the story of intergenerational conflict. The familiar Old Guard vs. Young Turk narrative was not only already present in the general cultural repertoire that surrounded the affair, but was also given additional force by the ‘immediate surround of social life’ provided by Cambridge University in particular. This location provided added resonance to the reception of the narrative since occurrences within the ancient universities, and especially Oxford and Cambridge, tend to arouse a great deal of usually deeply ambivalent public interest, and much of the public imaginary that feeds this interest focusses in on the institutions’ apparent unwavering defence of tradition; the widely held belief in their obstinate recalcitrance on issues of reform. Whether or not there is any actual truth to these imaginings of Oxbridge is and interesting question, though one that is strictly irrelevant here; it is the fact that such beliefs are popularly held that is important. Indeed the script that Cambridge University invests a great deal of effort into ensuring that as little as possible ever changes appears to have been embedded in the public repertoire since at least the turn of the century, when Cornford’s (1994 [1908]) amusing satire was described as having provided a characterisation of that ‘ineffectual class’ responsible for the university’s administrative machinations ‘more nearly to the truth than they will like’ (The Cambridge Review, 1908: 262). Cornford describes, and prescribes, a series of mechanisms which will allow the ‘Young academic politician’ to rid himself of the naive notion that he is there to affect change, and instead, continue the well-established tradition of ensuring the avoidance of any form of institutional development or progress whatsoever. He discusses, for instance, ‘The Principle of Unripe Time’, which involves the idea ‘that people should not do at the present moment what they think right at that moment, because the moment at which they think it right has not yet arrived’, stressing that ‘Time, by the way, is like the medlar; it has a trick DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0009

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of going rotten before it is ripe’ (Cornford, 1994 [1908]: 105). The cultural stereotype of the Oxbridge don, as we see it expressed in a multitude of popular portraits, both critical and affectionate from Tom Sharpe’s (1974; 1995) fictional satires to Noel Annan’s (1999) biographical sketches, is of a fusty character, whose eccentricities depend upon the removal from practical necessity that his (the classical stereotype remains almost invariably the unmarried male) cloistered archaic existence affords him, and who treats any prospect of ‘progressive development’ in the running of university or college affairs with the utmost suspicion. Again, whether or not it bears any resemblance to reality, the popular cynical image of the Oxbridge don (much of which seems to have arisen from a period prior to the reforms of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Roach, 1959: 235–6) is of an individual comfortable in his sinecure, perhaps more interested in the quality of the college claret than in the quality of their own research, let alone the quality of an undergraduate’s education (e.g. Rose & Ziman, 1964). This strategy of positioning the antis as an outmoded Old Guard also helped reinforce the second example of a symbolic positioning strategy described earlier, since by placing the affair within the cultural narrative of progressives vs. conservatives, MacCabe’s denial of tenure was again cast as having occurred independently of professional considerations, and as instead ‘related to a sense among Cambridge traditionalists that the time had come to mount a strong resistance to further incursions by the tendency MacCabe was thought to support’ (Doyle, 1986: 130). Since this tendency was itself linked to the introduction of ways of thinking developed abroad, a further dimension of this strategy involved positioning the antis as either suspicious of foreign influences or else outright xenophobic. Moreover, because Cambridge as a place is tied so strongly to a particular mythologised and classed imaginary of England as a place, and English Studies is in turn intimately wedded to the English nation to a degree that other disciplines simply are not, the notion that its conservative defenders might themselves be prone to nationalism and intent on preventing Gallic deconstructionists crossing the fortress-like thresholds of the university’s ancient buildings was a narrative fortified with even greater potential credence. Casting the antis in a xenophobic role simultaneously meant positioning them as anti-professionalisation, not simply vis-à-vis formalising methods (such as some versions of ‘scientific’ structuralism claimed to offer) but also in respect to their opposition to the inexorable trend of an internationalisation of the academy and the modernising movement towards closer integration with other academic systems such as France. This strategy may also have found a symbolic buttress in the written DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0009

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support for the pros’ cause, mentioned earlier in the book, that had arrived from America and France. Similarly, the capacity of the pros to cast themselves as representative of the foreign influence found support in the fact that many of MacCabe’s prominent supporters were interested in ideas from across the channel. Stephen Heath, for instance, ‘taught much in French’ (Inglis, 1995: 279), had written – in French – a study of the French literary theorist Roland Barthes (Heath, 1974), and had also translated some of his work into English (Barthes, 1977). Frank Kermode, who had encouraged the reading of French theory in his seminar at University College London before coming to Cambridge, describes being influenced by ‘the much despised French theorists, people like Derrida, who was quite unjustly treated as a kind of madman around here [Cambridge]’ (2008). During his doctoral studies MacCabe had spent a year at the École Normale Supérieure, where he had, by his own account, ‘sampled Parisian intellectual life to the full’, working with Althusser and Derrida, and attending Barthes’s seminars and Lacan’s lectures (2010c). The ‘theory’ which permeated his first book (1979) was as distinctly French as the subject matter of his second, on the new-wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard (1980).8 In his lecture to the faculty, Williams told his colleagues that in protecting the established canon ‘what is often being defended ... is not just a body of writing ... but a national identity ... a stand, a last redoubt, from which more general notions of Englishness, of values, of tradition are defended against all comers; until even native dissidents (to say nothing of all those foreigners) are seen not merely as different but as alien – speaking not our language but some incomprehensible jargon’ (1983: 195). This slide from ‘English’ as a body of literature to ‘Englishness’ as a set of values which were ‘not merely academic’ was also acknowledged by other commentators on the affair (e.g. Scruton, 1981: 137), and it is clear the exclusions it implicitly carries. Others highlighted English academic parochialism more broadly, noting the reluctant and sluggish national response to theoretical developments on the Continent (e.g. Bradbury, 1981: 137; Donoghue, 1981), and accusing the antis of harbouring ‘an in-built fear of what is going on elsewhere in the world’ (Heath, quoted in Williams & Collings, 1981: 45). Again stressing how the new forms of literary theory and cultural studies were linked to the social sciences, Steiner, for example, stated that outside ‘Britain, the paramount fact in modern literary studies has been the application to these studies of ways of reading, of techniques of analysis, which drew ... on other disciplines in the sciences humaines – i.e. linguistics, epistemology, the social sciences, DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0009

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psychology, anthropology’ (Steiner, 1981: 135), and discussing the English reaction to structuralism in particular, Bowie, suggests that ‘academics in the relevant fields froze, read nothing, and said nothing’ (1981: 136). A Professor of English at New York University, Denis Donoghue, also waded in on this point, but instead emphasised a possible national defence against developments across the Atlantic: is the current row at Cambridge between ‘England’ and ‘America’; that is, between those who want an English curriculum for an English university taught by teachers unassailably English in their sensibility, rather than neoAmerican, or even neo-French, and those who are charmed by American flexibility and diversity? The fact that Leavis used the word ‘Americanisation’ to suggest an appalling process of levelling, a failure to discriminate between the objects demanding attention, is enough to show that the issues are in some sense political. (1981: 136)

Donoghue was pointing to the fact that American universities had travelled much further towards the adoption of a variety of different approaches within the same pluralistic English department; a fact that he himself suggested could in reality be the result of more superficial gesturing. However, given the scant evidence that such developments in America were much in the minds of the direct participants in Cambridge at all, his comments might also be read as a demonstration of how distantly observed events are so often translated into local concerns; how audiences necessarily read performances through the prism of their own local cultural and historical markers. A further permutation of this strategy of positioning the antis as reactionaries was to suggest that their cultural conservatism was a direct political conservatism too, and that the apparent dispute over English criticism was in fact expressive of a deeper clash of political convictions (Birchall, 1982; Doyle, 1986; Lewis, 1982: 3; Simpson, 1990: 251). This charge was of course in turn met with forceful resistance. Reflecting back on the incident, Ricks, for example, comments that ‘there’s all this stuff about me being very right-wing – I’m just a life-long Labour voter, I’m not very right-wing, even though there was a political undertone to it ... the notion that those who hold up Empson and Leavis as great critics are somehow right wing is simply wrong’ (Ricks, 2013).9 Defending against a student newspaper’s description of him as a ‘prominent conservative’, Erskine-Hill claimed at the time that he had ‘never been against change or novelty as such, never ignored junior members’ opinions, never been the automatic spokesperson for the existing arrangements’ (SHD: 337). Against the charge that a moratorium had been placed DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0009

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on discussion of tripos reform since 1977 (Fisher et al., 1981) and also that the findings of a working group set up by Kermode to investigate teaching in the faculty had been actively dismissed (Kermode, 1997: 251; 2008),10 others, such as Sykes-Davies claimed that reform had already taken place. ‘No university’, he maintained, ‘has done more and few have done as much as Cambridge to promote intelligent and useful interest in non-literary English ... It has generally been our policy to reform ourselves when need arises’ (SHD: 336; 337). Likewise, Stevens claimed that contemporary critical approaches were already well integrated into the faculty, and that ‘in Part II of the Tripos an undergraduate who wishes to concentrate on modern literary theory and its applications can devote at least half of his working time to it, and possibly more’ (1981: 191). These claims were themselves, in turn, challenged by students as being ‘in any practical sense, untrue’ (Johnson, SHD: 358). Perhaps more damaging for the antis’ case however, at least from the stance of dramatic coherence within a particular performance team, was that their declarations of intellectual openness and pluralism also clashed directly with other remarks coming from within their own ranks, such as the claim that forms of literary theory under the banner of ‘structuralism’ were ‘[l]ike all other Parisian fashions ... very passing’ (Sykes-Davis, SHD: 336). Indeed, as we will see later, whatever their actual status as conservative or not, a crucial performative inconsistency with the antis’ defence against the notion that they were opposed to the newer forms of literary theory came from within their own performance team, via open expressions of precisely such opposition and resistance. In struggles over successfully ‘defining a situation’, dramatic coherence appears to be of crucial importance. Perhaps more effective was the antis’ counterstrategy of mirroring the pros’ approach directly, and claiming that it was in fact they, the pros, who were corrupted by political bias. One reason this allegation had a chance of holding (Witherow, 1981a; Hughes, 1981: 257) was that Marxism had by and large been the envelope within which the structuralist message had originally been delivered to a British audience (Easthope, 1988), and the pro camp had – as we shall see below – become strongly associated with structuralism during the affair. This is not to say that the pros’ judgements were in fact prejudiced by political preoccupations; whilst MacCabe had in his youth been a member of the Communist Party (Simpson, 1990: 258) he described himself to The Guardian at the time as being ‘a very inactive member of the Labour Party’ (Walker, 1981g), and is reported to have later tried to sue The Times for calling him a Marxist (Inglis, 1995: 276) – hardly what one would expect from a card-carrying DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0009

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revolutionary. Rather, it is to say that the broader symbolic landscape from which this counter-narrative was woven again added cultural support to its dramatic viability and ‘performative power’. The main purpose of this section has been to show how background cultural narratives are able to be marshalled in support of particular positioning moves, imbuing them with a degree of dramatic viability that extends beyond simply allowing the facts to ‘speak for themselves’. It should also be noted that paying attention to narrative ‘types’ in this manner is able to open up possibilities for generalising beyond specific case-based insights and identifying common narrative forms shared across a variety of different research sites, thus providing ‘a bridge between ... hermeneutic inquiry ... and the impulse towards general cultural theory’ (Alexander and Smith, 2003: 25). Having, in this chapter, examined a selection of examples of symbolic positioning strategies deployed by the pros’ performance team, we will now turn, in the following chapter, to some of the strategies embarked upon by the antis.

Notes 1 Given the constitutional issues that comprised much of the substance of the affair, the more poetic elements of the interventions found themselves necessarily intertwined with the dry bureaucratic speak of administration. 2 It was also where Snow delivered his aforementioned Rede lecture. 3 Though we find ourselves in unequivocal disagreement with their positing of agency in ‘things’, Actor-Network Theorists have similarly stressed the importance of paying attention to objects and ‘inscription devices’ as ‘actants’ in controversies (e.g. Callon, 1986). 4 Sykes-Davis also employed humour in his contribution to the debate through recounting his good behaviour in responding to a prying journalist’s unsolicited phone call by offering him his suit measurements before promptly hanging up the phone (SHD: 335). 5 The technique of ‘mise-en-abyme’ is a time-honoured theoretical move, one effect of which is to divert attention away from the governing performance through evoking a sense of dramatic disorientation. 6 Midgley reported at the time that the ‘most extraordinary aspect’ of the affair ‘is the almost total failure of either side to understand the other ... the apparently still deepening chasm of mutual incomprehension separating the two sides’ (1981: 3), and Bergonzi writes that ‘often the contestants did not share the minimum common ground that makes argument possible’ (1990: 10). DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0009

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7 It was reported in The Guardian that Barrell (supported by Kermode) appealed to the Vice Chancellor to release them from the rules of academic confidentiality so that they could describe in detail what had happened within the committee meetings that led to the MacCabe Affair (Walker, 1981c). 8 Interestingly, in Simpson’s (1990) retrospective account of the affair, written unambiguously from the position of a pro, he likewise finds it salient to note MacCabe’s Irish heritage. 9 Ricks was clear about his lack of sympathy towards framing literary criticism through theory of any kind (Ricks, 1981), and that explicitly included political theory. As Jardine comments ‘Ricks wasn’t interested in the politics, just in criticism’ (Jardine in Inglis, 1995: 285). 10 In reference to the reception of the report that emerged from this working group, Kermode (2008) recalls that the faculty simply ‘didn’t want to discuss it’.

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Examples of Symbolic Strategies Employed by the Antis Abstract: This chapter provides three examples of performative positioning strategies employed by those we dub the ‘anti’ camp, showing how they were in turn met with counterstrategies. Firstly, we show how the ‘antis’ attempted to hold up the canon of English literature and certain methods of literary criticism as sacred entities, in demand of protection from forces of profanation. Secondly, we focus upon the semantic struggle of positioning what was imprecisely termed ‘structuralism’ as a pollutant, imbued with moral threat. Thirdly, we highlight the strategic positioning move of claiming that consensus in fact ruled, and therefore that no controversy had in fact occurred, noting the difficulties, given all the attention that had already been paid to the incident, of maintaining this stance. Keywords: danger; dramaturgy; pollution; purity; sacred and profane; strategies and counterstrategies; structuralism Morgan, Marcus and Patrick Baert. Conflict in the Academy: A Study in the Sociology of Intellectuals. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. doi: 10.1057/9781137521309.0010. 

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English literature and literary studies as sacred The first example of a symbolic strategy employed by the antis was their effort to remind the audience of the principle that English literature was itself an evidently sacred thing, embodying a set of values that demanded protection from any possible corrupting or polluting forces. This strategy relied firstly, upon constructing ‘the canon’ as a totem for English literature at large – a core collection of works that provided a coherent representation of the primary and sacred objects of the discipline itself, and secondly, the defence of a particular established method of literary study as definitive and coextensive with proper literary studies in general. Defending the purity of these two elements from possible contamination was projected as not merely a technical, but also a moral concern. Ian Jack, for example, stated that it is our responsibility ‘to keep the attention of students focused on great writers’ (quoted in Wheen, 2005: 77), Ricks reminded The Guardian that ‘it is our job to teach and uphold the canon of English literature’ (quoted in Walker, 1981a: 26), Erskine-Hill stressed that the ‘first loyalty of us all is to our subject’ (SHD: 337), and Long suggested that the usual suspect – ‘structuralism’ – ought not be given any ‘special privileges’, since ‘along with all the other methodological “isms” [it is] irredeemably secondary, and in some sense irredeemably unimportant, in comparison with literature itself ’ (SHD: 344). The implicit moral load being placed on English literature here is of interest in its exemplifying one of the most common rhetorical tropes of the fracas – the remarkably frequent appeal to higher (often universal) concerns above factional or personal interests. As well as ‘English literature’, higher concerns here included claims to be speaking on behalf not of one’s own interests, but rather in the name of ‘truth’, ‘the academy’, ‘facts’, ‘the Faculty’, ‘justice’, ‘the Tripos’, ‘the students’, ‘intellectual integrity’ or ‘the University’. For instance, Sykes-Davis remarked that ‘those who have set the press in motion and requested this meeting ... could hardly have been more inept, or have caused greater harm to their own Faculty and to the University’, and that it is ‘to the academy in the broadest sense that our responsibilities are due’ (SHD: 335; 338, emphases added). A student supporter, Mr Johnson, reminded those gathered that the inquiry into MacCabe’s non-appointment, which he fully supported, ‘should have the interests of the English students at its heart, for it is for them that the Faculty is run’ (SHD: 358, emphasis added), and Gareth Stedman-Jones made an appeal for an inquiry ‘both in the interests of DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0010

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the reputation of the English Faculty in particular and the University’s good name in general’ (SHD: 360, emphasis added). Dramatically, such claims to be acting on behalf of something purer and more universal than personal gain or petty retribution draw attention away from whatever personal or partisan positioning moves may simultaneously be taking place, and towards more lofty, venerable concerns. Cynics might argue that religious and political figures have been practicing such attentionshifting sleights of hand for time immemorial; distracting their followers with baubles of the sacred to free up unhindered space for more base manoeuvring. Similarly to Orwell’s (1946: 257–8) diagnosis of the malleable emptiness of much popular political terminology, it is also worth noting that very different positions in the MacCabe dispute often claimed to be acting on behalf of precisely the same higher concerns. Whilst, for example, SykesDavis (SHD: 335) claimed to be motivated solely by protecting the interests of the faculty, Williams did so too, but from a diametrically opposed position, arguing that ‘I am not here to attack the English Faculty but to find, and help to find, conditions for the renewal of that enterprise, and I believe that those who have called today’s discussion are centrally moved by that intention’ (SHD: 347). Aiming directly for the sacred heights, MacCabe himself recounted that his motivation for persuading Derek Brewer for the vote on his appointment to be retaken ‘was not a question of my future but one of simple justice’ (MacCabe, 2009, emphasis added). In some cases the fact that one’s actions were being led by higher concerns that may in fact potentially threaten one’s private interests was stated explicitly. Erskine-Hill, for example, commented that if his voting had displeased some senior professors in the department (presumably Williams and Kermode) ‘I should apologise for this displeasure, but might vote the same way again, believing that I should not thereby jeopardise the latter part of my career’ (Erskine-Hill, SHD: 337). Occasionally, higher and lower concerns were placed side-by-side in interventions to emphasise the danger of having one’s actions led by dishonourable concerns, and the importance of taking the high road. For instance, Woodward, the undergraduate students’ representative on the Faculty Board, pointed out the problem ‘of individuals bearing factional politics to the Board, apparently for the English Tripos, but in disregard of its students’ (SHD: 340, emphasis added). Kermode also presents this comparative technique in suggesting that when ‘prejudice, and a desire for DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0010

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political advantage, take the place of disinterested discussion and enquiry, it will sometimes be an unfortunate individual who must bear the shock of the conflict’, and in his appealing to the Faculty Board to attend ‘not to its own fancied rights but to the needs of its students’ (SHD: 335, emphasis added). From a structural perspective, this comparative technique is also important in showing that the description of a motive as base is always a relative, rather than absolute, designation. Douglas’s famous analysis of ‘dirt’ as the prototypical pollutant made clear that pollution always takes this relative form. What we tend to think of in absolute terms as dirt, she demonstrated, is better understood as simply ‘matter out of place’, which when placed within another context would not be considered a pollutant at all. She writes that there ‘is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder ... Dirt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organise the environment’ (1966: 12). Likewise there were plenty of other contexts within the university in which the charges of ‘self-interest’ or ‘personal gain’ that made sense as forms of corrupting bias in the Senate House debate would be considered perfectly acceptable, even laudable, motives; it was the context, not the content, that made them polluting. This insight is also relevant to the historically contingent notion of ‘fairness’ in consideration of MacCabe’s upgrading, for the notion that appointments should be conducted via open competition, and judged on the basis of merit rather than patronage, would have seemed scandalous for the majority of Oxford and Cambridge’s history (Abbott, 2001: 125; Annan, 1999: 6).1 It is only in the particular and recent historical context of the sensibilities of late-20th-century employment procedure that the MacCabe Affair becomes comprehensible in this sense at all, since it is only in this context that the charge of bias as a pollutant of fair judgement might hold. Looked at in this way, one element of the symbolic struggles that took place within the ‘MacCabe Affair’ can be understood as laying claim to contingent purification practices aimed at reorganising the environment of the faculty so that appropriate interests were functioning within their appropriate contexts, contingently defined as such in terms of both time and place. In response to the strategic appeal to the canon of ‘English literature’ as sacred (at least within the context of an English literature faculty), the pros launched a counteroffensive of arguing that this canon was in fact the product of the profane forces of historical contingency and power. DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0010

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Williams, for example, reminded the faculty that, ‘the “canon of English Literature” is not given; it is produced’ (1983: 193), and went on to spell out some of the historical ways in which this production had occurred, emphasising, again, the salient link between nation, language, and literature: you have in sequence, first, a restriction to printed texts, then a narrowing to what are called ‘imaginative works’, and then finally a circumscription to a critically established minority of ‘canonical texts’. But also growing alongside this there is another and often more potent specialisation: not just literature, but English literature. (Williams, 1983: 194)2

The ‘canon of English literature’ had been constructed by mere mortals, and was therefore open to revision and reconstruction by present and future generations of such mortals. What ended up within, and what was excluded, was the outcome of profane considerations, and did not somehow miraculously rise above them. Automatic reverence to an established canonical conception of ‘English literature’ ought therefore, according to Williams’s argument, itself become a political question, rather than an automatic reflex to be drilled into students. One generalisable insight that might be gleaned from this first example of a symbolic strategy of the antis is the historical and cultural contingency of positioning moves in cases of controversy and dispute. The same convincing performance will fail to find the same success in altered times and places. Taking into consideration variable background cultures is key to comprehending the performative viability of a particular strategy and when there are conflicting ‘epistemological styles’ present within the same time and space (as in this particular case), one’s performative strategy must appeal as widely as possible. Performative success, in other words, becomes far more challenging in complex social contexts in which there are multiple audiences to be persuaded.

Positioning ‘structuralism’ as a pollutant If we continue to think in structural terms, it is clear that designation of the ‘sacred’ depends upon the existence and identification of its counterpart, the ‘profane’. If, as discussed in Chapter 3, English Studies was to be the primary humanistic discipline that, having successfully eclipsed the Classics, most defined the national culture, and Cambridge English had DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0010

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come in the eyes of some to define what the study of English in general should mean, then the symbolic environment was arranged in such a way that the antis could position any threat to Cambridge English, as not only threat to the local practice of English Studies in Cambridge, but also to the discipline at large, and what’s more, even an implicit threat to the national culture itself. In this manner, the emotive momentum and symbolic weight of the affair quickly snowballed, rapidly assuming proportions well beyond its local effects in terms of whether or not a young lecturer was to be offered a permanent post. As the affair proceeded, this threat also became increasingly associated with, and condensed into, a single catch-all term: ‘structuralism’, which, in spite of repetitive protestations that it was of absolutely no relevance or value to the debate whatsoever, participants and commentators seemed incapable of ceasing to use (e.g. Stevens, 1981; Simpson, 1990: 263; Williams, SDH: 347).3 The term was frequently used by the antis as a simple epithet, aimed at stigmatising their opponents (e.g. Sykes-Davis, SHD: 336; Long, SHD: 343), and as a label it therefore quickly became imbued with a host of moral, rather than simply classificatory significations. In this manner it served as an imprecise shorthand for everything the antis believed was wrong with the kinds of work they understood MacCabe and others to be supporting. As Simpson puts it, it became ‘the term that the “business as usual” faculty majority chose as their omnium gatherum definition of the enemy’ (Simpson, 1990: 246; also Lewis, 1982: 3), and the various streams of labelling theory that developed in the wake of Becker’s (1963) study of Outsiders and Goffman’s (1963) examination of Stigma, have illustrated how labels are capable to some extent of bringing certain types of subject into being through ostensibly merely alerting us to their existence. In this particular case, however, in order for this stigmatising strategy to work, the term itself needed to be (re)positioned as in fact the pollutant the antis wished to claim it was, and more specifically, as one threatening to the kinds of literary study that the previous section suggested the antis were intent on sacralising. If this could be achieved, then disinfecting the faculty of its influence might then be taken as being of paramount importance. Towards accomplishing this end, Erskine-Hill suggested that in spite of the scientific pretensions some of them held structuralists embraced a radical relativism he dubbed ‘cognitive atheism’ in which ‘one interpretation is as valid as another’, and ‘touchstones, criteria, different degrees of probability, and indeed the concept of truth’ itself are carelessly thrown DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0010

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to the wind (SHD: 338). He also highlighted its terminological imprecision, and the fact that amongst the various definitions there is ‘little that the philosopher could recognise as a theory to define them’ (ibid.), suggesting that those who readily associated with it were themselves muddled in their thought. As we have already highlighted, in addition to positioning it as a sophistic doctrine, the antis also alluded to the fact that like most pollutants ‘structuralism’, and its authors, were foreign things, both in national and disciplinary terms (e.g. Sykes-Davis, SHD: 336); so as Bowie noted, it became ‘almost a matter of public hygiene not to read them [the ‘structuralists’], and to discourage the student population from doing so’ (1981: 136). Commentators on the affair, such as the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, aided the antis’ efforts in positioning the term as a contaminating threat by flipping the notion (described in Chapter 2) that Leavis’s approach was elitist on its head. He did this by suggesting that it was in fact the new French theory that MacCabe & Co. were understood to be championing that was the truly elitist culprit, because it was this approach that failed to address itself to an idealised common reader and instead spoke its own private, technical, and esoteric language. ‘This explains’, he wrote, at least in part why semiotics and all its hermetic offshoots should have entered into so overt a conflict with the traditional Cambridge school. For the entire claim of Cambridge English to academic centrality – a claim which it has substantiated at least as well as Cambridge philosophy – rests in the fact that it has addressed itself not to the high priesthood of an arcane religion, but to a recognisable ideal of the reader of literature. Hence it has achieved the only kind of objectivity that a humane subject can acquire, that which pertains not to science, not to magic, but to human values themselves. (Scruton, 1981: 137)

Likewise, another commentator, clearly assuming that structuralism was somehow necessarily a form of radicalism (an assumption discussed in the preceding chapter), pointed to the irony that compared to Leavisite criticism ‘structuralist writing is so obscure that it totally bars any working-class adult, the liberation of whose class is the declared aim of the philosophy behind such writing, from any comprehension of it at all’ (Hughes, 1981: 257). Seen contextually, one challenge with maintaining this strategy of positioning structuralism as a toxic force, as with the former strategy of defending a predefined and stable notion of ‘English literature’, was that at some point it inevitably came into conflict with the attempt to DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0010

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convince doubters that the anti camp were welcoming of new ideas, capable of identifying their merits, and willing to integrate them into faculty teaching. There was again, in other words, a problem of coherence across the strategic repertoire, which may itself have signalled a greater diversity of opinion within the antis’ ranks. Moreover, its sting was somewhat removed when those whom the label was contrived to discredit readily adopted it as a banner of pride. For instance, the Regius Professor of Greek, Geoffrey Kirk, proudly asserted his endorsement of ‘structuralist analysis’ suggesting that it ‘is an approach, or set of approaches, that cannot be simply ignored in any respectable university in Europe’ adding – rather dubiously given the circumstances – that it ‘is one that often increases understanding’ (SDH: 345). Kirk also suggested that the antis were simply ignorant, and that ‘to label the whole structuralist movement as mindless and somehow wicked is the reaction, I am afraid, of those who usually do not have the faintest idea what it is really about’ (SHD: 345; also Bowie, 1981: 136). Also addressing this apparent ignorance, and actively detaching its moral from its technical connotations, Williams (1983) attempted to carefully parse out the various definitions of the term in his faculty lecture, showing how whilst some were able to operate within the ‘dominant paradigm’ of literary studies, others made a fundamental break from it. Interestingly, he suggests that on at least one dominant understanding of the term – that which points towards analysis of language and literature as ‘an internal rule-governed system’ – structuralism might in fact be understood as a ‘long-lost cousin who had emigrated from Cambridge via Empson in the late twenties and early thirties’, visited North America where it had been associated with New Criticism, and then returned back to Cambridge via France in a somewhat altered form in the 1960s (1983: 206). He was suggesting that the approach of ‘practical criticism’ initiated by the Cambridge critic Richards (who had left for Harvard in the late 1930s), and developed by his student Empson was in some sense a form of literary structuralism avant la lettre.4 The significance of this counterargument in terms of positioning ‘structuralism’ was that contrary to the antis’ claims, it could in fact be understood – at least in one of its guises – as having originated in germ form within the very faculty and social body that was now misidentifying it as alien and attempting to expel it (see also Jones, 1981: 9). Writing elsewhere, in The Guardian, Williams (1981) also argued that since the figures that made the Cambridge tradition famous – for DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0010

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example, Richards, Empson, the Leavises, and Knights – were themselves iconoclastic rebels against the gentleman–dilettante model of literary scholarship that they felt oppressed the discipline of their day, the new work that MacCabe and others in the faculty represented in fact showed a greater fidelity to this spirit of Cambridge English than the apparently defensive behaviour of the antis (Mulhern, 1981: 27–8; also Eagleton, 1981). Heath also suggests that Richards and Leavis’s deep interest in the modernist literature of their era (Eliot and Lawrence, in particular), had failed to be carried over into the following generation of literary critics at Cambridge. Leavis’s tradition instead ‘served as an embattled standard that excluded contemporary creative work, and his influence generally fed into an academic establishment of canonical texts, of what counted in and as “doing English” ’ (Heath, 1994: 32). Leavis had even had a brush with the law in his efforts to teach Joyce’s banned book, Ulysses, in his lectures at Cambridge (Chaney, 1985: 251) and had, incidentally, famously experienced his own set of hurdles in securing a faculty post.5 Mulhern, however, incisively pointed out how the other side of the ‘Cambridge tradition’, which the antis were in fact demonstrating a far greater adherence to, was the unrelenting, and to some extent successful, drive to establish English Studies as the ‘moral control-point of the entire culture’, a status to which ‘no other discipline entered a rival claim’ (1981: 28; also Leavis, 1943). Mulhern’s point again adds support to the notion that a strong contextual facilitating factor in the affair was a sense that the new forms of literary analysis understood to be championed by MacCabe threatened English Studies’ recently won status as the central humanistic discipline – the new Classics. It was of course certainly in part this understanding of the discipline that the 1980s ‘radicals’, and indeed most prominently Williams himself, mounted a challenge against, bringing us to a second positioning move made by Williams during his lecture. That is, one of solidarity with another connotation of structuralism; that associated with the ‘radical semiotics’ which had inspired MacCabe’s writing. On this understanding of the term, he suggested that structuralism did directly confront the dominant literary paradigm, and at the same time made contact with his own later work on ‘cultural materialism’, which involved ‘the analysis of all forms of signification, including, quite centrally writing, within the actual means and conditions of their production’ (ibid.: 210). Both approaches shared an emphasis upon subjectivity in comparison with more determinate structuralist analyses (Higgins, 2013: 139), and likewise DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0010

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insisted on including ‘the paradigm itself as a matter of analysis, rather than as a governing definition of the object of knowledge’ (Williams, 1983: 211). This account accords well with Simpson’s understanding of the perceived threat in MacCabe’s approach: ‘not that it proposed some alternative within a range of alternatives; nobody minds that ... [but] that it promised to put things together in a new way’ (1990: 263). It also provides a link to claims that Williams was the actual target of the hostility directed, by proxy, towards MacCabe (Jardine, in Inglis, 1995: 285).6 What is interesting about both the antis’ strategy of positioning structuralism as a pollutant, as well as the various counterstrategies mounted by the pros to re-dignify the term, is that they demonstrate how ideas themselves, or even ideas about ideas such as ‘structuralism’, can become the objects of positioning moves just as effectively as can individuals themselves, at least to the extent that individuals or groups are put into association with such ideas.7 Furthermore, the fact that different strategies operating side-by-side can act to both support, as well as undermine one another, again highlights the importance of achieving coherence across one’s strategic repertoire if one’s overall performance within symbolic struggles is to ‘come off ’ convincingly.

‘Move along now, nothing to see here’ A final example of a symbolic strategy employed by the antis was that of claiming that in actual fact there was no conflict within the English Faculty at all, and therefore, as Stevens put it ‘no “crisis” in any proper sense of that abused word’ (1981: 191). Long, for example, argued that the debate had artificially constructed ‘a polarity that simply isn’t there’ (SHD: 344) and Stevens suggested that whilst the ‘English Faculty is said to be in a state of confusion and disarray, the evidence of this is hard to come by’, claiming that he was ‘much more conscious of common aims, common interests, a common pursuit, than I am of anything else’ (SHD: 345). Dougherty suggested that the pros had organised ‘a siege’ of an otherwise happy faculty (SHD: 356) and Sykes-Davis managed to combine the notion that consensus ruled within the faculty with a thinly veiled swipe at Williams, in commenting that one ‘professor, famous on page and screen, has addressed an open meeting on “The Crisis in the English Faculty” and when he declares a crisis, conscientious objectors must beware’ (SHD: 337). DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0010

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This strategy can also be understood as linked to the attempt at upsetting the notion that the Senate House debate had any meaning whatsoever, let alone meanings of a sacred nature, concerned with the higher values of the faculty or university more generally. Long, for instance, expressed this quite directly through his denial ‘that the circulated description of “the state of the English Faculty” has any validity at all’ (SHD: 343), and Stevens proposed that it was ‘merely polemical to represent the Faculty as engaged in an ideological battle – and a gross distortion of a complicated reality to imagine any clique working off their “intellectual hatred” on a single individual’ (SHD: 345). Occasionally, rather than this perhaps more far-fetched description of an actual consensual state of affairs, this strategy instead took the form of an appeal to the anti camp to be done with their complaints in order to allow harmony the possibility of returning. Sykes-Davies, for instance, expressed his confidence that the faculty still had ‘the resources of goodwill to co-operate together’ (SHD: 338). Beer optimistically commented that it ‘would be pleasant to think that we might one day be able to look back upon these events as a serious winter diversion which marked the beginning of a new period of intellectual progress and understanding’ (Beer, SHD: 355), and on the second day of the debate, Dougherty called upon those who had the previous day ‘approached this lectern sternfaced’ to ‘turn their thoughts ... to Schiller: “O friends, no more these sounds ... that all men may be brothers!” ’ (SHD: 357). Of course, MacCabe’s supporters challenged the antis’ attempted repositioning of the symbolic landscape in this way: disputing their contention that either nothing had occurred or that grievances had been adequately dealt with and that it was now time to move on. They did this by repositioning such claims as instead expressions of smug complacency on the part of those incapable of acknowledging the wrongdoing that they suggested had so clearly taken place. One undergraduate speaker told the Senate that ‘I consider any call for peace, retrenchment, and perhaps a little reform to be disingenuous’ (Clemmow, SHD: 360). Another suggested that ‘what is truly horrifying is that so many dons don’t seem really to care ... The responsibility for the Faculty’s poor shape rests on those who have done nothing, or have done very little. Rests on those who maintain today that there is no crisis in the English Faculty’ (Dettmer, SHD: 359). Yet another insisted that ‘the faculty is in a state of collapse’, and that the cause was plainly ‘the Board’s irresponsibility’ (Woodward, SHD: 339). In the same vein, on the matter of whether or DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0010

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not there was ‘a case for enquiring into the State of the English Faculty’,8 Professor Kermode stressed that ‘the answer must be: indeed there is, and everybody knows it’ (Kermode, SHD: 333). The struggle over whether or not an affair had taken place was likewise linked to whether or not the media had amplified or otherwise accurately reported events. Whilst the antis almost universally insisted that the ‘press has greatly exaggerated the bitterness in our Faculty’ (Sykes-Davies, SHD: 338), and was responsible for ‘wildly irresponsible distortions’ (Stevens, 1981: 193; also Beer, SHD: 353; Erskine-Hill, SHD: 338), the pros instead suggested that ‘the press has not conjured up a ghost’ (Clemmow, SDH: 361), and that whilst reports ‘may have been misleading in detail ... they have been absolutely right in substance’ (ibid.), that ‘the evidence shows that the press tried assiduously to get the facts straight, and to provide some honest account of the intellectual differences involved in the quarrel’ (Simpson, 1990: 245). Kermode, for example, summarised the reporting as having ‘not been such that the larger public can know much about the facts of the matter; but those who know more are unable to contest the truth of its general impression’ (Kermode, SHD: 333). However, as mentioned earlier when discussing the first two examples of the pros’ own positioning strategies, the largest threat to the antis’ claims that there was nothing of interest to see, was the dramatic difficulty of convincing an audience that there was no fire (or that the fire had already been put out) beneath the continuing billows of smoke, whether or not that smoke had itself been artificially generated. Such an enormous amount of attention had already been drawn to the affair that on a performative level, positioning the commotion as having in fact been magicked out of thin air was a challenging one to maintain. More generally, even if the antis’ strategy managed to prove convincing to the immediate audience, the controversy now had a momentum and logic of its own. It had, at a certain ill-defined point, left the exclusive hands of those immediately invested in the events, and entered a larger public sphere, in the process gathering new investments (e.g. those of media producers intent on selling their wares, those of media consumers hungry for scandal and sensation, and those of an indeterminate number of participants engaged in debates over literary studies elsewhere, who could draw upon the episode as an analogue and parable for their own local struggles). In this sense, it is difficult to draw a clear boundary around the event in either space or, as we suggest in the following chapter, DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0010

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time. In what MacCabe described as the ‘age of celebrity’, control of the status of the event had at a certain point ended up at the whims of more distant, indeterminate, and far less controllable social forces. In fact, a quarter of a century later, analysis of its possible meanings, and therefore the active positioning of its symbolic script, even managed to end up in the unlikely hands of two nosy sociologists.

Notes 1 Even as late of the mid-19th century, Annan describes how Canon Barnes of Christ Church, Oxford remarked that ‘“know what we’re coming to ... I’ve given studentships to my sons. and to my nephew’s children, and there are no more of my family left. I shall have to give them by merit one of these days”. An old fellow of Merton was urged to award a fellowship to the candidate who had done best in the examinations. “Sir, I came here to vote for my friend’s son, and vote for him I shall, whatever the examiners say”. To award by merit had echoes of the French Revolution’ (Annan, 1999: 6). 2 He goes on to ask, ‘Is “English” then the language or the country? If it is the language, then there are also fifteen centuries of native writing in other languages: Latin, Welsh, Irish, Old English, Norman French. If it is not the language but the country, is that only “England” or is it now also Ireland, Wales, Scotland, North America, Old and New “Commonwealths”?’ (ibid.) 3 One place we might begin to understand what the participants were referring to when employing the term ‘structuralism’ is the index of MacCabe’s (1979) Joyce book. Here we find a list of authors – Althusser, Barthes, Cixous, Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, Jakobson, Kristeva, Lacan, Saussure – some of whom would nowadays be grouped under the heading ‘poststructuralism’, itself a notoriously inadequate label, and one which commanded less widespread currency in the early 1980s. The name ‘Levi-Strauss’ is conspicuously absent. The anthropologist Edmund Leach was Provost of MacCabe’s college up until 1979, and the primary exponent of anthropological structuralism at Cambridge, but his scathing review of MacCabe’s edited collection of essays on Lacan (Leach, 1981) seems to underline the distance between the approaches going on under the same label within these two disciplines. 4 Steiner (1981: 135) also reads Richards’s work in this way. 5 In spite of being the most famous, and influential literary scholar of his generation, Leavis was only made a part-time lecturer in the faculty in 1936 at the age of 41, a full-time Lecturer only in 1947 at the age of 52 and a Reader (the position he retired from two years later) in 1959. Before that, he was based at Downing College, where he became a Director of Studies in 1930.

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Steiner (2007) notes how until he properly joined the faculty, Leavis was unable to examine or be a member of the boards that set the tripos, with the consequence that his students ‘paid a terrible price’ for their allegiance to their charismatic mentor. 6 Alternatively, MacCabe himself suggested that ‘in fact it had been the “Kermode affair” and it was Frank Kermode who had always been the principal target’ (MacCabe, 2010a; 2010b), and Bergonzi writes that ‘it has been suggested’, though he does not tell us by whom, that in fact ‘the gallophile Stephen Heath was the real target’ (1990: 11). 7 This latter qualification differentiates our position from the more radical accounts of the ‘life of things’ given by some theorists adopting the ActorNetwork approach. 8 This was the official title of the Discussion of the Senate that had been called.

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6

Conclusion Abstract: This chapter draws together some of the principal arguments made in the preceding chapters, advancing the theoretical implications for studying controversies more broadly, both within and outside of the academy. We stress the utility of adopting a pragmatic approach to theoretical synthesis that responds directly to the idiosyncrasies of context. Whilst acknowledging the virtues of recent cultural sociology, we elaborate how this case analysis demonstrates the methodological difficulties of treating social life in its ‘purely cultural’ aspect. We conclude by noting that controversies should not be treated as bounded events, as they inevitably emerge out of prior facilitating conditions, and like all symbolic contributions to reshaping our shared cultural life, their future impact or revival is forever unpredictable. Keywords: cultural sociology; pragmatism; symbolic and non-symbolic Morgan, Marcus and Patrick Baert. Conflict in the Academy: A Study in the Sociology of Intellectuals. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. doi: 10.1057/9781137521309.0011.

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Through a combined analysis of, in Part I, the facilitating contextual settings and, in Part II, the performative enactment of the ‘MacCabe Affair’, this book has attempted to demonstrate the socially structured drama that lies at the heart of disputes within the academy. We understand this project to be important in prompting reassessment of historical disputes that have unfolded within the humanities and social sciences, including those (such as the late 19th-century Methodenstreit, or the 20th century Historikerstreit, for instance), which have perhaps contained far greater intellectual content and consequence, but which, in part through virtue of obtaining classical status, risk becoming sanitised of their performative and strategic substance, and instead formalised into purely intellectual affairs. It has argued that when disputes, controversies or crises occur, consensual symbolic classification systems break down and need to be actively reconstructed by agents invested in maintaining these systems. Whilst there may have been highly variant understandings over the form that this reconstruction should take, it is worth highlighting that all the various parties with direct investment in the affair tacitly agreed that some such reconstruction was required, even if such reconstruction involved simply reaffirming the importance of maintaining the established and dominant symbolic sorting frames, burying hatchets and moving on. We have argued that barriers to consensual reconstruction presented themselves in the MacCabe case at least in part through the presence of divergent ‘epistemological styles’ having emerged within the same faculty, each at variance with the other’s mode of judging the issues at stake, and each concerned, through a variety of symbolic strategies and performative positioning moves, to convince the various audiences of their own particular ‘definition of the situation’. In opposition to other performative perspectives that assume more stable roles from which social action might be read, positioning theory was seen as useful here in its alerting us to the significance of spontaneity and relationality in struggles over meaning-making, showing the manner in which actors contended, both individually, as well as in ‘performance teams’, to position themselves, their adversaries, and their own, and others’ ideas in meaningful relation to one another and in such a manner as to lend support to particular strategic goals. The Senate House debate in particular was seen as providing a relatively bounded exemplification of this process, providing a staged opportunity for those participating to dramatically position themselves in front of one another and before a gathered audience. Whilst emphasising DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0011

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the spontaneity of the reconstruction of symbolic classification systems in this manner, we have also tried to stress the importance of the wider socio-historical and narrower institutional contexts in which positioning took place, as well as the significance, highlighted by recent work in cultural sociology, of the background symbolic landscape from which narratives were drawn and which influenced whether or not performances were judged as compelling. Since the reassembly of symbolic classifications is such a deeply contested process, power, in the Weberian sense of one agent, or group of agents, being able to exert their will in the face of resistance from another, is therefore at the heart of understanding the outcome of such disputes (Weber, 2013: 926). Though we have hinted at the importance of both symbolic and material forms of power as they are typically carried within academic environments – through, for example, such things as seniority and title in hierarchies of rank, institutional location and the capacity to have one’s voice heard and vote counted on various boards and committees, the social capital provided through academic and extra-academic networks (such as media-contacts), and the cultural capital inherent in scholarly reputation, as well as the wider power that the government exerts over all publicly funded institutions – a more complete analysis of academic controversies would need to flesh out in greater detail where else such power resides, how it is concealed and revealed and the various ways its operation succeeds or fails. Here however, and especially in Part II of the book, we have primarily focussed only on one dimension of power; a type of symbolic power that Alexander (2011) describes as ‘performance power’. This is a kind of power which although capable of being abetted by other forms of material or institutional power, also operates independently of them, and succeeds in asserting itself on the basis of an altogether different set of effective criteria. In this understanding, to ‘be really powerful means that social actors, no matter what resources and capacities they possess, must find a way to make their audiences believe them’ (Alexander, 2011: 89), and this depends upon a variety of factors including the capacity to maintain coherency across all the various elements of one’s performance, as well as marshalling background narratives and codes to which audiences are receptive, and projecting, in Goffman’s earlier terminology, a unified ‘definition of a situation’ across a given performance team. Like all non-coercive forms of power, its efficacy also depends to some extent on those audiences over whom it is exercised, and it is for this reason that we suggested in DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0011

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the previous chapter that performances must always be understood as ‘co-created’ situations. In spite of this neglect of the other forms of power that help determine the outcome of disputes and controversies, our analytical focus has been upon the symbolic form that the controversy took, rather than attempting to account for the actual outcome (in terms of success or failure) of the various struggles that occurred, and for this concern, aspects of the methodological approach of the new school of American cultural sociology have proven particularly useful. Nevertheless, pace this school’s methodological suggestion of the necessary ‘bracketing out of wider, non-symbolic social relations’ in order to allow for ‘the reconstruction of the pure cultural text’ (e.g. Alexander & Smith, 2003: 14), we would like to suggest that ‘bracketing out’ material contexts may in fact on occasion constrain the social analyst’s ability to understand the ‘purely cultural’. Primarily, we would argue, this is because other than on an analytical level, there is in fact no such thing as ‘pure cultural texts’, that in all actual empirical social contexts the symbolic and the material invariably coexist. This fact is of course hardly denied by cultural sociology (as e.g. McLennan, 2005 appears to suggest), in that its argument is simply that ‘bracketing out’ is a necessary methodological move – a means towards greater understanding of the distinctive facet of social life it takes as its primary underexamined object of study. Our concern is not that cultural sociology neglects the significance of material forces in social life, but rather that the methodological move of ‘bracketing out’, if carried out in strict and absolute terms, risks reifying ‘the cultural’, with the consequence of potentially mistaking it, once we return to a theoretical level, as a social force somehow emanating from nowhere. It also begs the methodological question of at which point ‘the material’ (we place this word in brackets to avoid the reverse reification) is let back into one’s analysis? In distinction from McLennan’s (2003) concern that the new cultural sociology evinces an ‘idealist bias’ on a theoretical level, our concern is more that it evinces an a priori methodological bias towards the cultural which may, ironically, and depending on the empirical context, act to hinder our ability to ‘reconstruct the pure cultural text’. Our case analysis has, we hope, demonstrated that even when primarily concerned with recovering the frequently neglected symbolic dimension of social life, without also making a methodological effort to account for material and institutional contexts, DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0011

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one’s understandings of cultural texts themselves may become impoverished. We hope, in other words, to have shown that the symbolically focussed analysis of Part II of the present book was enhanced by having first, in Part I, attempted to provide a non-symbolic contextualisation of the affair. For example, paying attention to the various material transformations that were taking place in English higher education at the time of the affair, such as the post-Robbins expansion of the universities, and the very specific and relatively unique effect that these material transformations had upon Cambridge in particular, augmented our ability to understand the particular salience of the pros’ ‘purely cultural’ critique of Leavisite elitism. The special resonance of the ‘purely cultural’ narrative of a fuddy-duddy and conservative ‘Old Guard’ resisting the inevitable rise of the ‘Young Turks’ (again we place ‘purely cultural’ in inverted commas, since clearly this narrative is, strictly speaking, not ‘purely cultural’) was likewise enhanced by paying attention to the fact that a highly divisive conservative government had recently been elected to national office. We could have gone further, and suggested that other obvious material facts, such as Cambridge’s geographical status as a market town located outside the symbolically modernising urban metropolis, likewise added weight to the cultural power that this narrative of it nurturing stick-in-the-mud, parochial resistance to change might hold. We also attempted to show how the material factors of local institutional contexts also helped account for the composition and allegiance of ‘performance teams’. Intentionally ‘bracketing out’, for example, the role played by colleges in providing the material loci for the ‘interaction rituals’ that helped bind their members into shared moral communities, and purposely ignoring their ability to serve as pools from which potential recruits became enlisted, would have undermined an understanding of the form and efficacy of the ‘purely symbolic’ performances that subsequently played themselves out. By the same token, the collective, and ‘purely cultural’ anxiety (which was capitalised upon by the antis, and no doubt provoked their initial horrified response to MacCabe’s possible appointment) over threats to the character of a recently established and institutionalised discipline that had taken on the mantle from the Classics of being the core humanity, with all this word’s deep moral connotations, makes far less sense in the absence of a material account of the institutional explosion of the social sciences and the apparent encroachment of their methods into DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0011

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literary analysis since the 1960s. Neither is it irrelevant to the symbolic force of the arguments (though this point has not been elaborated earlier) to reflect upon the cultural consequences within the university, of Cambridge’s broader reluctance to offer material support to the developing social sciences (anthropology and economics excepted) in anything like a comparable degree to the support they enjoyed in the newer plate-glass universities that sprouted up during the 1960s. In opposition to the suggestion that only ‘after having created the analytically autonomous culture object does it become possible to discover in what ways culture intersects with other social forces, such as power and instrumental reason in the concrete social world’ (Alexander & Smith, 2003: 14), our analysis implies that in some instances the inverse in fact holds: only after reconstructing these ‘other social forces’, as we attempted to do in Part I, does it become possible to fully describe the analytically separable ‘culture object’, as was our aim in Part II of the book. Bracketing may indeed prove useful at particular moments in the analysis of social situations, and cultural sociology provides a rich amalgamation of methodological tools in aiding that process when it is appropriate, but sociology is also a pragmatic pursuit and it does not help in advance of a research encounter to specify when such appropriate moments in fact are. Just as there is a danger, which cultural sociology has been particularly effective in alerting us to, in allowing one’s methodological choices to be led by the assumption that material forces are always ‘in the last instance’ determinate, so there is a price to pay in the methodological decision to treat material contexts as a priori epiphenomena of underlying cultural codes. In the end, it must always be an empirical rather than theoretical question as to the relative significance of cultural or material forces. As Weber famously put it, we must not ‘substitute for a one-sided materialism an equally one-sided spiritualistic causal interpretation of culture and of history. Each is equally possible, but each, if it does not serve as the preparation, but as the conclusion of an investigation, accomplishes equally little in the interest of historical truth’ (Weber, 1992: 125). In one sense, the case we have presented earlier is perhaps not best understood as a contribution to the sociology of knowledge, since much of what we’ve described has been concerned less with ideas and more with revealing the performed nature of disputes as cultural constructs with an emphasis upon the social and institutional environments which inevitably influenced their expression. However, in another sense, since DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0011

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new ideas, especially in the humanities and social sciences, are often forged in alliance with those they approve of, and in opposition to those they reject, simply studying the form and structure of academic conflict in this manner may also help reveal insights into the substantive development of ideas themselves (e.g. Collins, 2002: 52–3). Finally, it is important to stress that symbolic conflicts, wherever they occur, should not be considered bounded events since they are never entirely complete or conclusive. Instead, because struggles over the reorganisation of shared symbolic life are ongoing, they are perhaps better understood as politics temporarily frozen in time (Unger, 1987: 145). This can be demonstrated by the fact that many of the same issues touched upon here were still being contested long after the conclusion of the ‘MacCabe Affair’, and indeed continue to be so in various popular debates (e.g. Dawkins, 1998; Searle, 1990; Selden, 1986; Wheen, 2005). Most obviously in this respect, a decade following the departure of MacCabe for Strathclyde, another affair exploded in Cambridge, with the ultimately unsuccessful attempt to deny the university from awarding an honorary doctorate to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Not only did this event involve many of the same individuals and networks as the earlier MacCabe dispute (Smith, 1999), but its symbolic form also bore a remarkable resemblance to the case we have used as the focus of this book. Such comparable examples1 also help demonstrate the generalising possibilities of case-specific cultural analysis in their capacity to unpick cultural codes and determine symbolic narratives which are shared across a variety of localised settings, and to do this without slipping into the classical structuralist hubris of believing that in doing so, universal features of the cultural repertoire are somehow being uncovered. Whether or not such formal universal features (of symbolic disputes, or any other cultural phenomena) in fact exist, is again, we would contend, not a question that can be established in advance of careful empirical reconstruction.

Note 1 A further related example that unfolded almost immediately after the MacCabe Affair in 1981 erupted when a University Assistant Lecturer in Social Psychology at Cambridge, David Ingleby, failed to be upgraded to a permanent post. Ingleby, whose ideas about ‘critical psychiatry’ (1981) had also been

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influenced by French theorists such as Michel Foucault, was recommended by all 11 members of the Social and Political Science (SPS) Committee (SPS had not yet become a faculty at this point, and was therefore institutionally weak within the university) for upgrading. The Appointments Committee, which consisted of no other social psychologists, turned the upgrading recommendation down even after two appeals were made, and 90 students and various eminent academics, including Charles Taylor at Oxford, petitioned on his behalf (Flather, 1981; Jones, 1981).

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Bibliography SHD: All references refer to the Senate House Debate on the ‘State of the English Faculty’ (3–4 February 1981), the transcript of which was published in the Cambridge University Reporter, 18 February 1981.

Cambridge University Archives material Assorted papers relating to Faculty governance, administration, appointments and teaching, 1961–81. Correspondence relating to English Faculty Board and committee membership and office holding, 1979–82. Correspondence relating to nomination for election to various Faculty Board committees, 1970–82. English Faculty Board Correspondence 1979–81. English Faculty Board Minutes 1980–1.

Interviews Prof. Sir Christopher Ricks, 17 October 2013, London. Prof. Heather Glen, 14 August 2014, Cambridge. Prof. Colin MacCabe, 22 September 2014, via phone conversation. Prof. Fred Inglis, 14 October 2014, via phone conversation. Dr Richard Axton, 28 October 2014, Cambridge. Other anonymous interviewees. 

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DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0012

Index Althusser, 30, 55, 72 Annan, Noel, 9n1, 30, 54 anthropology, 3, 5, 29, 31, 42, 56, 79 Assistant Registrary, 13, 21n2 Axton, Richard, 12, 14, 17, 37 Ball, Christopher, 32 Barrell, John, 12, 13, 15, 37, 49, 59n7 Barthes, Roland, 29, 55, 72n3 Beer, John, 14, 15, 32, 70, 71 Bourdieu, Pierre, 8, 36, 53 ‘bracketing out’, 6, 34, 77, 78 Bradbury, Malcolm, 27–8, 31 Brewer, Derek, 15, 62 Bryson, Norman, 37 Cambridge University, 2, 12, 18–20, 26–38, 39n4, 45, 53–7, 64–8, 78–80, 82 Cambridge University Reporter (journal), 45, 82 Christminster, 47 Classics, 26, 30 English Studies, 26, 30, 32, 64, 68, 73 College Teaching Officers (CTOs), 20n1 colleges, 20n1, 28, 34–8, 78 conflict, 7–8, 12, 63–4, 66, 69 academic, 80 generational, 52–3 social, 17

DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0013

symbolic, 34, 80 conscience collective, 45 Cornford, Francis MacDonald, 28, 34–8, 53, 78 counterstrategies, 8, 43, 46, 50–1, 57, 69, see also symbolic strategies critical psychiatry, 80–1n1 cultural sociology, 5–6, 41, 76–7, 79 ‘bracketing out’, 6, 34, 77, 78 danger, 62, 79 Derrida, Jacques, 52, 55, 72n3, 80 Donoghue, Denis, 55–6 Dougherty, John, 37, 69, 70 Douglas, Mary, 34, 63 dramaturgy, 6–7, 41, 43, 45, 47–8, 57–8, 62, 71, 75 Durkheim, Émile, 43, 46 Eagleton, Terry, 38 Edward VII Professorship, 15, 19, 22n7 English Faculty Board committees, 12–14 Board minutes, 4, 13–15, 21n3 Cambridge University, 2 English literature, 13, 66 education, 27 professorship, 22n7, 25, 38 as sacred, 61–4





Index

English studies, 2, 5, 16, 24–6, 30–3, 35, 39n6, 40n10, 53–4, 64–5, 68 English Tripos, 26, 36, 39n4, 40n12, 62 ‘epistemological styles’, 24, 30, 38n1, 49, 64, 75 Erskine-Hill, Howard, 14, 20, 37, 47, 50, 52, 56, 61–2, 65 Foucault, Michel, 72n3, 81n1 French theory, 23, 38, 39n6, 54–6, 66, 81n1 Glen, Heather, 13, 14 Goffman, Ervin, 3, 35–6, 45–5, 76 defining a situation, 3, 47, 51, 57, 75, 76 Guardian, The (newspaper), 36, 50, 57, 59n7, 61, 67 Harvey, John, 16, 50 Heath, Stephen, 15, 16, 21n3, 29, 37, 38n3, 47, 49, 50, 55, 68, 73n6 higher education, massification of, 24, 28, 30 Hindess, Barry, 30 Hirst, Paul, 30 Hoggart, Richard, 39n6 humanism, 24, 26, 27, 30 humanities, see social sciences humour, 46–8, 58n4 Ingleby, David, 80n1 Inglis, Fred, 12, 13, 18–19, 50 interaction rituals, 35, 78 Jack, Ian, 37, 61 Jardine, Lisa, 9n3, 20, 37, 59n9 Johnson, Gordon, 14 Joyce, James, 13, 38, 51, 68, 72n3 Jude the Obscure (Hardy), 47 justice, 61, 62 Kermode, Frank, 7, 12–15, 19, 31, 36–7, 39n9, 40n14, 50, 52, 55–7, 59n10, 59n7, 62, 71, 73n6 Kirk, Geoffrey, 31, 49, 67

Kuhn, Thomas, 7, 38n1 Lacan, Jacques, 51, 55, 72n3 Leach, Edmund, 72n3 Leavis, F. R., 15, 26–7, 29–30, 32–3, 37, 39n5, 40n10, 40n13, 56, 66, 68, 72–3n5, 78 linguistics, 27, 31, 55 linguistic sociology, 31, 43, 55 literary studies, 14, 20 dominant paradigm, 67 literature, 27, 29, 31 modern, 55 as sacred, 61–4, 65 literary theory, 12, 34, 47, 55, 57 Long, Mike, 12, 13, 47, 50, 69–70 MacCabe, Colin, 12, 14, 18, 19, 40n14 McCabe Affair, 2, 3, 9 chronology, 12–17 functions of, 17–20 non-reappointment as sacred issue, 48–51 proximate contexts, 34–8 socio-historical context, 24–34 ‘willing suspension of disbelief ’, 46 Manchester School of Anthropology, 3 Marxism, 27, 31, 57 massification, higher education, 28 Miller, Edward, 14 mise-en-scène, 45, 58n5 Mulhern, Francis, 30, 68 Multiple Correspondence Analysis, 9 narrative, 3, 8, 28 background, 76 cultural, 78, 80 event, 42–3 generational conflict, 52–3 Old Guard vs. Young Turk, 53, 54, 58 nation, nationalism, and national language, 54–6, 64–6 Newsnight (BBC television), 16 non-symbolic factors, bracketing out, 6, 34, 77, 78

DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0013

Index

Old Guard, positioning the antis as, 51–8 Outsiders, The (Becker), 65 Oxbridge colleges, 9, 23, 27, 53–4 parochialism, 50, 52, 55, 78 peer-review, 49 performance, plays, 47–8 performance teams, 23, 31, 34–8, 57–8, 75–8 performative, 6, 43 planned parochialism, 52 pluralism, 27, 32–3, 49, 57 pollution/pollutants, 8, 41, 61, 63, 64–9 positioning antis as conservative Old Guard, 51–8, 78 antis as reactionaries, 56 structuralism as a pollutant, 64–9 positioning theory, 5–9, 41 post-Robbins expansion, 23, 28, 30, 78 practical criticism, 39n7, 67 Practical Criticism (Richards), 39n7 pragmatic approach, theory, 5–6, 43, 79 profane, 42–3, 46, 50–1, 63–4 professional bankruptcy, 52 Reece, Florence, 17 Registrary, 13, 21n2 Richards, I. A., 27, 29, 30, 32, 39n7, 40n10, 67, 68 Ricks, Christopher, 14, 15, 16, 19, 20, 21n1, 37, 40n11, 40n14, 56, 59n9, 61 rise of the social sciences, 24, 28–31 Robbins expansion, 30 Robbins Report, 28 Rorty, Richard, 5, 24 sacred English literature and literary studies as, 61–4 MacCabe’s non-reappointment as, 48–51 and profane, 43, 46 Salingar, Leo, 13, 14 Sanderson, Alan, 18

DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0013



Scruton, Roger, 66 Senate House debate, 7, 37, 41, 45–8, 63, 70, 75–6, 82 Simpson, David, 3, 18, 37, 59n8, 65 Snow, C. P., 30, 58n2 social capital, 36, 76 social sciences humanities and, 3, 8, 23, 75, 78–80 literary theory and cultural studies, 55 rise of, 24–34 staging, Senate House debate, 4, 7, 8, 41, 44, 52, 75 Stedman-Jones, Gareth, 37, 50, 61 Steiner, George, 27, 29, 50, 52, 55, 72n4, 73n5 Stop Press (newspaper), 16, 37, 52 strategies, see symbolic strategies structuralism, 6, 16, 27–8, 46, 72n3 English reaction to, 55 literary theory, 57, 61 positioning, 54, 64–9 student numbers, 28 Swinnerton-Dyer, Peter, 15, 21n5 symbolic classification system, 41–2, 75–6 symbolic conflicts, 34, 80 symbolic strategies English literature and literary studies as sacred, 61–4 MacCabe’s non-reappointment as sacred issue, 48–51 ‘move along now, nothing to see here’, 69–72 positioning structuralism as a pollutant, 64–9 positioning the antis as conservative Old Guard, 51–8 Senate House debate, 45–8 Tanner, Tony, 9n2, 15, 37, 50, 52 Taylor, Charles, 81n1 Thatcher, Margaret, 33–4, 39n8 Time Out (Eagleton), 38 Times Higher Education Supplement (magazine), 50



Index

Times Literary Supplement (magazine), 18, 19, 31 Ulysses (Joyce), 68 University Teaching Officers (UTOs), 14, 20–1n1 Upgrading Committee, 12–15

Watergate Scandal, 42 Williams, Raymond, 12, 14–16, 19, 29, 37–8, 39n7, 49, 52, 55, 62, 64, 67–9 ‘willing suspension of disbelief ’, 46 Wilson, Penny, 36 Young Turks, 53, 78

DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0013