Scholarship as Testimony: Jerome McGann’s Keynote Address for the 16th Annual Craft Critique Culture Conference, 2016

Abstract

Jerome McGann's1 talk "Exceptional Measures" was in itself "exceptional" in a number of ways. Delivered in the context of a conference with heavy emphasis on digital humanities and subtitled "The Human Sciences in STEM Worlds," McGann's keynote surprisingly bracketed off both of these fields-DH and modern science-to instead go back to the basics and make a passionate claim for reassessing the values that underlie the humanities as such. While McGann has been deeply engaged with bibliographic scholarship for most of his career, it was the highly focused nature necessitated by DH scholarship that, he claims, led him to realize he "didn't know what books were" in the first place. The abstracting and operationalizing of literary objects into the digital sphere made the co-founder of the University of Virginia's groundbreaking "Research in Patacriticism"2 lab understand that he wanted to pursue a more humble approach to scholarship: instead of datamining, digital editions, and textual mapping, McGann is now interested in "Truth."McGann's conscious embrace of such a transcendental signifier was as much programmatic as polemic. The argument of "Exceptional Measures" was not merely "post theory" but explicitly anti theory-with de Man's deconstruction serving as the prototype of a "misguided" model of scholarship. Describing the literary theory of the latter twentieth century as disclosing a "Cheneyan concept of knowledge" (in allusion to the lies and half-truths that lead to the second Iraq War), McGann pleaded for a renewed separation between "perceived fact" and "opinion"-which, he claimed, are utterly confused in post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and like concepts. Against theory, McGann proposed a skeptical empiricism. While this notion has a prehistory in Socrates and Plato, the focus of McGann's talk was with the New England transcendentalists-Emerson and Thoreau-and their ongoing legacy in more recent environmental writings (especially Barry Lopez's 1986 Arctic Dreams). McGann's vision of the scientific process (hinted at in his talk's title) is then not so much a (post)modern one-based largely in falsification, not positive proof-but one that understands itself as performing a "pastoral office;" thorough and careful practice dedicated to the accurate report of a historical Truth writ large is its method and end goal. McGann, then, ultimately pleads for slow, historicist scholarship that avoids the "propaganda and confusion" perpetuated by theory. To tell "the truth and nothing but the truth" ought to be the scholar's commitment, according to McGann. While he stops short of adding "so help me God," McGann's claim was then based certainly as much in the long history of scriptural exegesis as it is in the more secular, literary trajectory laid out by "Exceptional Measures. …