Do Books Have a Place in a Shanghai World

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Do Books Have a Place in a Shanghai World?

lionel ruffel

Translated by Simon Porzak

For those who haven’t yet noticed, there’s a tune everyone’s whis-tling nowadays, and it’s the tune of rankings and evaluations. We’re evaluating a lot of things, from hospitals to the work of ministries themselves, but from now on it’s the evaluation of uni-versities and of higher education in general that will attract the most attention. And, evaluated in this manner, universities begin to regain their prestige, at long last—not once again—since these rankings and evaluations do not correspond (quite the opposite, in fact) to the glorious image that the French, it seems, would like to have of themselves. No problem! To these rankings (a new genre of human-interest story, quite useful for fi lling dead space in news-papers), our managers respond with a new battery of assessments, and everybody seems satisfi ed. Everybody but us, the assessed, such tragic fi gures—and much more tragic are those among the assessed who happen to belong to the diffi cult-to-assess discipline of literary studies.1 No matter how much each of us, according to his or her personal tastes, may jeer at, revolt against, or methodi-cally deconstruct academic rankings (chief among them being the Shanghai ranking), our work becomes more and more infl uenced

qui parle fall/winter 2011 vol.20, no.1 80

by the large-scale procedures of international evaluation. One of these decisive evolutions concerns our relationship with the book.

The Book, So Badly Abused by Rankings

After universities, research teams, and professional development, journals will be evaluated in turn. Here we cut right to the heart of the matter, because from now on journals will form the keystone of the system. But how is a series of evaluations leading toward a ranking built? Let’s examine, just to take a random case, the most famous of them all, the so-called Shanghai ranking. This ranking relies on a tally of the Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals awarded to the professors, researchers, and students of a given institution, on a tally of the articles published in the journals Nature and Science originating with these same persons, on the number of their articles indexed in reference databases (such as the Science Citation Index or the Arts & Humanities Citation Index), and on the number of researchers who are considered indispensable in their disciplines. Other principles, such as an institution’s size, are taken into ac-count but will not be of importance to this essay. One preliminary remark: this ranking gives a lot of weight to the so-called hard sci-ences (since, as it’s worth remembering, Nobel Prizes for literature and the Nobel Peace Prize are not added into these calculations) and to the Anglo-Saxon domain. We’ll have to return to this point.

More importantly, a category has been so strongly emphasized that it has entered into contemporary discourse—the category of the chercheur publiant, or researcher-publisher.2 Publishing what, exactly? Essentially, publishing articles in those journals that have been subject to a ranking. To state it baldly, in the world imagined by this kind of ranking and evaluation, publishing a book is not of the same capital importance as it once was. A few centuries of tradition granting the book its supremacy over the article may very well be reversed.3 Each individual country had its subtleties, but this hierarchy had been a global one. In France, in the fi eld of liter-ary studies, there existed an implicit upwards slope from an article in a specialized publication to an article in a general publication, from a book with a specialized publisher to a book with a general

Ruffel: Do Books Have a Place in a Shanghai World? 81

publisher (e.g., passing from the presses universitaires to Gallimard or Minuit4 usually constituted an increase in prestige). Let’s not forget a third category, that of vulgarizing articles or works, with the lowest market value on this implicit scale. The tacit, underlying philosophy of this system granted ascendancy based on the mag-nitude of a work’s argumentation and its capacity to be shared as widely as possible, without lapsing into the excessive simplifi cation associated with vulgarization. A different set of values is expressed in today’s extension of a scientifi c paradigm into the humanities or “social sciences” (sciences humaines). We might even prepare ourselves for the end of humanities colloquia in favor of those big conventions where we will exhibit, by constraint and as a rule, our “results” (a term that is quite foreign to us) on a single “poster” (as they’re called).

The consequences are numerous. The temporality of writing a book (essay,5 thesis, treatise, manual, etc.) is not the same as the temporality of writing an article. To plunge yourself into writing a book is to agree to step out of the frenzy of perpetual solicitations and the multiplication of shorter forms, to accept a larger share of the risk, since you alone will take responsibility for an argument (as opposed to the publication of an article in a journal, which can be “guarded” or “tutored” by others). Books will certainly not disappear from the fi eld of literary studies, but more and more of-ten these books will just be collections of articles that have already been tried out elsewhere. A collection of articles undeniably has a certain value, and a “good” collection of articles will always be more interesting than a “bad” book, but a collection doesn’t pos-sess the same conceptual architecture as a book. Furthermore, it’s less demanding for the reader, who can dive into whatever he or she is interested in as his or her schedule allows. Finally, historians of the book and of publishing, Roger Chartier in particular, have taught us that not only do media affect the message but that there exists an essential link between the object-medium, the generic and discursive categories, and the potential uses of a text. Evidently, any teaching of literature, of literatures, is in its very essence linked to the reading of books, but more and more, and certainly much more than when I was a student, we privilege the reading of ar-ticles over that of books.


These arguments could be contested, criticized for their lack of precision, or countered with the affi rmation that a very aristocratic hierarchy (from an article in a specialized journal to publication with a general publishing house) has been supplanted by a more democratic process (anonymous articles sifted through by two im-partial readers). It might even be said that we are dealing here with a necessary recalibration of literary studies, where “essayicity” or “bookiness” has for a long time prevailed over a scientifi city that we too often regard disdainfully and, it must be admitted, wrong-ly. Finally, it could be conceded that this Anglo-Saxon framework privileges integration in a community of researchers over the af-fi rmation of egos. These arguments are fair and deserve further consideration.

We needn’t, however, be mistaken about these new processes of inequality. On the one hand, this system has favored an explo-sion in the prices of scientifi c journals, which are becoming quite simply unaffordable for individuals. Only institutional libraries can shell out the astronomical sums demanded by these newly consolidated journals. And I suspect that the Harvard library, to take a random example, may be better endowed than the Uni-versity of Albi library, just to mention a university at which I’ve taught. They tell me this was already the case during the reign of the book. Not so, because anyone, anywhere, could order a book personally or have it ordered by his or her university library. On the other hand, we have every right to ask ourselves where these astronomical sums spent by university libraries (which is to say, ultimately, by public powers) go. Certainly not to those who made the journal (article authors, members of editorial commit-tees, report writers, etc.) and who, except in a very few cases, are not paid. Françoise Benhamou reminds us on her blog that “the market for scientifi c journals, which a study directed for the Eu-ropean Commission by a group of researchers from the Free Uni-versity of Brussels and the University of Social Sciences of Tou-louse estimated to generate between 7 and 11 million dollars in sales in 2001, is strongly concentrated, notably around Elsevier, Kluwer, Blackwell, and Springer.”6 We have to take this given—this concentration—into account when we think about our at-


titude toward the transparency and democratization associated with the consolidation of journals.

Another fundamental inequality is currently in the process of instituting what amounts to a veritable academic monolingualism. The model of the journal that we see developing now employs a simplifi ed international English that leaves hardly any room for the critical style that has been of capital importance in the history of literary studies. As we all know, style is not just ornamenta-tion; it produces sense, or at least is able to infl ect it, and adds a stratum of complexity to a developing thought. Fears about the impoverishment of critical discourse will be legitimate if journals of literary studies align themselves with scientifi c journals at the expense of books. Otherwise, all academics will need to have spent several years of their lives in the United States or Great Britain to express themselves, in English journal articles, and (why not) in books as well, with a complexity equivalent to that which their mother tongue would have allowed them. This perspective would be exciting if it did not contribute to the imperialism that is already at work here—since the United States and Great Britain monopo-lize the fi fty highest places in the Shanghai ranking.

Faced with this somber assessment, we might well wonder what the academic institution is doing. For the moment, it seems to have chosen to answer the challenges posed by rankings. The French government has created an evaluative bureau, launched on March 21, 2007.7 This agency’s goal is to evaluate learning institutions, departments, educational strategies, and degrees. But it has already (since July 28, 2008) produced a “list of journals in the fi elds of social sciences and humanities,” a list that has been garnished with a ranking brought to you by the letters A, B, and C. This list was probably created to rival another European evaluation, the “Eu-ropean Reference Index for the Humanities.” This latter index, older and thus more complete, includes a ranking of journals by discipline, including literature. A recent communiqué (September 24, 2008) from two AERES directors delegated to literature con-cludes: “At the end of these two meetings, in which the advantages and disadvantages of a list and of a ranking of scientifi c journals in literature were weighed, it was decided, given the current state


of refl ection and in the absence of a consensus, that the AERES would not produce, this year, a reference list for French Literature and Comparative Literature. The discussion will be continued, a year from today, to evaluate the situation.”8 A wise decision, but the reader will understand that the restriction is merely temporary, and that a French list will soon be established, without any larger refl ection on the publication of both articles and books in literary studies. Unless . . .

As diffi cult as it is to walk against the wind and hope against hope, we would have to be able to put the book back at the center of the evaluating system and to remember that a researcher who publishes books and not a single article is also (!) a researcher-publisher. The idea may be rather unpleasant, but since it seems unavoidable that our directors will produce a ranking of journals, it seems to me that this list should necessarily be balanced by an evaluation of book publishers in the fi eld of literary studies, and in the humanities and social sciences. This balancing act would have its basis in the fact that the global publishing market, despite re-cent effects of concentration and older effects of globalization, still rests on a foundation of strong regional and national particulari-ties. In the Anglo-American world, for example, university presses are extremely strong, and a research professor would have no in-terest in publishing a book in some equivalent (although there are really no equivalents in this context) to the series “NRF Essais” at Gallimard, the “Paradoxe” or “Critique” series at the Éditions de Minuit, or in Seuil’s “Librairie du XXIe siècle,” to give a few examples. This diversity of publishing houses that dedicate entire series to the humanities doesn’t exist elsewhere. How can an in-ternational system of evaluation even be imagined in these condi-tions? We must demand that the AERES experts produce an evalu-ating system that takes the particularity of our fi eld (which is both local and worldwide) into account. We must demand that they not pursue European or international harmony at all costs. In these conditions, we hope for an evaluation that takes the publication of books into account and integrates a third term into the growing di-vision between scientifi c works and works of vulgarization: works published by general publishers. Ultimately, this presupposes an evaluation of publishing houses themselves.


From Structures to Mentalities

Responsibility for this kind of gentle divorce between the university and the book does not, however, lie entirely with the mechanisms of evaluation alone, which are much too recent for their effects to be themselves evaluable. The greatest structural fault of our univer-sity system is to have hampered the renewal of the reading pubic through the large-scale weakening of those colossal book-pushers, the humanities, and the real impossibility—despite all sanctimo-nious claims to the contrary—of any true interdisciplinarity. Even if it is impossible and even indecent to praise the American univer-sity system naively, one remarkable aspect ought to be noted, and that is the extraordinary diversity of students who take classes in social sciences and literary studies. The uniformity here is neither social nor ethnic, but obligatory; it is formidable, but disciplinary. And when I say “disciplinary,” we must think in terms of fi elds: thus, a non-negligible segment of the public in a literature course in the United States comes from international relations, business management, biology, physics, and so forth. In France, our classes are awfully homogeneous. At best, a professor of general and com-parative literature can hope for a few students who have wandered in from philosophy or from one of the various national literatures. But students from scientifi c or legal disciplines? Forget about it. And how could we even hope for those students, since in most cases campuses have been specialized, geographically forbidding any and all interdisciplinarity? In this way, a distinction has been made between universities whose primary material is the book (hu-manities), those whose primary material is the article (law school), and, fi nally, those whose practice is experience (scientifi c or techni-cal universities). This division has multiple consequences. On the one hand, this means that a student who has had to absorb hours and hours of classwork in history, French, and philosophy in the course of his secondary education can, all of a sudden, never hear anything about those subjects ever again once he arrives in an in-stitute of higher education. How can he or she not feel some sort of symbolic liberation? And from what, for the most part, would he or she feel liberated? Probably from reading books (that expression


is not tautological, since reading is not what’s at stake here). This gigantic disproportion between secondary and higher education is obviously poisonous. An illustrative anecdote: the only occasion at which advanced students in all disciplines can meet with each other is extremely selective. This occasion is a centerpiece of the CIES [Centres d’initiation à l’enseignemenet supérieur, or Higher-Educa-tion Pedagogy Training Centers—Trans.], which offer internships to aspiring professor-researchers. It’s diffi cult to fi nd these intern-ships, which should, in theory, be of interest to a rather wide pub-lic. The most established one that I was able to attend was an in-ternship in the history of science, which proved (if anything can be said to prove this) that these young professor-researchers coming mostly from scientifi c universities must feel that something is miss-ing. But once the speaker decided to see what we already knew, it turned out that only the students of literature could cite the big names in the history of science. The break, then, is a very radical one. This break, at any rate, begins in high school with the appall-ing and unacceptable devaluation of the literary baccalaureates, and of humanities instruction along with them. The ideology of the 1980s, which has been transformed concretely into educational policy and more nebulously into attitudes or mentalities, privileged engineers and businesspeople. This ideology, combined with the differentiation of campuses by disciplinary fi elds and the rejection of interdisciplinarity, goes a long way toward explaining one strain of the book’s decline in French university education.

In an exciting book, the American writer Russell Banks describes his experience as a university professor of literature in this way:

I taught at Princeton University for many years, and it was always the case. I taught the ambitious children of Indians, Koreans, Jamaicans, and so on. The parents had sacrifi ced and sometimes humbled themselves working at menial jobs so that these children could go to university, and they were all study-ing medicine, law, business, those sorts of professions. And you know that their children in turn, when they go to university, will study music and art, philosophy, the humanities.9

If we are to take the social dimension of this remark into account, we would also have to emphasize that the American university


structure values the humanities and artistic disciplines, and along with them the book and the work of art, much more highly than our French system. One proof of this is that the humanities and liberal arts are still structuring concepts in the American system. Nearly all American students believe that their curricula ought to include one or more classes in literature or art history. As much as we’d like to say the same, we know that our reality is quite dif-ferent. It’s almost completely the opposite: the literary disciplines suffer from a striking lack of social representativity, participating without wanting to in the maintenance of social reproduction and distinction. Except this mechanism of reproduction and distinction has considerable drawbacks and scant gains.

It’s understandable that our relationship to the book is tied tightly, in the university sphere and then beyond it, to political de-cisions: the absurd structure of campuses segregated by disciplin-ary fi elds, the refusal of interdisciplinarity, the cult of engineering and business, the devaluation of the literary branches and of the humanities in secondary education. But at the same time, what pol-itics has done, politics can undo. Sadly, that’s not what’s going on right now. The law named “LRU,”10 now in charge of our future or at least for the remainder of the next fi ve years of our future (but the deafening silence of the Socialist leaders makes us think that they massively approve of this reform), seems to strengthen this di-sastrous movement rather than oppose it. The reigning philosophy is still one of professionalization, while what we need to do is pre-cisely to stop worrying about it and to return to our fundamentals, which are to transmit a non-specialized knowledge and inscribe our students in a cultural history. It’s astonishing that today’s aca-demic policies dream of the American model while they seem to do the exact opposite. Who said “The essence of a university is that it is uniquely accountable to the past and to the future—not simply or even primarily to the present”? Who said “A university is not about results in the next quarter; it is not even about who a student has become by graduation. It is about learning that molds a lifetime, learning that transmits the heritage of millennia; learn-ing that shapes the future”? Or, again, that the university is also a place “of philosophers as well as scientists,” where teaching and


knowledge are valued in part “because they defi ne what has over centuries made us human, not because they can enhance our global competitiveness”?11

Is this some dangerous revolutionary? Some anti-government intellectual? No, it’s Drew Gilpin Faust, the new president of the richest and most powerful university in the world, Harvard, in her 2007 inauguration speech. Obviously, money and power provide some liberties that are unavailable to others. But all the same, the philosophy being woven here is much more favorable, palpably so, to the teaching of humanities that, whatever form it may take, hap-pens through the book.

Hopes

I’ve already said that what politics does, and what politics can (luckily) undo. Let’s say it clearly: we can’t really expect much from the current teams, for whom the humanities and literary stud-ies seem to be only a minor concern—if that. I’m being generous, because we could see in the declarations of the president during his candidacy, even if it meant giving into a certain kind of paranoia, a clear desire to bury them. We might very well fear that the cur-rent opposition is not really moving in a direction we would like it to. For example, imagine my surprise when I discovered that the working group Enseignement supérieur et recherche (Higher Education and Research), part of the think tank on “reestablishing the Left,” terra nova: a majority of economists, fi nance inspectors, human resources directors. Not a single representative from the humanities!12 We should be worried that the question of the book and of higher education scarcely interests them, except in the spirit of accounting.

Personally, I’d like to fi nish by turning to a book, Lire, interpré-ter, actualiser: Pourquoi les études littéraires? (Reading, Interpret-ing, Actualizing: Why Literary Studies?), by Yves Citton—a book that has taken the time to develop an argument and isn’t limited to an advertising slogan, although it didn’t lack for such peremptory slogans. Taking the repeated attacks of Nicolas Sarkozy during his presidential campaign against the study of literature written in the


past as his pretext, Citton’s project never fails to astonish: “In this book, I will show in which ways our practices of reading and in-terpretation put in play by the study of (classic) literature deserve to be put back into the very heart—and not at the idle or negligible margins—of contemporary apparatuses of capital production.”13 Beyond the necessarily provocative (because it itself responds to a provocation) character of this assertion, the ambition—the real ambition—of this book is to reestablish literary studies, in this case principally studies of books, so as to put them into a different kind of contact with contemporary social and political worlds. Implic-itly, Citton engages in an attack on literary studies as they are all too often practiced, that is, by giving a central place to erudition and literary history, the famous “You cannot read Ronsard un-less you understand the political history of the sixteenth century and the whole of ancient literature; otherwise you’ll say nothing but trash.” Citton reverses this perspective: we must start from our contemporary situation to transform texts by actualizing them. This presupposes a difference in understanding the “literary.” The literary is not an essence but a contextual construction, to be un-endingly reinvented by the reader. Such a vision understandably encourages interdisciplinarity, or even better, to speak in Citton’s language, indisciplinarity, since we, we literary pedagogues, have to learn everything, or at least to learn as much as a non-specialist would. In this case, the book would be much more desirable if we declared that its interpretation is open to actualization—and not already given, and an object for research, in accordance with principles that presuppose a specifi c training. But there is a deeper reason for a remotivation of literary studies. Essentially, literary studies proceed from the active interpretation of these complex systems, speaking in cognitive terms, that books are. Now, we have passed from productive capitalism, to the capitalism of knowledge, to this cognitive capitalism in which the necessary competences are primarily hermeneutic. Because books of literature are complex hermeneutic systems, a sustained engagement with them allows for a better understanding of the contemporary world. QED.

Understanding but also action, since literary reading invites us to grasp the connotative meanings implied in a text’s fi eld of pos-


sibilities, as opposed to a non-literary reading, which only catch-es the denotative meaning of an utterance. The fi rst reading thus allows us more successfully to resist the deceptive seductions of promotional and ideological discourses through understanding the polysemy at work in them. To get right down to it, a question of emancipation is again at stake here, because “literary fi ction al-lows the reader to experience affective reorganizations, capable of spawning new possibilities, in a time when the economy of affects becomes the central battlefi eld of our social developments” (LIA, 303).14 This book is joyful, encouraging, inspiring. It enjoins us not to renounce who we are, not to renounce the study of Molière and Racine in colleges and high schools (thankfully, secondary school teachers have not renounced this, contrary to what a general theme of decrying decadence would lead us to believe), not to transform literary studies into college-level cultural studies (which we aren’t doing), but to put evaluations and rankings back in their place and remember what they truly are: geopolitical struggles whose main fi eld is the academic market. With Citton, I would say that only the company of books can help us toward such an understanding.

Notes

1. I’d like to make it clear that I write here as a professor-researcher in a literary discipline (which happens to be general and comparative literature), not as a specialist in university politics or in the politics of the book, both of which are implicated in this article.

2. The term chercheur publiant has become standardized in France and is commonly used in academic job postings. Although we do not (yet) speak of researcher-publishers in an Anglophone academic context, the extent of the idiom’s currency is comparable to our alliterative imperative “publish or perish”—Trans.

3. To be fair, it must be said that there also exist, notably in France, sys-tems of evaluation that give an essential place to books. But on the one hand, these systems have the fault of not being suffi ciently stan-dardized, and on the other hand, we have entered into a war of evalu-ations, and for the moment Anglo-Saxon principles, which epitomize the Shanghai ranking, have the advantage.

4. Presses universitaires (university presses) roughly correspond to the various university presses in the United States; however, the most


prestigious French intellectuals often publish with the well-estab-lished publishing houses Gallimard and Minuit, which also publish highbrow literary works (for instance, Minuit publishes works of high theory by Georges Didi-Huberman and the more accessible lit-erary studies of Pierre Bayard, along with its stable of well-regarded luminary litterateurs like Jean Echenoz and Jean-Philippe Toussaint). Unlike the American system, French publishing houses unite authors across categories such as “strict academic,” “public intellectual,” “avant-garde author,” and “critical and commercial success”—all the while maintaining strict segregations based on levels of prestige (as if Judith Butler, Joyce Carol Oates, and James Patterson were all pub-lished by the same imprint).—Trans.

5. The French word essai, which occurs in the subtitles of most long-format literary studies published in French, is only partially or anach-ronistically translated by the English word essay. In French, essai re-fers almost exclusively to long, book-length works and connotes a heightened, academic style.—Trans.

6. “le marché des revues scientifi ques, dont une étude menée pour la Commission européenne par un groupe de chercheurs de l’Université libre de Bruxelles et de l’Université des sciences sociales de Toulouse estimait le chiffre d’affaires de 7 à 11 milliards de dollars en 2001, est fortement concentré autour d’Elsevier, Kluwer, Blackwell, Spring-er notamment.” See http://www.livreshebdo.fr/weblog/webLogText.aspx?id=24.

7. This is the Agence d’évaluation de la recherche et de l’enseignement supérieur (AERES, or Bureau of Evaluations of Research and Higher Education)—Trans. See http://www.aeres-evaluation.fr.

8. “Au terme de ces deux réunions, où ont été pesés les avantages et les inconvénients d’une liste et d’un classement des revues scientifi ques en littérature, il a été décidé, en l’état actuel de la réfl exion et en l’absence d’un consensus, que l’AERES ne produirait pas, cette année, de liste de référence en littérature française et en littérature comparée. La dis-cussion sera poursuivie, d’ici un an, pour faire le point sur la situa-tion.” See http://www.fabula.org/actualites/article25750.php.

9. Russell Banks, Dreaming Up America (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008), 47.

10. The LRU, or Loi relative aux libertés et responsabilités des universités (University Freedoms and Responsibilities Act), passed in 2007, pro-vides for the transformation of French universities into autonomous institutions, each in charge of its own budget and management. One


of the three stated purposes of the law is to make French universities more competitive and visible on a global scale, which would imply some relationship to international rankings and evaluations.—Trans.

11. See Faust’s inauguration speech, http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2007/10/12/faust-inauguration-speech-unleashing-our-most.

12. See http://www.tnova.fr/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=383.

13. “Il s’agira de montrer dans ce livre en quoi les pratiques de lecture et d’interprétation, mises en jeu par l’étude de la littérature (ancienne), méritent d’être replacées en plein cœur—et non pas dans les marges oisives et négligeables—des dispositifs contemporains de production des richesses.” Yves Citton, Lire, interpréter, actualiser: Pourquoi les études littéraires? (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2007), 24. Hereafter cited as LIA.

14. “la fi ction littéraire permet au lecteur d’expérimenter des réagence-ments affectifs capables de frayer de nouveaux possibles, en une époque où l’économie des affects devient le terrain de lutte central de nos développements sociétaux.”

Do Books Have a Place in a Shanghai World

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