The Drama of Thought

John Pistelli's invisible college and the problem with the standard critique of academia.

I continue to enjoy

John Pistelli

’s Invisible College lecture series on British literature, which is everything you would want such a course to be—gossipy, erudite, breezy, deep, personal, critical, etc. All the good things. 

I’ve been a mediocre pupil so far—have done none of the reading since the early weeks, when it was just a few poems per session; occasionally miss a whole lecture; often skip the last 20 or 30 minutes—but that doesn’t seem to matter much in terms of the basic pleasure of listening. I assume John wouldn’t begrudge me my mere adequacy.

What’s struck me most, as a natural meta-critic of this kind of thing, is John’s relationship to what I take as the standard critique of contemporary humanities teaching, which is that your typical (left wing) professor of today is far too into theory, politics, and extra-textual historical and sociological context at the expense of close structural attention to and general enthrallment with the beauty and majesty of the texts under discussion.

On the one hand I take John to be in some kind of broad sympathy with the notion that there’s something wrong with the contemporary academy (the “visible college,” in his parlance). On the other hand I think it would be very difficult to listen to John’s lectures and come to the conclusion that he is the kind of teacher that most of the advocates of the standard critique (I think of a puffy-faced William Bennett spliced with the weasel face of Chris Rufo) think they want.

It’s not that John doesn’t care about the beauty of language, the transcendent value of many of his selected texts, or the necessity of engaging with some recognizable version of the western canon. It’s that he mostly takes that all for granted. It’s a premise of his course, not its subject or his method. If what you’re waiting for, in listening to these lectures, is for John to expend serious intellectual and rhetorical firepower trying to evoke what it feels like, as a reader, to aesthetically experience the text in question, you will wait mostly in vain. He does read some passages from the texts, now and then, but they usually are selected for the ways in which they evoke a certain idea or theme with which he’s engaging. Even when the point is to give us the flavor of the writer’s style, what’s missing is the kind of the narrative set-up—here’s what’s coming, here’s what other people have said about the specific ways in which it’s amazing to read, here’s what it makes me feel, here’s what else it’s like that you already know, etc.—that John would do naturally if he were the kind of teacher who got off on that kind of pedagogical work.

What gets John off are ideas. His course is above all a romance of ideas; his authors and their texts are vehicles through which ideas move and dance, entwine and separate and clash, through time. This is where the primary pleasure for the listener resides. And while the core texts of the syllabus are pretty old school, no modern or postmodern thinker is alien or anathema to his dance with ideas. Marx, Freud, Foucault, Eliot, Auerbach, Said, Kosofsky Sedgwick, Paglia, Butler, Eagleton, Bourdieu, Fanon, and so on. 

Listening to a lecture by John Pistelli is an aesthetic pleasure, but the aesthetic pleasure derives from listening to him—his joy in his own language, his fascination with the ideas, his frequent digressions, his expert curation of biographical info, his fluency with the broad sweep of the history and theory of the last few centuries, his humorous comments on noises that intrude from outside his home, the ways in which each lecture has a natural arc of its own while also existing in conversation with its preceding lectures. 

All of which is to say nothing more radical than that John is an exceptional teacher in the traditional mold, but what he reveals in his particularity is that the qualities of being such a person are not what so many critics of the academy think they are. They inhere primarily in the person rather than in their choice of texts, topics and interpretive lenses. What we want, as students, is someone who is charismatic, who makes it obvious through their passionate engagement with the material that we should care about living in passionate engagement with ideas and art, who has strong opinions about what matters, who cares about the language that they use, who has a big story to tell, and who conveys that they know his or her or their shit better than we do. We want someone who persuasively stages the drama of thought (to borrow the title John gave his lecture on George Bernard Shaw).

We should be worried much less, in other words, about whether our universities are too left-wing, too theoretical, or too post-modern, and worried much more about whether they’re too boring. It is certainly possible that they are too boring,¹ and furthermore that this boringness is downstream of precisely the tendencies and trends that the critics of the academy highlight. It’s worth insisting, however, that in principle this doesn’t have to be the case. The kind of teachers we want should be able to exist across all sorts of political and theoretical spectra. Among the best teachers I had in college one was a cranky paleo-conservative computer scientist who hated technology and another was a swishy art historian who paints expressionist male nudes and in his spare time reviews fountain pens on youtube. They probably couldn’t bear being in the same room with each other for more than five minutes, but who cares? They were each inspiring to me in their own ways. One gave me Orwell, the other Foucault.

If there is a relationship between the political and theoretical tendencies of the professoriate and the general quality of its teaching, it’s not a simple one, nor does it point toward any kind of simple solution to whatever deficits there may be in the latter.

1. I’m genuinely not sure if this is the case, at least when compared to previous eras of college instruction. I suspect that we assume this because we falsely extrapolate from a few great figures. No doubt it was a joy to study literature from Lionel Trilling, for instance, but were most of his colleagues in the Columbia English Department all that great? I have my doubts. And even if they were, were they all that great at Harvard and the University of Michigan and Oberlin at the same time?