Shakespeare versus the bus ticket

In the current furore over changes to the teaching of English, a number of commentators have accused "postmodern" theorists of destroying the study of English literature (see for example, Dumbing down: outcomes based and politically correct—the impact of the culture wars on our schools, Donnelly 2007).

One of the dramatic claims made in the debate is that postmodernists see no difference between studying Shakespeare and reading a bus ticket or an SMS message. Educational standards and cultural traditions are at risk if postmodernists gain control of the curriculum, we are told.

Critics can even point to curriculum examples that seem to prove their point: such as Western Australia's forthcoming Literature Course of Study, which includes opportunities for students to study graffiti, among other kinds of text.

Contrasting English literature's greatest icon with such a mundane and ephemeral object as a bus ticket or a text message certainly makes for a striking argument. The claim is all the more effective because the literature-versus-bus-ticket argument has not been made up: it actually comes from the work of one the best-known theorists, the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton (Literary theory: An introduction, 1983). I have repeated it myself (Criticism in the postmodern age. CCI512 Seminar, Moon 1987), as a way of illustrating some points about post-structural approaches to literature. But context is everything, and the devil is in the detail. What sounds like an alarming assertion becomes much less scandalous when the reasoning behind it is revealed and understood.

The point that many commentators have failed to grasp is this: there is more than one way of studying those cultural phenomena that we call texts, or writings, or literary works.

The approach that most people are familiar with (to varying degrees) is called Literary Criticism. "Lit Crit" is a discipline with a long history in western culture, though its formal development occurred within English universities in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It concerns itself with making aesthetic and moral judgments about those texts that we call works of literature - which generally means creative works of fiction that portray and comment on aspects of human experience.

The literary critic uses a variety of methods, including historical research, biography, close reading, and various kinds of textual interpretation. The immediate aim of criticism is to decide which works of literature offer the greatest insight into the human condition, and to describe, if possible, how they do it; the broader aim is to improve society by cultivating individual taste and morality, using the "best" works of literature as a kind of moral compass.

Within the literary-critical tradition, the work of writers like Shakespeare has special value, because critics have judged such work to be of lasting value to the culture.

But Literary Criticism is only one of the games that we can play with texts, just as soccer is only one of many different games that we can play with a ball. In recent years, we have seen another game and another set of players, arrive on the academic scene.

The people playing this new game have decided to look at cultural phenomena in a different way. We could describe them as cultural “scientists," because some of their methods are similar to those of natural scientists: they are interested in observing, classifying, and explaining cultural objects without making aesthetic or moral judgments. They treat works of literature in the same way that a geologist treats rocks - as objects that we find lying around in the culture, and which we might stub our intellectual toes on.

To these cultural "scientists," works of literature sit alongside a whole range of other cultural objects - billboards, bus tickets, popular songs - that are made out of the same substance: language. Like physicists arranging elements on a periodic table, they try grouping together objects with similar properties and compositions, to see what patterns are revealed.

These groupings sometimes include books. That means the work of such “scientists” occasionally overlaps the field of Literary Criticism. But even if both disciplines have an interest in books, they are not playing the same game with them. This is an important point to grasp.

Cultural Studies (for that is the "science" I am describing) is not so much a denial of Literary Criticism: it is about doing something else instead of Literary Criticism. (At this point I should admit that I am simplifying the positions terribly, in order to make the larger point of my comparison clear. There are competing traditions and positions within, as well as between, the two disciplines; and my use of the term “science” should not be taken too literally.)

In the area where these two disciplines intersect, we have seen various "turf wars" break out, as the two groups vie for influence and respectability. The battles have taken place in schools and universities; in the pages of academic journals; in museums and art galleries; in newspapers - in any cultural spaces where boundaries are drawn and judgments are made about the cultural objects that we produce and value.

There are political and ideological dimensions to the battle, undoubtedly. But at base, Literary Criticism and Cultural Studies are different intellectual enterprises. Literary Criticism is about making aesthetic and moral judgments of literary works: Cultural Studies, including the sub-set of so-called "postmodern theory", is about describing, classifying and explaining a much more diverse range of cultural processes and products.

For Cultural Studies, the real goals are to describe the conditions under which various cultural objects are created, and to reveal the underlying codes and rules by which they generate meaning.

Which brings us to the works of Shakespeare, and the bus ticket. For the cultural "scientist", these are two objects made out of the same basic substances: language, words on paper, printing technologies, and the like. On that basis, they can be grouped together on the "periodic table" of texts - just as lead and tin can be grouped together on the basis of their common properties. But what is it that the cultural "scientist" actually does with such objects? How does he or she “read” the bus ticket? And what does that have to do with Shakespeare?

I think the debate will be helped if we actually look briefly at a bus ticket - or, in this case, a tram ticket.

In December 2006, I travelled from Adelaide to Glenelg by tram. On that journey, I purchased a ticket. On the front face of the ticket was the following information:

metroticket  24Dec 14H21
validate each boarding - insert this way
$02.20 RGI Z3

On the reverse of the ticket was this:

 ... What really matters is what happens within us, not to us ... People who live in the past rob the future ... You cannot ride two horses at the same time ...

The ticket combines travel and fare information on the one side, with a series of little moral aphorisms on the other - an interesting juxtaposition. What’s going on here?

This little printed object raises a host of questions for any “scientist” seeking to understand South Australian culture and society: is this to be classified as a governmental or a cultural object? In what way is the economic regulation of transport connected to the management of conscience and personal conduct? What are the social and cultural and economic conditions that have produced this strange convergence?

These are big questions, and they show us that the tram ticket, if we pay it some serious attention, is a fascinating text. It reveals to us, in miniature, a correlation between two techniques by which populations are governed: on the one hand, the physical infrastructure of transport routes, schedules, fees, and the like; and on the other hand, a moral infrastructure of beliefs and values, presented as a body of shared wisdom and delivered through the official voice of government instrumentalities.

In the tram ticket, these two forces of government go hand in hand. If we accept for a moment that such an analysis provides a revealing and sophisticated perspective on the world we inhabit, then we should conclude that Cultural Studies has something interesting to offer us.

Now let us consider what such cultural “scientists” see when they turn their attention to Shakespeare. Amazingly, perhaps, from the very "detached" perspective of Cultural Studies, the works of Shakespeare begin to look eerily similar to the tram ticket.

Shakespeare's plays and sonnets are valued by society for their aesthetic and moral qualities. And, like the moral aphorism on my tram ticket, they are disseminated to the population largely through the regulatory instruments of government - in this case, schools, curricula, syllabuses, textbooks and examinations, which collectively specify who is to read the plays, when, and why.

Like the tracks of the Glenelg tram, the tracks of the school curriculum are laid down by government, as part of a vast program for the management of the state and its population. The very word "curriculum" is Latin for "running-track”, and schooling can be viewed as a long tram ride in which students must make certain stops (learning to spell; solving quadratic equations) in their journey toward technical and moral proficiency as a citizen.

Reading Shakespeare is one of the popular stops that governments like to include on the educational journey, for much the same reason that the South Australian Government prints moral aphorisms on the back of its tram tickets: that is, because government has an investment in the moral regulation of its citizenry.

Nobody should pretend that this way of looking at Shakespeare's work exhausts the meaning of the plays. It barely scratches the surface. But it is a legitimate way of thinking about the plays as cultural objects, and it reveals some of the limitations of a purely literary approach, which tends to ignore the “governmental deployment” of texts in favour of aesthetic considerations.

That is the point that theorists like Eagleton have in mind when they make comparisons between reading works of literature and reading other cultural objects; and it is part of the thinking that lies behind some of the new school curricula, which give students scope to study a wide range of texts beyond the literary. The brief example above gives us a taste of what they might do with those texts.

The question, then, is not really about whether our students should read Shakespeare or bus tickets. The question is about what game we think they should be learning to play in high school: Literary Criticism, or Cultural Studies. It is about which discipline we think offers the most appropriate ideas and tools to students who have to live in the complex social and cultural spaces that have evolved in the 21st century.

There is no reason why they cannot do both; or neither. But, at present, the argument is being confused by a false assumption that the choice is between good or bad “standards”, progress or regression, civilisation or decay. That's not it at all. If we frame the debate in those terms, we are arguing about apples and oranges. Cultural Studies is not an inferior form of Literary Criticism; it is a different game, though equally sophisticated and literate.

What complicates the debate is that both disciplines - Literary Criticism and Cultural Studies - have made very big claims for themselves. Both have, in their own ways, claimed to offer universal truths about the world. And each uses its own (limited) tools and techniques to puncture the claims made by the other.

Criticism uses its belief in moral absolutes to accuse Cultural Studies of moral relativism; Cultural Studies uses its "scientific" detachment to accuse Literary Criticism of promoting the narrow values of privileged groups (the "dead white British males" of the literary canon).

They are both right, within limits. But if we are to get anywhere in the discussion, we need to stop relying on specious caricatures and instead engage with the issues more seriously. In Australia, we hear more detailed and subtle analyses of football games than we have heard in recent discussions of education. We can and must do better.