J Knowl Econ (2013) 4:6–23

DOI 10.1007/s13132-012-0125-4

The Hector Hypothesis: Disciplines, Difficulty,

and Democracy

Susan Bruce

Received: 4 October 2012 / Accepted: 15 October 2012 /

Published online: 1 December 2012
# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2012

Abstract Through an interrogation of the nature and value of encounters with

“difficulty” in Humanities Higher Education, this essay aims to articulate some of
the ways in which Humanities education itself, even in its least canonical and least
prestigious manifestations, is of value. Beginning with a brief reading of a scene from
Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, which models for readers unfamiliar with
Humanities scholarship the kinds of questions a Humanities perspective on a text
might raise, the essay argues that distinctions established in that play regarding con-
ceptions of the nature of value underlie debates in literary studies over what should be
studied, and why. It goes on to claim that an analogous distinction underlies approaches
to the question of “difficulty” in Humanities education, and it then places this discussion
in the context of an examination of a real moment from a real university seminar in
which a student expresses frustration with the material he is studying. Chosen because it
concerns disagreement prompted by texts which are neither canonical nor, on the face of
it, difficult, this moment is used to exemplify a fundamental value of Humanities
education, which offers a space wherein can be pursued and practiced an argumenta-
tional method whose fostering is fundamental to the health of liberal democracy.

Keywords Argument . English . Humanities . Troilus and Cressida . English literary

studies . Difficulty

Value, Difficulty and Educational Elites: A Theoretical Introduction

In act 1, scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Cressida and her uncle
Pandarus stand on a platform on the stage and watch as the warriors pass below them,
returning home to Ilium. For almost 100 lines Cressida observes this parade, each
soldier being identified by Pandarus, who “tell[s] them all by their names as they pass

S. Bruce (*)
School of Humanities, Keele University, Keele, Staffordshire ST5 5BG, UK
e-mail: s.e.bruce@keele.ac.uk
URL: http://www.keele.ac.uk/english/people/brucesusan/
J Knowl Econ (2013) 4:6–23 7

by” (Shakespeare 1988a: 1.2.180), offering a running commentary on their virtues

even while he encourages Cressida to “mark Troilus above the rest”. “That’s Aeneas,”
says Pandarus first: “is that not a brave man?” Next we meet Antenor of “shrewd wit”
(“who’s that?” inquires Cressida); and then Hector, of “brave” countenance and many
“hacks upon his helmet”. Paris follows, “gallant” and “brave”; then Helenus: “who’s
that?” says Cressida again; “that’s Helenus,” says Pandarus, clearly distracted, “I
marvel where Troilus is. That’s Helenus. I think he went not forth today. That’s
Helenus. … I marvel where Troilus is. Hark, do you not hear the people cry
‘Troilus’?” (1.2.214–220). A stage direction tells us that Troilus enters at this point,
and now we encounter the first difficulty of interpretation in this extract. “What
sneaking fellow comes yonder?” Cressida asks. “Where? Yonder?” Pandarus queries,
before replying:
That’s Deiphobus.—’Tis Troilus! There’s a man, niece, h’m? Brave Troilus, …
prince of chivalry! … Mark him, note him. O brave Troilus! Look well upon
him, niece. Look you how his … helm[’s] more hacked than Hector’s … O
admirable youth! Paris? Paris is dirt to him, and I warrant Helen to change
would give an eye to boot. (1.2.226–36)
Then pass the common soldiers; “here comes more” says Cressida; “asses, fools,
dolts” replies Pandarus, “Chaff and bran, chaff and bran. Porridge after meat”
(1.2.226–236).
There is an easy explanation for this dramatic parade: it is obviously a convenient way
for the playwright to introduce to the audience many of the play’s characters. There being
25 of these, plus assorted servants, musicians and retainers, some form of introduction is
necessary if we are not to be confused beyond measure by the comings and goings in this
most mobile and populated of texts. But a reading of these lines that stopped at this
observation would be one of very limited value. The Humanities in general and the
discipline of English Literary Studies in particular take it to be axiomatic that language,
even when it proclaims itself as such, is rarely transparent or straightforward; and that
literary meaning (whether intrinsic to the text or produced in the engagement between text
and reader) is virtually inexhaustible. So instead of being content with the proposition that
this dialogue can be explained (or explained away) as a dramatic device serving one
discrete purpose, a literary enquiry into its meanings and purposes would be more likely to
complicate matters, subordinating the value of the purely instrumental to that inherent in
questions more difficult to fix or contain. A literary scholar might suggest, for example,
that the density of deictic expressions in this scene (“that, that, look you, that”; “Where?
Yonder?”; “Here, Here, Here”) might emblematize the unsettling nature of the action that
is to come, in which we seek in vain to find our place. She might hypothesize that the
play’s technique—overturning the familiar, thwarting expectation, baffling our sense of
what are proper and recognizable identities—also underlies the groundstrokes with which
the warriors are painted here, as gallant, chivalric, manly, and brave, qualities which many
of them are shown singularly to lack as the play goes on. And she might claim that even
our one moment of difficulty, the apparent misrecognition of Troilus as a ‘sneaking
fellow’ by the woman who says she loves him, or as Deiphobus by the man so concerned
to have Cressida “mark” Troilus as a man self-evidently “above” all the rest may dovetail
with the larger concerns manifest later in the play about recognition, identity and value. Is
Cressida just pretending to misapprehend Troilus for a lesser, sneaking, fellow, either for
8 J Knowl Econ (2013) 4:6–23

the fun of winding her uncle up or to preserve her own worth in a world in which, because
“men prize the thing ungain’d more than it is” (Shakespeare 1.2.285) it makes sense to
understate your desire for another? Or is the moment proleptic of a later failure of
discrimination on Cressida’s part, pointing to a possibility that the act of evaluation is
always subject to error, or that worse still, such failures of evaluation betray the fact that
there is nothing intrinsic there for anyone to value in the first place? It is certainly true that
in fusing Cressida’s point of view with that of the audience, and allowing her to
ventriloquize some of our own thoughts (“who’s that?”) this scene enables the efficient
introduction of the play’s many characters. But it does much more than that. In establish-
ing an empathetic connection to Cressida which it will later overturn, for example, it lays
some of the groundwork for our later experience of the “radical discontinuity of character”
for which Troilus and Cressida is so well-known (Dollimore 2004), and—far beyond
the instrumental function it initially fulfills—it raises from the outset profound
questions about identity, about knowing others and about recognizing who they are,
that the ensuing play will proceed to explore.
In this essay, I want to try to demonstrate what sort of things can be experienced as
“difficult” in interpretative literary studies, and to try, through an interrogation of what
the value of encounters with “difficulty” in Humanities study might be, to arrive at an
articulation of some of the ways in which the Humanities themselves are of value, even
in their least canonical manifestations. I have used Troilus and Cressida to open these
questions in part because it may well be the most difficult of Shakespeare’s plays
(“appallingly difficult”, in the words of Kermode (1955, p. 181); “experimentally” so,
and “aimed at discriminating audiences whose judgments matter” in those of one of
its more recent editors David Bevington (Shakespeare 1998, p. 11)) but also and more
saliently because a key locus of its difficulty resides in its debate on the nature of
value. Throughout this text, the play returns, time and again, to questions of what is
valued, why things are valued, and whether we are right or wrong to value them as we
do, but the play’s most explicit and sustained attention to these questions appears in
the Trojan debate in act 2, scene 2 over what to do with Helen. This debate is itself
dense, subtle and difficult—so tricky, in fact, that even Jonathan Bate, who’s recently
used it to introduce a volume devoted to The Public Value of the Humanities, draws a
questionable conclusion about the consequences of the respective arguments
that are made in the course of it. Hector begins the quarrel by putting the case
for giving Helen back, arguing that “she is not worth what she doth cost/ The
holding”, a claim which Troilus counters with the question “What’s aught but
as ’tis valued?” (2.2.50–51). For Bate, this remark constitutes an economistic
understanding of value wherein is invoked the ultimate quantifiability of a
commodity: the logical conclusion of Troilus’ question, Bate claims, is “that
there will always come a point where the price is simply not worth paying”
(Bate 2011a, p. 3). Now, the relation of “price” to “value” is dense and impenetrable
in Troilus and Cressida, complex in the extreme and one reason for the difficulty of this
discussion, but it is at least a plausible assumption that in fact, this is a consequence of
Hector’s argument, not Troilus’. Hector, as we shall shortly see, is of the opinion that if
something has intrinsic value, its price may be readily agreed by two people of equal and
reasonable discernment. But Troilus’ question signals rather the impossibility of the
reliable and stable quantification of anything, value being instead purely subjective,
existing only in the eye of the beholder, the intrinsic worth of anything by extension only
J Knowl Econ (2013) 4:6–23 9

a chimera, at best, a folie a deux.1 In this view, the value of any one thing as compared
against any other can become infinitely greater than it: to borrow a metaphor from
another play, it can “receiveth as the sea, naught enters there,/ Of what validity and
pitch so e’er,/ But falls into abatement and low price,/ Even in a minute!” (Shakespeare
1988b, 1.1.11–15). Just as easily, it can be denuded of all value at the drop of a hat,
when the fickle shape of fancy turns its attention to something else. That’s why
Troilus’ question is so frightening, and perhaps why Hector’s reply is so fervent; in
any case, it is certainly what Hector understands Troilus to mean, as his realist
response makes clear: “But value dwells not in particular will./ It holds his estimate
and dignity/ As well wherein ’tis precious of itself/ As in the prizer” (Shakespeare,
Troilus and Cressida, 2.2.51–55).
For reasons which will become clear later on in this essay, I want to hold on to the
essential disagreement here between the relativist, destabilizing skepticism of Troilus,
and the idealistic realism (if that is not a contradiction in terms) of Hector. Bate uses
the debate to attack the current attempts to quantify the value of Humanities research,
usefully historicizing the current contest over the Humanities through J. S. Mill’s
account of the earlier quarrel between Benthamite utilitarianism and Coleridgean
notions of a clerisy. The duties of the latter were “to preserve the stores and to guard
the treasure of past civilization and thus to connect the present with the future”
(Coleridge, quoted in Bate 2011, p. 12), a conception of the Humanities researcher’s
role which Bate broadly endorses. Other contributors to his collection articulate other
benefits issuing from Humanities disciplines: archaeology’s aid in helping us address
issues such as global warming, for example (Pearson 2011); Cultural Geography’s
contributions to tourism and the management of landscape (Daniels and Cowell
2011); the light that Humanities’ subjects can shed on political appeals to “Britishness”
(Bate 2011), or on legal issues, where “the humanities alert us to those places where
humanity itself has silently fallen from the scales of logic” (Watt 2011, p. 205). In the
strongest of all of the contributions to the volume, Jürgen Zimmerer explains how
history can aid our understanding of atrocity, can help its victims to overcome their
trauma, and can even help prevent its repetition (Zimmerer 2011).
Such defenses of the Humanities are a necessary response to what has widely been seen
as an alarming diminution in the value publicly afforded them in recent years. A number
of contemporary commentators have understood this diminution as signaling the profound
reconfiguration of the role of the University more generally, wherein an older conception
of it as “a vital democratic public sphere that cultivates … values necessary for the
production of a democratic polity” is giving way to one which reconceives it as “a
marketing machine essential to the production of neoliberal subjects” (Giroux 2011). In
this view, the Humanities and qualitative social sciences epitomize the University’s
civilizing function, constituting as they do the key locus within it wherein may be
developed “a commitment to public values, social responsibilities and the broader
demands of critical citizenship” (Giroux 2011). For this reason, such commentators
argue, the Humanities become the primary “target” of an “extremist” “right-wing”
whose assault on the intellectual nexus which best nurtures the “non-commodified

1
Troilus’ question only really becomes thinkable in this cynical form after the advent of money in its paper
manifestations, such as bills of exchange and the like. For a brilliant reading of the play’s relation to and
treatment of money and to disease, see Harris 1998, pp. 3–37.
10 J Knowl Econ (2013) 4:6–23

values that might challenge the neoliberal worldview” is at once deliberate and self-
conscious (Giroux 2011). This assault is achieved by a variety of means, most
saliently in the UK by raising tuition fees in order to indebt the young, who will
then have neither the time nor energy to challenge the old hegemonies, or (better still)
will be forced to “choose” to study something with a more lucrative and less
subversive potential in the first place. Giroux is one of the most outspoken of these
thinkers, but critics far less politically radical than he agree with him that there is a
tension between economistic models of education and the health of the Humanities:
“the model of rational economic … choice” articulated in the Browne report, Stanley
Fish argues in a recent opinion piece for The New York Times, “does not encourage
investment in medieval allegory or modern poetry or Greek history” (Fish 2010).
That it is the arts, Humanities and qualitative social sciences which have the most to
lose in an instrumentalist reconfiguration of Higher Education (HE), of which the current
English reforms are just one example, is incontestable, and that they nurture their students’
capacity for active engagement in critical citizenship is something that I hope to go on here
concretely to demonstrate. But Giroux’s claim that such reforms bespeak a conscious
intent to do away with disciplines in their entirety may be too undiscriminating (and hence
potentially counterproductive) a conclusion. It would be faintly surprising, for instance, if
the current UK cabinet saw no value at all in the Humanities and social sciences, given that
the degrees of almost all of its members are uniformly distributed within those discipline
groupings.2 In fact, the majority of this group of politicians would probably argue in
support of the intrinsic value of the subjects most disproportionately affected by the
reforms they are endorsing. More consistent with this particular set of personal career
trajectories is a slightly different belief: that the Humanities and social sciences are
valuable only insofar as they are taught and learned in relatively elite institutions3 and
that in the current UK HE landscape, they emblematize not so much the civilizing function
of higher education, as the fact that over the past couple of decades it has been extended to
too many people. It is notable, for example, that one likely consequence of the new
market-driven HE landscape in the UK is the closure of institutions rendered insolvent by
a new environment wherein elite universities may effectively take students from the
quotas allotted to less prestigious ones; government intervention in such an eventuality
is explicitly ruled out in the policy documents announcing the current reforms.4

2
A brief snapshot of the UK cabinet as constituted during the writing of this paper indicates that out of a
sample of 23 ministers (including the Prime Minister) 19 have degrees in the Humanities and Social
Sciences. Six read Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE); three History; three Law; one Archaeology
and Anthropology; one Comparative Literature; one Economics; one English; one European Studies; one
Politics; one Geography (which hovers on the boundary between the social and natural sciences).
3
Fourteen of the 22 ministers surveyed took their degrees from Oxbridge; of the other degree-holding
ministers, six studied in “old” universities and one in the College of Law.
4
The previous (labor) government’s 2003 white paper, The Future of Higher Education was also predom-
inantly instrumentalist, holding, for example, like the current policies, that employers’ interests are
paramount in determining the proper extent and reach of HE, and similarly wedded to the conviction that
increased student choice will “drive up quality”. But the move from expansion of UK HE to the contraction
heralded by the coalition’s policies does mark a significant political shift. Although some aspects of policy
may fail to enter legislation—for instance, the proposals to allow foreign private providers to establish new
universities in the UK—it is the relaxation of student number quotas to allow prestigious institutions to
recruit more at the expense of lesser-ranking ones which will have the most profound consequences for the
English Higher Education landscape.
J Knowl Econ (2013) 4:6–23 11

The distinction I am making here—that current UK policies do not so much betray

the opinion that the Humanities and social sciences are without intrinsic value as they
do the view that there is no value in educating anyone other than a relatively small
elite in them—might appear relatively inconsequential. But one of its implications is
to suggest that we need to frame our defense of the Humanities and the social
sciences not only in terms which focus on research and other forms of public
“impact” (as is the case in Jonathan Bate’s volume, for example,) but also in ways
which articulate the benefits that our disciplines generate for those who study them,
most of whom will not end up as researchers in those disciplines, or even in work
directly related to them. More particularly still, we need to explain what benefits the
Humanities and Social Sciences confer on those who study them in institutions rather
less elite than the almae matres of current UK cabinet members and to articulate why
that should matter to those who do not study them at all.5 For our disciplines are not
under threat in all institutions: on the contrary, in England, they may even expand in
elite Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), if elite HEIs wish to avail themselves of
the opportunity to take on more highly paying students in subjects which are, we
should recall, cheap to teach. But what is at risk is a cycle of decline in which the
Humanities become increasingly, perhaps exclusively, the preserve of the privileged
and the powerful.
However, in order to defend the proposition that study of the Humanities has value
also for the non-elite we must first address another prejudicial set of beliefs, which
runs something like this: what is “worth” studying must be intrinsically “difficult”;
the intrinsically “difficult” is out of reach for the relatively unsophisticated reader or
student; almost all A-grade students will in future years be studying in elite institu-
tions now that limitations on those institutions to recruit such students have in the UK
been removed; it is therefore rational to limit degree courses in these subjects to a
select number of institutions, because students in less prestigious HEIs only study
relatively “easy” syllabi anyway, from which they will take away little of value. The
view that the expansion of Higher Education has come at the expense of rigor and
challenge is now a pervasive one (witness allegations about the proliferation of
“Mickey Mouse degrees”, and perennial attacks on Media and Cultural Studies).6
And what it presupposes is that difficulty, like value, “dwells not in a particular will,”
but is inherent in the object; it takes, as it were, the same realist approach to difficulty

5
Stanley Fish argues that: “to the question ‘of what use are the humanities’, the only honest answer is none
whatsoever. … Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its perfor-
mance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some
larger good. The Humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said …
diminishes the object of its supposed praise.” (Fish, quoted in O’Gorman 2011, p. 278). But “because, like
Everest, it is there,” is no longer enough, and even when it worked, it was never adequate. Disciplines
always deserved a better justification than an appeal to the intrinsic value of the subjects we study, which,
after all, exists even if we do not study them. Fish confuses here the thing itself with the study of it.
6
A similar distrust of what appears superficially “easy” may have characterized the U.S. Culture Wars of
the late twentieth century. There has, however, been a subtle but important shift in the terms of the debate
from their manifestations in the Culture Wars to the current complaints about Mickey Mouse degrees, in
that earlier interventions assumed, as current ones do not, that “traditional” Humanities syllabi had value for
a broad cross-section of students, whose successful induction into nationness/ subjectivity/ “civilized”
culture exposure to great literature was supposed to guarantee.
12 J Knowl Econ (2013) 4:6–23

that Hector adopts for value, locating difficulty in the text (or body of texts) rather
than in the encounter between the text and its reader.
There is a long tradition to this insistence and to its parallel or analogy with
approaches to “value”, as well as to questions about the “meaning” of the literary text.
As Fred Parker has argued, variant approaches to the construction of English Literature
syllabi have tended to follow one of two oppositional approaches to the question of
value. On the one hand, there is the Leavisite approach, akin to the Hector hypothesis,
wherein priority is given to the artist whose literary production offers us a “view of life,
and of the things giving it value, that makes the valued appear unquestionably more
important than the valuer” (Parker 2005, p. 141, quoting F. R. Leavis, “Tragedy and
the Medium”). The other (which is consonant with a Cultural Studies model, for
example, and also with Troilus’ perspective that things are of value insofar as they are
held in esteem) would insist that value lies not in the work itself, but in its appre-
hension, otherwise described as “the process of intellectual enquiry” into its terms
and nature (Parker 2005, p. 141). A very similar dichotomy inhabits approaches to the
ontology of the literary work wherein, as Paul B. Armstrong explains, “two untenably
extreme positions mark the poles between which such an ontology must situate itself”
(Armstrong 1990, p. 20). One is the conservative position that the text is a “pregiven
entity that prescribes a right reading” (Armstrong here cites René Wellek); the other
the view that “the work does not have an autonomous existence but instead depends
completely on how it is interpreted” (Stanley Fish, for example). Much the same
opposition often underlies approaches to the quality of “difficulty”. So for example,
in his introduction to Just Being Difficult, a recent collection of essays on the debate
over the difficulty of scholarly writing, Jonathan Culler claims that, “difficult writing
… seeks to act on the reader, providing an experience as it structures experience”
(Culler and Lamb 2003, p. 4), and Judith Butler argues that “one of the most important
ways to call into question the status quo is by engaging language in nonconventional
ways … because some of the most problematic views about reality have become
sedimented in everyday parlance” (Butler 2003, p. 200). Difficulty is for these authors
a property of the writing in question, inalienable from it, intrinsic to the work itself, a
quality Culler ascribes to the literary as well as to the scholarly text: “When the object
under consideration inhabits the literary canon,” he notes, “difficulty is treated as
richness and intricacy, the very qualities that make literature an object of exegetical
energy and classroom study” (Culler and Lamb 2003, p. 2). It is unclear whether this
assumption stems from an attitude to the written word per se—a conviction that its
perlocutionary force is somehow autonomous, independent of its reception—or from a
preconception about readers, about whom these critics often assume a pronounced
homogeneity, implied readers here all being extremely educated ones, occasionally
graduate students, sometimes academics from fields such as Philosophy, but usually other
literary critics. But there is a danger in this approach, which is that in categorizing writing
as objectively “difficult” (or, by contrast, objectively “easy”), and in implying only an elite
reader of it, it is relatively easy to slip to a position where one valorizes difficulty for its
own sake to the extent to which its simplification or translation is characterized as, de
facto, reductive.7 This is the position attacked by Gerald Graff when he argues that “the

7
This is obviously not an allegation one would levy against Culler, who specializes in the explication of
difficult texts.
J Knowl Econ (2013) 4:6–23 13

equation of simplification with bad forms of … watering down is harmful” (Graff 2000, p.
1046); and it is also the position of those who hold that the value of a Humanities
education begins and ends with the education of an elite.
I am not intending to argue here that all texts are alike, difficult only insofar as they
are experienced to be so: I do not share Troilus’ conviction that such things exist only in
the eye of the beholder. But neither does the extreme pole of the Hector hypothesis
analogy seem accurate: the claim, that is, that difficulty inheres only in the object. This
cannot be so, for in that case, a piece of writing would be equally difficult to all readers at
all times. Of course, that is not quite what Hector does say about value; he says that
“value dwells not in particular will:/ It holds his estimate and dignity/ As well
wherein ‘tis precious of itself/ As in the prizer”: value, in Hector’s view, exists both
within the thing itself and in the eye of its beholder. From this position, there is less of
a leap to a relational (as opposed to relative) property to value, or to difficulty, which
might be a potential event in the reception of any piece of writing.8 Even a lucid text
may be difficult to those who have not yet acquired the knowledge to understand it,
and, as Graff agues, a degree of “simplification is … a necessary aspect of any
effective intellectual communication [including teaching]” (Graff 2000, p. 1046).
But what value does an encounter with that kind of difficulty have, one where the text
is relatively straightforward, but the reader feels challenged by it, or with something it
provokes, nevertheless? To address this question, I want to turn to an instance of a real
student experiencing some real difficulty with an ostensibly “easy” text. The following
section of this essay, then, opens with a transcript of a discussion taped as part of an
interdisciplinary project9 that aims to discover what actually takes place when English
Literature is taught and learned in degree courses taking place in English universities of
very different characters, traditions and access to resources (elite HEIs, middle-ranking
non-Russell group ones, and inner-city “new” universities). Its focus is on ordinary,
everyday seminars, which we tape and then analyze, sometimes returning to institutions
to discuss our conclusions with the students and teachers whose seminars we have
observed. In our analyses of these extracts (texts, as it were, of the classroom) we try to
utilize literary methods and approaches (such as close reading, for example, or attitudes
towards the relative complexities of superficial and underlying meanings of texts), the
application of which to non-literary discourse aims to model the value of what English—
the discipline—itself does, and tries to teach. In the discussion from which the following
extract is taken, students at an institution which I will call Brancaster City University
(BCU) were taking an elective module in Disability Studies as part of their various degree
programs. Some were reading Single Honours English, some combining English with
other subjects; some were studying full-time, others part-time (BCU allows up to 9 years
for the completion of an undergraduate degree). BCU is an inner-city university in a
northern English town; it is a “new university”10 in the fourth quartile of most league
tables.

8
John McCumber says something similar about the quality of clarity when he observes that it presents a
paradox: the burden of achieving clarity may fall on the speaker, but the achievement itself falls to the
hearer (McCumber 2003, p. 58).
9
The project is described at greater length in Bruce et al. 2007)
10
“New” universities are universities created under the Further and Higher Education Act of 1992, when
the John Major government allowed a number of former polytechnics to become universities, abolishing the
binary divide that had hitherto existed between universities and polytechnics in the UK.
14 J Knowl Econ (2013) 4:6–23

Critical Citizenship and the Role of the Humanities: Some Concrete Examples

There were 18 students present in this seminar on the day we visited BCU, which is
about average, perhaps slightly on the small side, for BCU Humanities seminars. This
group is predominantly female (16 women and two men) and it is racially mixed: one of
the men is of Indian or Pakistani origin, as are five of the women, one of whom is blind,
and two of whom are dressed in black shalwar kameez and hijabs. Another woman
appears to be of Chinese, Taiwanese, or South Korean heritage. The students are seated
around tables arranged in a three-sided rectangle with their tutor, Rebecca, at a separate
table facing them: there has been an attempt here to produce something like a circle, but
the room, though large, is too small to accommodate this number of students in this
manner. It would be spacious enough were the students to be seated in ranks with the
teacher in the front, an arrangement for which it would appear to be more suited. The
room feels airless and enclosed: although bright, it has no windows or natural light, and
it is anonymous, lacking any notice-boards, posters or other indication of discipline. Or,
indeed, of location: the space could be a meeting room in a department store or small
company, as there is nothing to mark it as a locus of higher education.
Despite these relatively uncongenial surroundings, the students are for the most part
engaged and attentive, and many of them contribute to the discussion, which is lively
and enthusiastic. They are discussing a range of material, which they have watched in
advance of the seminar; this material includes Amanda Baggs’ (2007) YouTube video
In My Language, and BBC’s (1989) documentary John’s Not Mad, about John
Davidson, a Tourette’s syndrome sufferer. In the first hour, they have viewed a couple
of extracts from John’s Not Mad that Rebecca has brought in with her on disk. In one of
these, John has been shown visiting a supermarket, and Rebecca has used this clip to
raise a general point about the representation of disability in terms of a deficit model, “a
model that understands all human differences in terms of loss, and deficit: what people
don’t have”. Towards the end of the first hour, she also remarks that the Caucasian male,
whom I will call Rob, has laughed during the screening of this clip. She addresses the latter
remark directly to Rob, perhaps wishing to use his reaction to open a discussion about the
way in which the behavior of those with disabilities such as Tourette’s may embarrass or
shock those who encounter it. Rob has, throughout the seminar, appeared perhaps the least
at ease of all the students: his arms are often crossed in front of him, or he rests his chin in
his hand in an attitude which suggests a skeptical intellectual distance from the discussion
taking place around him. And now, he resists Rebecca’s encouragement to address or
examine his discomfort, shaking his head in what appears to be a slightly embarrassed
deflection of her attempt to engage him in a discussion of his reaction.
Shortly after this exchange, the class takes a 10-min break. Most students leave the
room, but three or four of them, including Rob, stay in their seats, and a conversation
ensues between Rebecca and Rob in which they start to argue about: (a) whether physical
disabilities are objectively harder for the sufferer to cope with than behavioral or mental
ones; and (b) whether the media constructs the latter as “different” and in so doing
exaggerates the difficulties they experience. Another student, Danielle (sitting off camera),
follows the argument into which she occasionally interjects a comment or observation:

Rob: It, it does go back to the statistics [waving a photocopy of an article as he

speaks]: when you start getting the averages and means and etc.
J Knowl Econ (2013) 4:6–23 15

Rebecca: Yeah, alright.

Rob: But if that didn’t start, and if people didn’t start, identifying—we’d, we’d
be all fine, we’d be fine, nobody, no-one would care. [indistinguishable because
Rob and Rebecca start speaking at the same time at this point]
Rebecca: so, basically, if 200 years of history hadn’t happened …
Rob: yeah (grudgingly), yeah.
Rebecca: … we’d be absolutely dandy [indistinguishable]
Rob: But, even today, if new-, newspapers start publicizing like, all this kind of,
this kind of –
Danielle: No, but you’d still see somebody and think they are different to me so
therefore they …
Rob: I, I don’t: — I’d walk down the street, if I see it, I think … [shrugs his
shoulders slightly and raises his hands in an open gesture that appears to
indicate inconsequentiality]
Danielle: No, but back in the day when [indistinguishable, but I think she is
referring to the fact that the documentary was filmed more than 20 years ago,
and mores were different then] all this, it was still seen as presumably different
and it would have …
Rob: Yeah, well, this, this paper’s saying, this boring paper, [waving the photo-
copied article around, emphasizing the word ‘boring’, which he draws out]
Rebecca: [apparently exasperated and amused in equal measure] It’s not—
Rob: It was long and boring, seriously … Did you read it?
Rebecca: [still exasperated and amused, nodding emphatically, in a tone that
suggests she can’t believe Rob just asked that question] Yes, I did read it!
Rob: Yes, it was long, and it was boring. [At this point, one of the Muslim
students wearing the hijab re-enters the room after her break; she walks over to
her seat next to Rob.] It was saying, that statistics, just kept an ideal [?] where
everybody would be …
Rebecca Yeah, but what –

Rob: There would have been an issue, because everyone would have just—[the
Muslim woman drops a sheaf of photocopied papers in front of Rob, as well as
one in the place of the Asian man the other side of her, and sits back down next
to Rob] clear, clearly there would have been a difference on some level, but it
would have still been equal on the, the ideological stage [Halting a bit as he
pronounces the word ‘ideological’, a concept which he appears to be testing out
to himself].

Rebecca: Alright, so, let’s imagine that, um, say, say, John with Tourette’s,
right, John with Tourette’s, is …
16 J Knowl Econ (2013) 4:6–23

Rob: I don’t think that’s the ideal example—he’s clearly got social problems
there. But, if you compare it to a physical disability, because his is mental …

Rebecca: Yes.
Rob: … so he can still participate—clearly there’s got to be embarrassing
moments when you start swearing, but you look at football today, you just
know, they’re swearing left right and center.
Rebecca: But it’s not an issue about swearing, is it? It’s swearing in the wrong place.
Rob: Yeah but if …
Rebecca: Not just about swearing, it’s swearing in the wrong place: we can all
swear, like, kind of, really enjoy swearing, but I wouldn’t necessarily …
Danielle: Swear in the wrong place
Rebecca: … swear, swearing in the wrong place is where it becomes problem-
atic, isn’t it?
Rob: Yeah, but: it’s easily explainable, isn’t it: all you do is say, “I’ve got
Tourette’s.” If you, compare someone with, er, dwarfism or er, cerebral palsy or
something, the physical difference is, is something that stops them from, more
so … it, it … [trails off]
Rebecca: Aren’t they just different kinds of difficulties?
Rob: Yeah … [but not convinced]
Rebecca: Aren’t they just different kinds of, um, issues?
Rob: You see, I can, I can, I can understand where … I can understand the
problem with, with Tourette’s, despite my laughing, it’s just, …
Rebecca: Well alright, so let’s imagine: we’ve got somebody with Tourette’s in
a lecture theater.
[There is a pause at this point, where Rob apparently considers this.]
Rob: [Shrugs] People’ll get over it, though.
Danielle: Yeah, after about, like, the first 5 min.
Rebecca: Well people would soon get over it, yeah, but you might then think, well
actually, that is quite, that’s a difficulty, that’s a difficulty as significant as …
Danielle: Thinking: “Oh God, they must feel really embarrassed!”

Rebecca: But do you think that you can, um: … What would be the counter-
arguments to forgetting about it and not talking about it? [Rob laughs] Produce
an argument that opposes that position.

Rob: No [laughing, amused, and/or perhaps uncomfortable, and at this point the
other students re-enter the room, Rob’s other comments become indistinguish-
able, and the conversation ends]
J Knowl Econ (2013) 4:6–23 17

In his “typology of difficulty”, George Steiner identifies four kinds of difficulty (in
addition to conceptual difficulty, which he leaves aside). “Epiphenomenal” or “con-
tingent” difficulty is the kind of thing that you need to look up, in the OED, or a
dictionary of Classical Literature, for example. “Tactical difficulty” is the deliberate
production of obscurity in order to achieve certain effects or disguise personal
identities; “ontological difficulty” derives from “an essentially private idea of com-
munication” being something that we are not supposed to understand at all. What Rob
seems to be struggling with here is what Steiner calls “modal difficulty”: that is,
difficulty provoked when the “climate of consciousness”—the mores, or ethics—
(Steiner 1980, p. 28) in which a writer is writing is so different from that of the reader
as to baffle him or her. Rob, indeed, may be experiencing this kind of difficulty with
the climate of consciousness of the seminar itself, as much as with the text they are
viewing. Much of what he says (his repetition of “long and boring”, for example) as
well as his body language (shrugging his shoulders, crossing his arms, the dismissive
way in which he waves the photocopied article around) suggests an attitude, if not of
active hostility, at least of impatience with something (what exactly, is not quite clear)
in the ethos of the seminar.
If this was all that was going on here, this extract might support the view of
those who would wish to confine Humanities and Social Science disciplines to
the elite, at least insofar as students like Rob are concerned. In fact, in terms of
the manifest content of the exchange, there is very little here that is particularly
striking: there is nothing conceptually difficult, and the thoughts that Rob
seems to be trying to express are often strangely elusive—there is an awful
lot of tailing off, of unfinished sentences, and of inarticulate interventions.
What is the point of spending public money on conversations such as this
one, our coalition cabinet members might well ask? But this would be a rather
superficial reading of the exchange, one which took it entirely at face value
(which, as we have seen in our opening paragraphs, Humanities investigations
are disinclined to do). Such a “reading” of this moment would overlook, for a
start, that this is an elective module, and that both the main interlocutors here
appear to have some investment in the argument they are pursuing. Rebecca’s
is clear. This is her course, she’s teaching it, and she has a personal interest in
the matter, too, having herself a disabled child (as does at least one of her
students who, like Rebecca, mentions her own disabled son in the course of
discussion11). Rob’s investment is less obvious, but his studious and repeated attempt
to suggest that, in fact, he has not got any interest in the issues under discussion (“it
was long, and it was boring”) is not borne out by the ways he comports himself in it:
he sometimes speaks over the tutor; he acknowledges something that he was earlier
reluctant to admit (“You see, I can, I can, I can understand where … I can understand
the problem with, with Tourette’s, despite my laughing, it’s just …”); and, of course,

11
Personal anecdotes and information are frequently used to elaborate arguments and justify points in this
discussion in a way that perhaps they would not be if this were a seminar on Ulysses and – more
contentiously – would arguably be invoked to a lesser degree in a more prestigious institution. Also worthy
of note is the number of students who, in the course of discussion, mentioned their children; this is a real
difference from seminars in elite institutions, where a much smaller minority of participants would be
parents.
18 J Knowl Econ (2013) 4:6–23

not only has he read the “long and boring” paper, but alone among the students it is he
who feels impelled to take issue with what he understands it to be arguing. But let’s
take the strongest case for saying that conversations such as this one have no value (or
at least, not enough to merit the public funding of them). Let’s assume that Rob gets
nothing substantive from the article at all, that his relation to the information
communicated in it is purely dismissive and/or resistant. Let’s assume not only that
he does not care about the issue for the same reasons that Rebecca does, but that he
does not care about them at all, and that he only took this module because it looked as
though it was going to be the “easiest” of those on offer (a category, incidentally,
valorized by websites such as RateMyProfessor.com). Let’s assume that he is arguing
just for the sake of being difficult and that maybe all he cares about is taking issue
with what everyone else in this seminar appears happy to endorse.
In The Way We Argue Now, Amanda Anderson (2006) has formulated a rigorous
defense of argumentation as “the preeminent form of deliberative democracy” which
“keeps the democratic project fundamentally open and incomplete” (p. 181). For
Anderson, argument and debate are “an ethicopolitical ideal” (p. 184) (perhaps, the
ethicopolitical ideal) which, she claims, most
closely achieves the ideals of universalization and respect that undergird the
democratic project. Simply accepting the view of others because they are
asserted to be fundamentally linked to their nonnegotiable conceptions of the
good or to their given cultural identity—accepting a merely overlapping con-
sensus or insisting on accommodation of … customs that may seem to jar with
liberal democratic practice—… [fails] in according the forms of respect that the
model seems to claim for itself. … Argument with those from whom we differ
is a form of respect (pp. 186–187).
“Committed to the possibility of agreement as well as the conditions of pluralism,”
Anderson goes on, “argument does not attempt to tame or stabilize disagreement: it is
capable of reasoned disagreement, but it is perhaps more fundamentally characterized by
a dissatisfied recognition of disagreement” (p. 187).
This would seem to me to be a fairer account of the tenor of the conversation I
have described here than would the assumption that Rob is “just being difficult”
merely for the sake of it, although it does leave out some interpersonal aspects of the
exchange. Rob’s re-iteration of “it was long, it was boring”, for example, and his
question to the teacher who would set the reading—“did you read it?”—is a challenge
to the hierarchical authority of the classroom, but it is one inflected in faintly
flirtatious (and for that reason also faintly irritating) gendered terms. Perhaps the
spoken word cannot be distilled to pure reason to the degree that the written one can;
perhaps it cannot, with the best will in the world, ever entirely eradicate from itself
the performance of identity. Anderson does not really address tensions between
reason and identity in spoken (as opposed to written) fora, but she does want to
acknowledge that that performance can sometimes be politically efficacious, denat-
uralizing commonly held assumptions. To the degree that Rob’s ironizing tone is
adopted in the service of challenging a particular hierarchy—that of the classroom—
which must be overcome if the student is successfully to negotiate the rite of passage
that is higher education, we might allow that this is one (very minor) instance of a
“politics of disidentification” (in this case from the role of the dutiful student) that a
J Knowl Econ (2013) 4:6–23 19

“refurbished communicative ethics” might try to accommodate (ibid. 24) despite its
gendered overtones. But although Anderson wishes to allow the politics of identity a
beneficial role in certain circumstances, she is profoundly suspicious about the delete-
rious effects that an overemphasis on group identity can entail for the health of
argumentation in the public sphere, and in consequence for democracy itself. She holds
that identity politics’ insistence that identity is “fundamentally status-based, pre-given in
some fundamental way by the groups or categories that make up the sociological map”
results in a “commitment to the notion that norms of cultural affiliation must be
acknowledged, defended, or cushioned, particularly from what is seen as the evacuating
force of liberal or rational agendas” (pp. 4–5); her “most provocative claim” in The Way
We Argue Now is that “the dominant paradigms within literary and cultural studies
have had an adverse effect on the fostering of public-sphere argument precisely
insofar as identity has come to seem the strongest argument of all” (p. 17).
The group identities that Anderson has in mind here are class, race, ethnicity,
nationality, gender, and sexuality. To these we might add disability. And if we do that,
and return to the other text that is being discussed in this seminar, we could place Rob
and Rebecca’s argument in a rather different context than the immediate disagreement
provoked or catalyzed by the thesis of the “long and boring” article. In My Language
(which can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v0JnylM1hI2jc) is, for the
benefit of those who have not seen it, a film made by Amanda Baggs, at that time, a
self-styled autism activist who claimed she herself was autistic. In In My Language
we see Baggs, for the first 3 minutes, moving her body repetitively in front of a kitchen
window, scratching a metal implement on a metal surface and on a doorhandle, stroking
a keyboard, tapping at a chain, running a fingernail against a ridged metal surface,
rubbing her face against a magazine, and other actions, all overlaid with a soundtrack of
her voice humming a repeated series of notes. In the second part of the video, she
explains that the first, non-verbal, section is “in her native language” which, she explains
(the voiceover here is a mechanical, computer-generated voice, the text of the script
appearing in subscript on the image as well), “is not about designing words or even
visual symbols for people to interpret, it is about being in a constant conversation with
every aspect of my environment”. She tells the viewer(s) (all, by implication, neuro-
typical) that her actions are not purposeless but a response to her surroundings, and
suggests that it is ironic that she, who interacts so much more extensively with every part
of her surroundings than do neurotypical individuals, is seen by them as “in her own
world” and uncommunicative, whereas interaction with a more limited part of the world
is seen as communication. “It is only when I type something in your language,” she
writes (and the mechanical voice ventriloquizes),
that you refer to me as having communication … I find it very interesting …
that failure to learn your language is seen as a deficit but failure to learn my
language is seen as so natural that people like me are officially described as
mysterious and puzzling rather than anyone admitting that it is themselves who
are confused not autistic people or other cognitively disabled people who are
inherently confusing.
Her video, she says, “is meant as a strong statement on the existence and value of
many different kinds of thinking and interaction in a world where how close you can
appear to a specific one of them determines whether you are seen as a real person or
20 J Knowl Econ (2013) 4:6–23

an adult or an intelligent person”. Throughout the verbal section of the video, the
implication, sometimes explicitly articulated, is that her “language” is as “valid” as
“ours”.
Perhaps one thing that Rob may be struggling with here—one of the aspects of his
particular modal difficulty—is a discomfort with a certain kind of identity politics,
one embedded in the Baggs video, where disability-as-identity is explicitly held to
trump communicative reason, here re-presented as the language of the other (of, that
is, the neurotypical majority), to the degree to which argument with that perspective is
ruled out of bounds. Rob would not formulate it like this, and he might not want to do
so even if the terms of the argument I am suggesting here were available to him in the
way I am making them now, which, of course, they were not. But it does seem that
one of the things he is resisting, even if he is not articulating that resistance
accurately, if at all, is a cultural injunction simply to “[accept] the view of others
because they are asserted to be fundamentally linked to their nonnegotiable concep-
tions of the good or to their given cultural identity” (Anderson 2006, p. 186). A very
good illustration of the force of that injunction, which may enable us better to share
Rob’s difficulty as well as to understand a very concrete instance in which identity
interferes with argument and with reason, is afforded by the back story behind Baggs’ video
(a story that has only become apparent since the seminar took place). When Baggs uploaded
In My Language to YouTube, it was picked up by Sanjay Gupta (2007), the Chief
Medical Correspondent of CNN (http://edition.cnn.com/HEALTH/blogs/paging.
dr.gupta/2007/02/behind-veil-of-autism.html) and subsequently by the Canadian
Broadcasting Service (http://www.cbc.ca/thenational/indepthanalysis/transcripts/
story/2009/10/08/national-amandabaggs.html) who both covered it as a marvelous
insight into (a kind of rationality of) the autistic mind. This coverage in turn generated a great
deal of controversy, as a Google search with the terms “Baggs” and “fraud” will show; and
the blogosphere is now alive with allegations that Baggs is not in fact autistic at all.
The point here is not to generate a discussion about whether Baggs is or is not
autistic, and the video therefore “true” or a “fake” (neither of which categories would
seem quite accurate anyway if, as seems plausible, Baggs also has psychiatric
difficulties with which to contend). Rather, it is to illustrate the following point about
the difficulty of arguing with the video’s central and substantive claim (that is: that a
private “language”, communicable to no other living being, is as “valid”, as a
language as any other, socially shared, form of communication). Contesting that
claim is a good deal more socially uncomfortable (itself another kind of difficulty) if
you believe Baggs to be “really” autistic, and therefore expressing a point of view that
affirms a kind of private meaning and interiority that no-one has yet understood; it is
much easier to disagree with her claim if you think that Baggs is not autistic at all, just
faking it. It should not be: to act on that social discomfort, and hence fall back on
what Anderson calls “accommodating tact” instead of contesting a claim that you
believe to be wrong no matter who makes it has all sorts of consequences (including,
one might add, the facilitation of an environment in which a damaging hoax might go
unchallenged). But it is.
I would hold, then, that there is a good deal more going on in this apparently
inconsequential conversation than at first meets the eye. Much of the value of
Humanities teaching happens in the encounter itself, in ways that are not always
directly related to the content of what is being discussed and which are certainly far less
J Knowl Econ (2013) 4:6–23 21

immediately related to that content than would appear to be the case in “vertical”
knowledge structures such as the Natural Sciences. In this case, difficult issues whose
negotiation materially affects an individual’s relation with those who surround him
underlie the discussion of texts which, taken on their own, have no intrinsic difficulty at
all. Most importantly, a space is provided for the pursuit and practice of a method,
argumentation, whose fostering is fundamental to the health of liberal democracy. The
skills necessary to contest propositions, even if (perhaps, especially when) everyone else
seems content with what is on the table are as important to the student who will end up
teaching, or with a job in social care, or working in a bank (perhaps especially working in
a bank) as it is to those who end up in the cabinet, and by extension, they are as important
to society writ large as they are to the individual who acquires them through the sustained
training in the art of argumentation that Humanities and Social Science degrees afford.
But although I want to champion the value of such encounters with difficulty and to
explain why we should ensure their continuation in non-elite universities as well as in
prestigious ones, I want also, in concluding, to note the significance of the fact that the
most challenging and difficult moment in this seminar happens not in the seminar itself,
but in the semi-private and much more informal space of the seminar break. Perhaps this
issues from the student’s apprehension of, and discomfort with, the mores underlying the
seminar, in which taking issue with the claims articulated in the Baggs video involves
challenging the notion implicitly endorsed by that text: the notion, that is, that “norms of
cultural affiliation must be … defended … from … the evacuating force of… rational
agendas” (Anderson 2006, pp. 4–5). The difficulty the student has in articulating his
objections here is perhaps a striking illustration of the validity of Anderson’s hypoth-
esis that the fostering of public-sphere argument is compromised when identity itself
“[comes] to seem the strongest argument of all” (p. 17); as well as of the value of a
discipline that, as I tried to illustrate in my opening paragraphs, perennially returns to
questions about identity: who we are, how we know who others are, and the degree to
which their reputations help or hinder that enquiry.
But whatever it is that triggered the deferral of the argument to the seminar break on
this occasion, the instance I have discussed here may also exemplify an increasing
discomfort with argumentation among students, who resist public disagreement and seek
instead a more comfortable, and much easier (in all senses of the word, social as well as
intellectual) refuge in consensus. That resistance is not unconnected to our society’s
rapidly accelerating construction of students as consumers: as Jonathan Culler notes,
“when … students are treated as customers who should be satisfied, their resistance to
difficulty can become a source of power” (Culler and Lamb 2003, p. 3). Culler’s sense
that “our educational system … declines to value the struggle with complexity except
when that struggle succeeds in dissipating it” tacitly reiterates the point with which I
started, that the Humanities frequently look not to find answers, least of all instru-
mental ones, but to raise more questions.12 More generally, the construction of the

12
The current consumerist turn may pose particular problems for the Humanities, which, unlike the Natural
and even the Social Sciences, are “supposed” to be “accessible”, and which cannot structure their learning
along the lines of some kinds of knowledge being necessary preconditions for others. Why would a student
elect to study a “difficult” module which might in their view be likely to entail a risk of lower grades than
that risked in an “easier” course, and which is not a necessary precondition for other knowledge, especially
in a context where greater economic investment from the student under a new regime of very high fees may
make them more, not less, risk-averse?
22 J Knowl Econ (2013) 4:6–23

student as a consumer, subjected to constant customer satisfaction surveys which

implicitly situate the value of education in the degree to which it is apprehended by
students or by the labor market, adopts a Troilean perspective at the expense of
Hector’s. But I am with Hector. Purely instrumental values do matter and the
Humanities cannot ignore the demands of the market. But that is not enough, and
value, as Hector says, “holds its estimate and dignity/ As well wherein ’tis precious of
itself/ As in the prizer.”

Acknowledgments The workshop for which this paper was first written was generously funded by the
Fritz-Thyssen Stiftung. I thank the participants of that workshop for their invigorating discussions, and
Georgia Christinidis for her perceptive criticisms of an earlier draft of the essay.

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