A Defense of Judgment

by Michael W. Clune

Teachers of literature make judgments about value. They tell their students which works are powerful, beautiful, surprising, strange, or insightful—and thus, which are more worthy of time and attention than others. Yet the field of literary studies has largely disavowed judgments of artistic value on the grounds that they are inevitably rooted in prejudice or entangled in problems of social status. For several decades now, professors have called their work value-neutral, simply a means for students to gain cultural, political, or historical knowledge.

​Michael W. Clune’s provocative book challenges these objections to judgment and offers a positive account of literary studies as an institution of aesthetic education. It is impossible, Clune argues, to separate judgments about literary value from the practices of interpretation and analysis that constitute any viable model of literary expertise. Clune envisions a progressive politics freed from the strictures of dogmatic equality and enlivened by education in aesthetic judgment, transcending consumer culture and market preferences. Drawing on psychological and philosophical theories of knowledge and perception, Clune advocates for the cultivation of what John Keats called “negative capability,” the capacity to place existing criteria in doubt and to discover new concepts and new values in artworks. Moving from theory to practice, Clune takes up works by Keats, Emily Dickinson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Samuel Beckett, and Thomas Bernhard, showing how close reading—the profession’s traditional key skill—harnesses judgment to open new modes of perception.

254 pages, Paperback

First published April 23, 2021

About the author

Michael Clune is the critically acclaimed author of the memoirs Gamelife and White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin. His academic books include A Defense of Judgment, Writing Against Time, and American Literature and the Free Market. Clune’s work has appeared in venues ranging from Harper’s Magazine, Salon, and Granta to Behavioral and Brain Sciences, PMLA, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His work has been recognized by fellowships and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, and others. He is currently the Samuel B. and Virginia C. Knight Professor of the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University and lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

Also writes as Michael Clune .

Reviews

[Valeriu Gherghel · Rating 3 out of 5]

3, 5.

Mai are rost să spunem că o carte e mai bună decît alta? Mulți profesori socotesc că nu mai are rost. Judecata estetică, pretind profesorii, e mult mai puțin importantă decît interpretarea unei cărți. Cei care fac topuri, ierarhii, canoane, cei care pretind că se pricep să evalueze o carte (prin raport cu altele) dau dovadă de un spirit „elitist”. Oamenii sînt egali și fiecare are dreptul la o opinie. În plus, toate opiniile (toate judecățile estetice) sînt egale.

Michael W. Clune nu este de acord cu această atitudine „egalitaristă”. Unul dintre motive este că, în absența „autorităților”, a cronicarilor literari (rămași fără obiect), ierarhiile, topurile, clasamentele rămîn în seama mecanismelor pieții. Dar piața nu propune niciodată topuri valorice. Ea ține seama doar de vînzări. Din păcate, un bestseller este, de obicei, o carte mediocră.

Universitățile trebuie să-i ajute pe tineri să-și formeze gustul, facultatea de a discrimina și să-și întemeieze judecățile estetice. Într-o lume copleșită de cărți, judecata de valoare rămîne fundamentală.

[Nat]

This book was recommended to me after Zed and I gave a talk on Cavell's account of aesthetic judgment. In that talk, we criticized a contemporary theory that rejects the Kantian demand for agreement in aesthetic judgments, and other accounts that require aesthetic judgment to aim at agreement (even if they don't go so far as Kant to demand it). The contemporary view we were criticizing replaces the norm of agreement with a mutual appreciation of individuality, where individuality is understood as "discretionary choice". That idea falls squarely in the crosshairs of Clune's first couple of chapters, and I think I'll be able to mine this for some helpful observations to back up our criticism.

But there's also something about this book's defense of judgment that I think is less satisfying than Cavell's account, something that might have to do with insecurities of the discipline of English lit. Both Clune and Cavell discuss Hume's theory of aesthetic judgment. Hume's explanation of authoritative judgments of taste relies on the idea of a reasonable judge, who has lots of experience of the objects being judged—that's the sole criterion of aesthetic expertise. Cavell is clear that whatever force aesthetic judgments have depends completely on the ability of the judge to get their audience to share a reaction to whatever of value it is that they see in the artwork, and he rejects a suggestion in Hume's discussion of Sancho Panza's relatives' judgment about the qualities of a hogshead of wine (that it tastes of iron and leather) that their judgments are vindicated by a discovery—namely, that there's an iron key on a leather thong at the bottom of the hogshead. Cavell says that that's the *wrong* picture of the vindication of aesthetic judgment; the vindication of judgment rests solely on the ability of the judge to get their audience to share their reaction to the artwork. That makes it extremely fragile, and the judge is only as convincing as any particular judgment they make.

Clune, in contrast, is focused on establishing the foundation of aesthetic expertise: why we should trust certain peoples' judgments about artworks over others (pp. 11, 25, 65, etc.). In his case, the people he is arguing we have reason to trust are English professors. That is an odd project! There are lots of people with aesthetic expertise who have terrible taste, and people who have an uncanny ability to make astute judgments about art works even when they only have a passing familiarity with the work or neighboring works.

One of the more striking expressions of Clune's view is this statement: "If I can't imagine an academic article describing the features and qualities that give rise to my judgment, then my judgment is not an expert one" (p. 93). That is wild! What if your judgment takes a 1000 pages to develop, or can be expressed in a paragraph, or in the Neapolitan gesture of contempt that Sraffa asked Wittgenstein the logical form of?

[Ryanne · Rating 2 out of 5]

The problem or desire to produce/establish art’s alterity is what Clune gets crucially right here. But he does it through appeal to expertise or “judgement” rather than producing an account of the aesthetic object itself. Madam Bovary isn’t better than The Apprentice bc experts say it is, but because it ITSELF is better (or at the very least different). Nicholas Brown (in his book Autonomy) addresses the same problem w more coherence by providing an account of the aesthetic object, which is what this is all about, right? art isn’t better because critics say so, art is better (or at least distinct) because there’s something in the work of art that makes it so (MEANING)