The Two Criticisms—or, Structure, Lingo, and Power in the Discourse of Academic Humanists

In October of 1966 the Johns Hopkins Humanities Center was the site of an international symposium on “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man.” The name of the symposium expresses part of its ambition: to model literary criticism on certain “scientific” paradigms. In particular, the meeting was designed to explore the implications of structuralist thinking—and especially that of continental scholars—on “critical methods in humanistic and social sciences.” Whatever the organizers may have meant by “humanistic . . . sciences,” and whatever the value of the conference in examining structuralist thought, as it turned out the symposium will be remembered historically, if at all, as a beginning of poststructuralist analysis in the United States. For at the conference Jacques Derrida made his American debut, delivering a critique of structuralism whose title, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” embodied many of the terms and concepts that have since characterized academic criticism in this country. In the two decades after that Baltimore conference, some version of Derridean analysis— call it deconstructionist, speculative, formalist, or, my preference, “ludic”—has come to be increasingly central to the practice of literary study ... at least as it is carried out in the influential academic towers of New Haven and its suburbs across the land. A few months before this event in 1966, and I dare say unnoted at that conference, Stokely Carmichael had posed a new slogan for what had been thought about up to that time as the “civil rights movement.” Carmichael had been arrested by Greenwood, Mississippi police when, on June 16, participants in the march named after James Meredith had attempted to erect their tents at a local black school. During that evening’s rally, Carmichael angrily asserted that blacks had obtained nothing in years of asking for freedom; “what we gonna start saying now,” he insisted, is “‘black power.’” The crowd responded immediately to those words, chanting its “black power” response to Carmichael’s call.