Coughlin's suspicion.

• Author: Weisberg, Robert
• Position: Anne Coughlin

A.S. Byatt's mordant fictional report from a "theoretical seminar" for literature graduate students reflects the intellectual crisis that the rise of postmodernism has caused in the academy. As the various postmodern critical theories challenge the ideal and possibility of objectivity, many scholars recognize a dangerous temptation: that postmodern skepticism could encourage the scholarly sins of carelessness, laziness, and prejudgment. If there can be no truth, there can be no error; and if we can not really know anything, why bother doing research?(2) Master a few subversive maneuvers and you may never have to solve another equation or squint at another microfiche.

These sordid temptations engender a climate of suspicion about trans-disciplinary trespasses, an epidemic of itchy trigger fingers at the frontiers between fields of study. These border tensions broke into all-out conflict in 1996, with Alan Sokal's mischievous parody of the new critical school of science studies.(3) Sokal, of course, was the physicist who deceived the editors of the journal Social Text into publishing an article that was a deliberately grotesque caricature of critical theory in the guise of a social constructivist account of physics. Some humanists, including the editors, denounced Sokal for fraud. They claimed that he took unethical advantage of the editors' understandable lack of sophistication in science, and of their admirably eclectic willingness to air new viewpoints in science studies.(4) Other humanists felt vicariously embarrassed because Sokal's escapade had done exactly what it had aimed to do expose the pompous mindlessness of much of the postmodernist attack on objectivity.(5) Others still may have found the parody brilliant, and the editors' humiliation well-deserved, but feared it would be misused against legitimate social constructivist accounts of the scientific establishment.(6)

Sokal's jest, and the ill-humor with which it was greeted, illustrate the anxieties attending interdisciplinary scholarship in the age of postmodern skepticism. When other disciplines profess an interest in our field, do they really mean to learn from us, or help us in our work? Or are they simply out to infiltrate our borders, and expose our pretenses (whether to scientific objectivity, or to epistemological sophistication)? Are they coming in search of pillage--exotic souvenirs with which to awe their colleagues at home, but which they will display without appreciation or understanding? Are they seeking to escape the strictures of their own discipline, to project their licentious yearnings for epistemological anarchy onto an exotic "other" and "go native?" Are they, worst of all, making fun of us?

Professor Anne Coughlin gives voice to such anxieties in her recent review(7) of Literary Criticisms of Law,(8) the new book co-authored by Guyora Binder and myself. Coughlin is a notable legal scholar who, with great wit and verve, has brought historical and literary insights to bear on law and legal scholarship. She has, for example, read the rhetoric of recent debates about domestic violence as a perpetuation of Victorian images of passive womanhood.(9) One of her recent essays imaginatively re-reads the traditional elements and proof requirements of the offense of rape as the legacy of a religiously inspired legal regime for policing female promiscuity.(10) In an earlier and controversial essay about personal narrative in contemporary legal scholarship,(11) Coughlin questioned the claims of authenticity in that scholarship by tracing its roots to venerable literary ancestors. Thus, she argued, such classic autobiographical genres as confession and apology provided formulaic--and culturally conservative--scripts for much of this new burst of supposedly spontaneous and subversive scholarly prose.

In short, Coughlin's own work provides evidence of the insights literary theory and methods can contribute to legal scholarship. Thus, it is strange that her recent review expresses so much anguished self-doubt about interdisciplinarity generally and literary theory in particular. It is especially surprising because while our book is not a parody of critical theory, it gives only the most qualified and measured praise to contemporary critical theory (and even then only to certain discrete types of work). Rather, the mere fact that our book deals with the way a literary sensibility might apprehend law seems to have provoked Coughlin into a dramatic confession of her own intellectual insecurity about the whole phenomenon of law-and-Humanities studies. Coughlin's gratuitous reaction makes our book the occasion for some very unfortunate and unnecessary agonies over the worth of the whole scholarly enterprise to which Coughlin's own work contributes.

Coughlin seems cross with us because we wrote what she describes as a treatise, a book covering a wide variety of scholars and literary and legal figures. She concedes that on the good side, a "treatise" like ours can be "user-friendly" and "open minded and generous" in letting many scholars and authors on stage for sympathetic treatment.(12) On the bad side, however, treatises are long and bland. Worse yet, Coughlin suggests, treatises risk trying to address too many audiences with widely differing reading backgrounds, so that many readers have to read selectively, gliding over familiar territory.(13) Coughlin seems worried that some legal readers will impatiently huff, for example, when we review the evolving conventions of statutory and constitutional interpretation in the nineteenth century (surely all lawyers know that the concept of "legislative intent" traditionally had nothing to do with the intentions of legislators).(14) Conversely, literary readers who might be interested in how legal scholars employ personal narrative will chafe as they hurry past our review of the conventions of modern narrative theory (surely no literature graduate student needs to be reminded of the differences between story time and narrative time, comedy and romance, or voice and point of view).(15) Why she finds this problem so serious is something I will return to shortly.

But next, somewhat inconsistently, Coughlin laments that because most of our book concerns other people's scholarship, it risks being too much of an academic insider's book. And on that score, she fears that too many of the insiders will find opportunities for self-congratulation. She says that we "search for ancestors, locate remote and close family branches, pass judgment on the health of surviving offspring, and identify lines likely to thrive in future generations." And she therefore worries about the impropriety of linking contemporary legal scholars to great thinkers or historical figures of the past. Thus, she asks, with an irony that has no clear object, "Wouldn't you be interested to learn, and yes, have it be known, that your forefathers include such worthies as Husserl, John Brown, Cicero ... Hegel & co.?"(16) Perhaps Coughlin believes that we were shamelessly flattering our professorial colleagues by linking them to the greats of the past, though the many legal scholars who get a bit roughed up by our evaluations of them would hardly think so.(17) Or perhaps the real answer lies in a later sentence, when Coughlin suggests that her concern has to do with professional jealousy. She seems to conjure up a reader (herself?) saying:

Have you heard about that guy who gets to teach ancient Norse tall tales--in the original, of course, and to law students, no less--while you have to shepherd the little lambs through the Carriage of Gods by Sea Act? Well, you might not know it from looking at him, but he just happens to be the great-great-grand nephew of Nietzsche....(18) I can only assume that the reference is to William Ian Miller, an eminent law-and-Humanities scholar, whose work on Icelandic sagas(19) wins high praise in our book, in a...