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misconstruction of Peirce uncritically, it simplified his task enormously,
saving him the trouble of checking Lacan's appropriations against
Peirce's voluminous, difficult corpus.
If
only conservative evaluators
would agree to the constructedness of Lacan's notions, not their truth,
then the essay could proceed to publication.
Apologias like this one are rampant in the humanities, and the books
and articles that they enable flood the scholarly marketplace. University
press catalogues, booknotes and ads in periodicals, and "list of contrib–
utors" pages in journals announce these publications as breakthough
efforts and necessary reading, but despite the praise, most of them soon
disappear into the library stacks never to be heard from again. They are
hastily conceived and predictably argued, and notwithstanding the sin–
gularity promised on their dust jackets, they are all of a type. They begin
with approved constructionist premises, bolster them with arguments
from authority ("According to Richard Rorty... "), and attach them to
standard generalities about power, race, and gender. They vary only in
their subject matter, the texts and events selected for commentary. They
also suffer from the stylistic and design flaws characteristic of scholar–
ship pushed into production too quickly. Last year, I read six book–
length manuscripts for university presses, five of them by junior faculty.
All five I returned to the press with detailed instructions for develop–
mental editing. The authors possessed considerable intelligence and
earnest motives, but they obviously tried to compose too fast. Sentences
were unpolished and contained uniform expressions. Transitions were
jumpy and casual, as if the chapters succeeded one another with "Now,
let's look at...." The introductions were elliptical and rambling, as if
the authors had not yet settled the question of what concerns the pro–
jects were aimed at resolving.
But however rough and incoherent, such manuscripts often make it
into print and the authors win promotions. This is the research result of
the productivity requirements of the profession. Junior faculty scramble
to get dissertations published before their time, and the market is satu–
rated with scholarly ephemera. Younger humanities professors no
longer spend ten years investigating a subject, sharpening their theses,
and refining their prose. Lengthy archival studies and careful erudite
readings no longer appear. Career trajectories of figures like Rene
Girard, M . H . Abrams, Paul de Man, and Meyer Shapiro are eschewed,
for none of those talents produced enough work early in their profes–
sional lives to merit tenure under the present system. Penalized for
selecting long-term projects, assistant professors have too little time to
embark upon studies such as
The Mirror and the Lamp .
