Raging Canons
March 1, 2008By Tommy Jadoo 
A support of the Guillorian perspective of the canon. One cannot help but wonder if the obfuscation in canonical debate is indicative of the obfuscation in American political debate, and if so, can Guillory’s thesis have broader application?
In a review of criticisms concerning the academics of the university, Hazel E. Barnes writes that the institution has been challenged with respect to the validity, value, and social relevance of what it offers to its members. Had Barnes been speaking more specifically of the canon, historically challenged upon the same dimensions, she may have offered words of similar meaning. From Longinus’ insistence upon not persuasion but transport to Kant’s writings on subjective universal tastes, there have been many questions but few solutions which did not generate controversy. Amid the effective battery of perspectives surrounding the canonical debates emerges John Guillory’s unique, unobtrusive criticisms of what he has termed purely a symbolic struggle. Namely, Guillory maintains that the conflict between the canonical and noncanonical, respectively characterized by traditionalist and proggressivist agendas, has clouded the real debate over what should and should not be accepted as part of academia; particularly noting the dissemination of national culture in relation to cultural capital. The New Rights relegation of the noncanonical has been countered (mistakenly) by the lefts notions of multiculturalism. The entire conflict, Guillory suggests, has obscured the fundamental issue: Assuming that cultures are interdependent both at the time of a works production and its consumption, will the school acknowledge the interdependence during consumption? The answer emerges from a series of Guillory’s arguments in which he outlines: 1) a taxonomy of culture and examination of the institutions transmitting culture; 2) multiculturalism and the pluralists deprived conception of cultural capital that has led to multiculturalisms downfall; 3) the ludicrousness of the canonical vs. noncanonical debates and the implications of engaging in meaningless prattle.
Guillory’s notions of culture are defined along two lines. Culture in the sense of refinement includes familiarity with the great works of civilization. This culture-in-the-sense-of-refinement has been termed school culture as opposed to national culture which relies upon an ethnographic sense of common beliefs, behaviors, attitudes. Traditionally, educational institutions, including the university, which have attempted to make school culture stand for national culture, have only created dissonance and resulting failure. Guillory, offering an explanation of the failing, writes “the left hand of the educational system the dissemination of a supposedly national culture remains ignorant of what the right hand is doing the differential tracking of students according to class or possession of cultural capital.” It is this very dynamic that has been labeled as the invisible culprit of class suppression. The educational system has become lost in ideological beliefs based upon fallacious reasoning (the reliance upon school culture to transmit national culture) and has divorced itself from the cultural realities that actually exist.
