The Sacred Dark Arts of the Snowflake Hermeneutical Brigade

My guest on the show today is Len Gutkin, editor of The Chronicle Review, which is the ideas and analysis section of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Len, in his freelance life, is a critic whose essays have appeared in Liberties, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.He got his PhD in English from Yale in 2014, spent some time as a postdoc at Harvard, and has spent the years since largely at Chronicle, writing about the intellectual and institutional life of the American university with, from my perspective, an admirable sense of skin in the game; is somebody who cares about this stuff, and you can sense it in his writing.This episode with Len is something of a throwback for the show. A lot of my early episodes were pretty squarely focused on the culture wars — wokeness, anti-wokeness, what was going on in the academy, in journalism, in politics that kind of thing — and I have definitely drifted away from that territory, I think for good reason, in large part because I, like so many other people, kind of ran out of interesting new things to say about it.But I am coming back to it here because Len’s recent [paywalled - email Len for access] essay in Liberties, which he titles “Reading for Sins,” is the kind of piece that can probably only be written in retrospect, with a bit of distance from the hullabaloo. Len takes on what he calls at one point, maybe with a hint of apology, “snowflake hermeneutics”: the tendency, particularly acute in the literary humanities over the last decade or so, to read works of art primarily, or at least substantially, for the sins they contain; to fixate on the morally or politically objectionable aspects of books at the expense of everything else about them.He approaches that less to condemn it, though there’s no secret as you’re reading it that he’s not a fan of this approach to literature, than to give it what I think of as a genuine institutional and intellectual history — to understand it as something other than the thing that gives Chris Rufo too many owie feelings.To do that, Len ranges pretty widely. He gets into the sociology of taboo, the history of literary education, and, among other examples, a 2023 controversy over Merve Emre’s New Yorker review of John Guillory’s book Professing Criticism. Guillory’s book argued that literary scholars as a profession had made a rather grievous conceptual error at some point along the way: they came to think that their work as scholars was justified, at least in part, on the basis of its beneficial political impact on society. In some extreme cases, scholars saw themselves explicitly as activists, but in many cases it was somewhat more indirect. They had constructed a paradigm in which the critical, inquisitive, deconstructive work they did served clear political ends.Guillory was critical of that. Emre, reviewing his book for The New Yorker, lexplored his argument and then added some of her own, drawing on her own experience in academia. In doing so, and this is key to how Len gets into it in his essay, she repeatedly used a phrase that Guillory himself had used to characterize what had happened to his field: “professional deformation.” It is the English translation of what was a originally a French expression used to describe actual physical deformations, like the way coal miners might develop a distinctive slump or hunch.That phrase then provided the spark for an explosion of outrage from members of a public Facebook group called Remaking the University, administered by a former president of the Modern Language Association and populated by tenured and tenure-track faculty at high-prestige institutions. They did not like Emre’s use of “professional deformation.” Here is how Len, in his Liberties essay, characterizes what he observed in that Facebook group:I paid more than usual attention to the reception of Professing Criticism, because I had written about it several times myself. I was interested to see what the folks at a popular public Facebook page devoted to “Remaking the University,” hosted by a recent president ofthe Modern Language Association, would make of Emre’s review. They didn’t like it. And several of them — tenured professors of English, not naïve or overeager freshmen — were appalled by Guillory’s use of the phrase “deformation,” as well as by Emre’s approving use of it throughout her review. The subject is introduced thus, by a distinguished Victorianist: “I just read this and I’m feeling dismayed” by the “flippant, careless, and damaging work, including the unspeakable use of ‘deformation’ here, not to mention the Anglocentrism, elitism, etc.” This professor goes on: “It is horrifying that a person can use ‘deformed’/‘deformation’ in 2023 in an article in a major magazine and nobody flagged it.” Then another professor — like the first, a well-known scholar in her field — weighs in: “the ableism was stunning.” And the first professor returns to the charge: “I just did a search for ‘deformed’ and felt physically ill. She uses it nine times in the article, starting with ‘hideously deformed.’ What the hell? How are disabled scholars supposed to feel when they read that? How is it possible that she could think it was cute to use such a derogatory term and that the editors didn’t flag it? I don’t even see how one can debate the merits of the idea with slurs like that sitting in the prose.”In a less interesting essay than Len’s, we would simply be presented with this as blatant evidence of snowflakes doing their snowflake hermeneutics. Len’s approach is more interesting. He is somewhat taking for granted that it’s absurd, but he’s asking: what is actually going on here? What does it mean to say that one feels physically ill from reading the word “deformation” in this context? What feelings or reactions are being submerged, evaded, or sublimated in this kind of discussion? For what ulterior purpose was the accusation of ableism serving as a stalking horse? And why were people so pissed off in the first place?One answer Len gives has to do with the idea of words themselves as magic, as sacred, as having the power to heal or harm or alter the fabric of the universe. He points out that this is not a novel relationship to words — it is in fact ancient, and it connects in a pretty clear way, once he lays it out, to a much longer and then much more modern history of how literature, and the study of literature and other humanities, has functioned in the modern West as a kind of substitute for religion in the aftermath of the collapse of organized Christianity as a taken-for-granted source of meaning, vessel for sacred energies. The close reading of difficult texts was, within that period, understood as a serious spiritual practice.What Len argues — and what I find genuinely compelling and pretty persuasive — is that snowflake hermeneutics is in part a rearguard response to the loss of that function. The prestige that attached to literary study in that earlier period has drained away, and nobody quite knows how to recover from it. Snowflake hermeneutics is, in this reading, an unconscious attempt to restore some of literature’s old sacred charge by treating certain words and representations as sacred but in a negative register, because the positive ones can no longer serve. They’ve been vanquished from the inside by the contemporary academy, and then more thoroughly vanquished by the macro forces we’re all buffeted by — neoliberalism, postmodernity, capital, techno-futurism, whatever you want to call them.That is a much more interesting conversation to have than simply “snowflakes bad,” which isn’t really a conversation at all. Also interesting is where Len and I end up when we try to take seriously the role of taboo, the idea that certain words are genuinely destabilizing and that we need protection from them. We talk about whether taboos of some kind are necessary to the functioning of any society, whether any culture can really do entirely without taboos, whether everything should truly be on the table in a scholarly or intellectual context.We go deep on those things and others, and I had a lot of fun.One small production note: Len’s dog makes a brief but notable appearance early in the conversation. His barking, though loud, does not last long. He is not a bad dog. He is a good dog. But if you hear him and it feels disruptive, it will pass soon.Eminent Americans is produced in collaboration with the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, and is distributed through its publication, Arc Magazine. You can find all of Arc’s podcasts, including this one, and much more online at arcmag.org.It was a real pleasure to have Len on for this semi-throwback episode. Peace.0:00 Intro – Dan introduces guest Len Gutkin, editor of The Chronicle Review0:55 Framing the episode as a “throwback” to earlier culture-war coverage1:19 Len’s Liberties essay “Reading for Sins” and “snowflake hermeneutics”2:21 Sociology of taboo, literary education, and the Guillory/Emre controversy4:46 The “professional deformation” Facebook group outrage6:39 Len’s real question: why do people feel “physically ill” from a word?7:34 Words as sacred/magical — literature as substitute for religion9:19 Snowflake hermeneutics as grief response to lost prestige of humanities10:24 Preview: taboo, necessity of taboos in any culture10:56 Note on a barking dog early in the interview10:56 Danforth Center/Arc Magazine credits10:14 Interview begins — Len’s background and title at The Chronicle11:16 Len summarizes “Reading for Sins”13:20 Len’s academic background, PhD at Yale (2014)14:23 State of campus politics circa 2003–2014 (”interregnum”)16:02 2014 Yale grad student “atmospheric concerns” moment17:02 Postdoc years at Harvard, sensing the shift building19:20 The complicated student/faculty dynamic behind the culture wars22:46 Case study #1: the “N-word” podcast and classroom taboo rules26:52 The Michael Warner “faggotry” anecdote28:09 Slurs as concentrated sites of language’s power29:22 Workplace-norm slippage into classroom/literary norms32:14 The Odyssey, disturbing content, and professional hypocrisy36:14 Dave Hickey/Mapplethorpe/Jesse Helms tangent on art’s power to disturb39:17 Double-edged strategy: aggrandizing vs. vitiating one’s subject41:15 Right-wing “manosphere” vs. left-wing academic parallels (Barbara Kruger)46:44 Case study #2: Guillory’s “professional deformation,” Emre’s New Yorker review, and the Facebook backlash50:53 Is public Facebook commentary fair game as evidence?54:24 Faculty fear of students posting to social media57:00 Christian right’s historical claim to being the “OG” trigger-warning enforcers60:34 Hypocrisy on both sides of the free-speech/academic-freedom debate64:29 Buckley’s “God and Man at Yale” and academic freedom skepticism65:04 Psychoanalyzing the Facebook group’s outrage — displacement theory68:57 What was the actual “betrayal” in Guillory’s book and Emre’s review?70:42 Timing: 2023, the fraying of “woke consensus,” and October 7th73:15 Case study #3: Paul Moses and the 1960s Huckleberry Finn controversy at U Chicago80:29 Should there be any taboos in arts education? Céline as test case88:19 Circling back: blasphemy, sacralization, and STEM’s rising prestige93:52 AI as an accelerant of the loss of literary culture95:53 What a “mature” response to loss/grief might look like97:22 Closing thoughts and outro/credits This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe