The Lure of the List

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By LINDSAY WATERS

Who doesn't find lists irresistible? Letterman's Top Ten, no matter how dumb it is, jolts a tired show and audience to attention. The cultural critic Greil Marcus used deadly serious humor to rate the deaths of rock stars in his classic 1979 essay "Rock Death in the 1970s: A Sweepstakes," deflating a lot of pretentious nonsense being written about rock 'n' roll. When Richard A. Posner, a federal judge and a senior lecturer in law at the University of Chicago, published a 400-page treatise on public intellectuals in 2001, reviewers and readers only had eyes for the 27 pages of lists purporting to rank them (by, among other criteria, some complicated method of counting citations). Posner being such an earnest Gradgrind, we could take our illicit pleasure without guilt, inspecting his compilations seriously and still laughing at him, not ourselves.

For lists today, no matter how titillating, are like pornography: Once the guilt sets in, you can't escape feeling dirty for having lingered over them. It wasn't always thus. When I was a young teenager in Chicagoland in the early 60s, the supersurveys of radio station WLS brought me news of a country undergoing a peaceful revolution, with the great streams of rock, rhythm 'n' blues, and soul beginning to flow together. Top 40 radio seemed to be the very mechanism by which previously suppressed elements of our society emerged out of shotgun shacks, bayous, and ghettos to glory in the light. The payola scandals of the 1950s had cast a momentary shadow, but despite the efforts of marketeers to manipulate the results, the lists still seemed to work, allowing sullen teenagers to emerge from the privacy of their bedrooms to forge public taste.

But my heart sank when I saw that the premier egghead journal of the land, Critical Inquiry, published an essay last winter that purported to rank the greatest literary theorists in its pages (and, by implication, the world). Why — at a time when we distrust megacorporations and any word from high, when we know it only makes sense to suspect the fix is in with any such lists unless they are produced by a klutz like Posner or a clown like Letterman — would the leading specialized journal in the humanities toss very likely bogus social-science tools into its hitherto beautifully humming engine?

I felt like I had seen the people of Troy open their gates to that huge gift horse. What did the editors hope to gain, and was it worth giving up so much credibility to put pseudoscience where words should have been, to substitute accounting methods for critical judgment? Humanists should know better.

Critical Inquiry began at the University of Chicago in another world of joyous, hopeful interdisciplinarity, during a period when the walls that divided academic fields were coming down thanks to the velvet revolution of theoretical inquiry. The journal picked up on the tradition of new ideas and independent thought that academic mavericks like William Rainey Harper, at the turn of the 20th century, and later Robert Maynard Hutchins had built at the little house of learning near Lake Michigan. That Chicago had featured philosophers, poets, and writers who had no respect for what the supposedly important academics on, or beloved by, the East Coast thought of themselves. R.S. Crane challenged the New Criticism of Cleanth Brooks; Elder Olson tore down William Empson. Norman Maclean provided alternative theories of lyric poetry.

It was the Second City all over again, rather like some pompous Harvard professor being brought before the wits of Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, and Bill Murray. The very idea of criticism was to drag all the oppressive ideas that had dominated intellectual life before the court of reason by treating none of them piously.

Starting in 1974, the Chicago group at Critical Inquiry put up the big tent. Where some publications stuck to one form or another of innovative thinking, CI featured many: feminist theorists like Nancy Vickers; literary critics like Kenneth Burke and Stephen Greenblatt vying for attention with philosophers of such different ilks as Paul Ricoeur and Ronald Dworkin. A fine contentiousness prevailed as Wayne Booth debated M.H. Abrams, Frank Kermode squared off against Denis Donoghue.

What chiefly surprised me about last winter's list was its lack of any humor, any irony. The self-styled most important journal of theory was going to inform us — so it told us — what an objective method revealed about who the most important theorists were in its pages. How? By counting citations to theorists. Behind the rhetoric about discovering "the identity of our journal" lies an implicit assumption: If you're cited in Critical Inquiry, you're the best of the best. Sometimes the folks in Chicago get a little pumped (as when the Chicago Tribune early on started to refer to itself as the "World's Greatest Newspaper," even labeling its radio and television outlet by the call letters WGN).

But even granting CI its conceit, the second surprise (I'm lapsing into the ranking mode myself) was the relatively huge gap between the four most frequently cited theorists and the rest: Jacques Derrida (177), Sigmund Freud (174), Michel Foucault (160), Walter Benjamin (147). Then we drop down below 100 citations: Roland Barthes (92), Jacques Lacan (80), Fredric Jameson (79), Edward Said (77). Harvard philosopher Stanley Cavell ranks at No. 12, tied with Friedrich Nietzsche with 57 citations. The majority of the rest of our most-cited theorists huddle together with more modest numbers to their names. Harvard lit crit Homi K. Bhabha (an editor of CI) ties with Aristotle at No. 27, each with 38 cites; Harvard's Greenblatt ties with MIT's Noam Chomsky at No. 80, with 17 cites; Henry Louis Gates Jr. (again Harvard) ties with Friedrich Kittler, a media theorist from Germany, for 57, with 24 cites. Barbara E. Johnson (Harvard) is named but unranked with 12 cites. Once you get past the Europeans, the list is heavily East Coast, heavily establishment, and hardly does justice to what was once the fun of reading CI (although it may indicate what the journal has become in recent years).

The authors of the ranking, Anne H. Stevens, an assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and Jay W. Williams, Critical Inquiry's managing editor, note that "Benjamin's works are cited nonargumentatively," which I think is a nice way of saying his ideas are just window dressing, not engaged with. That must be why he ranks high as one of the most perfectly citable authors of all, because you can cite him reverently without having to figure out what he said. With Benjamin a citation is the academic equivalent of the purely ritual move, like a ballplayer's sign of the cross.

But the genuflecting to Benjamin points, perhaps, to something hocus-pocus about this whole counting exercise. The essay that accompanies CI's list crows that the theories featured in the journal "share a tendency to question received wisdom and accept few absolutes or foundations." Yet this list seems like a monument to CI's importance. Guys, you don't need to do this. You really have been consistently the best journal for emerging ideas in the humanities for a generation. Relax into your status as senior citizens.

More important, being critical (in the sense Immanuel Kant used the term) means first of all being self-critical. You humanists should have looked into the literature on the methodology of lists, which the social scientists who pioneered making them have reflected upon. That universal genius, the late sociologist Robert K. Merton, wrote a series of telling scholarly articles about the potentially harmful effects of compiling lists of citations, and about numerology in general when it comes to evaluating the real worth of scholarship. Indeed, the way the numbers fall out in CI's ranking seems to reveal the workings of what Merton called the "Matthew Effect," where fame becomes its own promotion, and the few most famous names get more credit for their ideas than less known thinkers with the same ideas might.

More tragic is the harm such lists do, especially (as Merton speculated) in the humanities, where thinkers tend to mature much more slowly than in the sciences. Such lists harm because they freeze things; they tend to favor those who were precocious young; and they positively discourage the slow-to-mature, causing the system to lose whatever the last people might have contributed. The human cost of such list making is wastage. The learned duplicate unthinkingly the worst behavior of society as a whole, celebrating the celebrities, not even pausing to think about the fruit wasting on the vine, whose cultivation might have benefited us all.

Lindsay Waters is executive editor for the humanities at Harvard University Press. His most recent book is Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004).