This paper, “William James’s Critique of Professional Culture,” is part of a broader project of elaborating a tradition in American aesthetic thought that celebrates nondiscursive aesthetic experience—the immediately felt affective and bodily experience of an artistic text—over verbal formulations of textual meaning. My focus here is on the psychologist and philosopher William James, whose tenure as a professor at Harvard in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century coincided with the national emergence of what the historian Burton Bledstein has called a “culture of professionalism.” The emergence of a culture of professionalism was intimately tied to transformations in higher education that established the university as the primary organ for the training and certification of professionals and elevated research over teaching as the university’s primary commitment. A central feature of the culture of professionalism was its emphasis on specialized knowledge, an esoteric vocabulary, and the production of a supply of scholarly discourse to fuel a growing apparatus of professional journals and conferences. In opposition to this single-minded emphasis on discursive knowledge, James repeatedly argued that the linguistic concepts devised by psychologists and philosophers distort the nondiscursive experiences those concepts are meant to describe. In his remarks about art scattered through his works he noted the poverty of verbal formulations relative to the transformational power of aesthetic experience.

As Bledstein observes, the increasing authority of professional discourse in the late nineteenth century created social and economic opportunities for the educated professional class at the expense of poor, rural, and immigrant Americans: “Those armed with words would get ahead in the new society; the inarticulate, barely literate, and foreign speaking would not.” This is the point, I think, at which my paper broaches the theme of our conference. As a teacher of American literature and culture, I wonder if I am not colluding with a hegemonic “discursive imperative” by sending to my students the implicit message that the production of discourse, whether written, spoken, or thought, is the proper goal of our experience of novels, poems, paintings, and other cultural texts. The automaticity with which my students accept the need to say what they think about those texts is the very means by which the professional class (and its aspirants) protects its cultural and economic authority. Although James was not one to dwell on the social and political ramifications of his arguments, his work suggests that a nondiscursive aesthetics might play a role in the elaboration of a counterhegemonic disciplinary practice.

This is the strong version of my argument, by which I mean the version that freely indulges in untested hypothesis, oversimplification, and hyperbole. I, like most teachers, I presume, would not assign term papers or lead rooms of undergraduates in discussion unless I believed there was some value in talking about poems and paintings and other texts. Certainly James produced and published no small quantity of discourse. But he also felt that in talking about works of art the most vital parts of our experience ended up on the cutting room floor. With James, I wonder if, in our exclusive focus on producing discourse, we aren’t neglecting alternative uses for the text. I wonder if what we teach our students to understand by “knowledge” isn’t woefully narrow. A model of knowledge limited to that which can be clearly articulated secures cultural authority in the hands of those who make the best arguments and marginalizes “the inarticulate, barely literate, and foreign speaking.”

Eric Fortier
University of Massachusetts Amherst