The Humanities in the Public Sphere
PETER BROOKS: I thought I might start us off by a remark of Paul Kahn’s, or what I thought I heard Paul saying, which is that the truth of interpretation in the humanities is not separable from the act of interpretation. I very much agree with this and feel that what we are talking about is an interpretive practice, and the people who claim that the humanities speak to the world of value because you become a better person by reading Clarissa or Julie have got it all wrong. It has nothing to do with the outcome of reading, but the practice of reading.
So I think that when we talk about sympathy or empathy, terms often bandied about, and the experience of the humanities and why it can lead toward an understanding of human rights, we don’t mean that in any easy, sentimentalist way, but that the practice of sympathy or empathy through reading should be very much of a discipline, a praxis.
JUDITH BUTLER: Peter, I want to thank you for having brought us together. I think you solicit and facilitate a kind of thinking that helps us all. I was thinking about that in particular and your relationship with the term ethics. You have offered a very strong critique, for instance, of moralism and ideas of narcissistic virtue and I think you have your own skepticism toward certain highly moral ideas of what it is to be a good person as well as forms of moral judgmentalism, and I appreciate that. That opens up the train of thought: What would ethics do that would be something different from hypermoralistic judgment or what Jonathan Lear has called operating in the register of the superego? Can we think an ethics that is not about superegoic condemnation or virtuous self-inflation? I took that as a point of departure in thinking about how best to respond to this invitation, and I think the people gathered here had many really important things to say along those lines.
My sense about human rights is that there is an active debate right now about human rights organizations exercising power to set the agenda for more local struggles and what happens when that occurs. So, for instance, in gay and lesbian human rights debates there is a large question: Do we say, do we give a norm for, what it is to be a rights-bearing sexual citizen, and do we then hold various countries and regions accountable to that norm? Or do we find out a little more about what people actually want in terms of sexual practice, and how they organize locally and through what terms sexual self-understandings are crafted, to see if human rights language or discourse could be more responsive to the language and practice of very specific kinds of movements and struggles? This criticism does not imply that human rights are nothing other than cultural imperialism; rather, it is that the field of human rights has become a place where this debate happens all the time.
For instance, there are human rights organizations in both Israel and Palestine that do the work of measuring. They document how many people living under occupation have been imprisoned and how many people have been in administrative detention without going to trial. We need that kind of measurement, we need those numbers—they are extremely important. At the same time, a lot of people say we can’t stay within the human rights framework because the problem is not counting how many violations there are in the so-called Palestinian territories, but asking whether those territories themselves were established through an unjust colonial settlement that needs to be addressed at a more systematic level.
So the critical position is not against human rights as such—everyone relies on those human rights organizations—but asking whether the human rights framework is sufficient for certain kinds of political analysis and political movements organized by the struggle for justice. Human rights are obviously rights-based politics, so we should be asking what rights-based politics allow us to do and what they keep us from doing. A struggle for justice, for freedom—these are large norms, I know. Do I want to become a subject who has these rights such that I can use or exercise them in some way? Or are we actually looking to reconfigure the political field, the political order in a region such that justice and freedom and equality may be better realized? Sometimes rights are a part of that picture, but they are not all of that picture. One might say that there is an insufficiency within the human rights framework without saying that it should be debunked or thrown away, or that it is nothing other than an instrument of cultural imperialism, which I think is rather unthinking.
On another note, I would like to hear more about the practical and about practical reason. I think there is something about the history of practice that is different from technique and also different from the idea of causality. Some of our arguments became problematic when we started asking whether the reading of a text leads to the practice of good deeds. If we construe the relation between text and deed as causal, I think we are in some difficulty because there is always a question of how a text is taken up, or under what conditions it is taken up in one way or another for the purposes of a set of actions or practices.
I also see right now in the academy an effort to rethink critique so that it is not just reduced to suspicion or debunking but so that it becomes a pathway to hope, a way of trying to reconfigure the political field more generally so that we might think differently, of opening up possibilities for living and livability rather than shutting them down.
Lastly, I want to draw attention to humanities in the public sphere by mentioning the book blocs. I don’t know how many of you were aware of the demonstrations in Rome and London and various places throughout Europe when this occurred. Students who were protesting massive budget cuts to universities or the closing of public universities took to the streets holding up signs with various titles and authors, effectively saying, “I want to live in a world in which I might go to the university and read such books,” and they included Plato, Marx, Althusser, Jane Austen. I think it is important to see that those kinds of public demonstrations are fueled by the desire to read and to secure the institutional conditions for the democratization of reading.
KIM LANE SCHEPPELE: I am going to take up one piece of the challenge to the human rights framework. I share your sense of critique and also your sense that rights should not be thrown out. But one of the worries about the human rights framework is its extreme individualism. Much of the human rights movement was a reaction against the authoritarianism of the twentieth century, and the human rights successes consisted of translating these principles into law. Once you get underneath how those authoritarian systems worked, and in particular how the Soviet system worked, many forms of resistance were collective forms, in which community building and collective solidarity were crucial to how resistance actually happened. Behind the demand for individualistic rights was a collective enterprise of alternative meaning-making.
Those fighting for human rights were not living in an individualized rights-defined space when they made those arguments. Instead, the lives of dissidents represented a meaningful kind of counterpoint to a world of individualized rights. With the end of the Soviet system, we also saw the end of the solidarity of these groups that were resisting power. It’s one of the reasons why the creeping authoritarianism we see now in these former Soviet places cannot fully be resisted because the communities that had been formed to resist repression were split up with the “fall of the wall.”
So I wonder whether the forms of repression that exist in countries that are allegedly democratic, open, and neoliberal demand a different kind of rhetoric—not the individualism of the human rights framework but something much more solidarity building. Perhaps that is why the Occupy movement doesn’t immediately proceed from a rights rhetoric. Often, demands for liberation call for some inverse of what they think they are living through at the moment when they develop the critique. But when the system to which they are objecting disappears and they are left with what they once thought would be better, then they can see that their solutions coexisted with rather than fully opposed the governments they criticized; they were not fully possible under any other.
I am therefore adding the unfolding of time to what you said, Judith.
JONATHAN LEAR: I want to go back to the question about the relationship of the truthfulness of the act of interpretation that Paul Kahn was talking about in his essay. One of the things I am interested in is the fullness of truthfulness. A lot of the work of psychoanalysis is helping or allowing people to speak their minds, where we’re not just talking about accuracy of words but about a filling up of being in the verbal expression. Part of the act of creation that Paul was talking about, I think, is the capacity of the humanities to encourage a kind of fullness in truthful speech. And I don’t think there is any way to capture that other than as essentially in the first person. It does not have to be first-person singular, it could be first-person plural, but there is no other way to get it.
Judith Butler was raising this question about the practical, and I think that this is also a place where the humanities distinctively can have a role. For instance, when I think back on apartheid in South Africa, there were a lot of things that could not be prevented and a lot of things that humanists could not do, but what stays with me is J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. That, for me, defines what happened there, that is what is lasting: this novelist’s attempt to resonate in other peoples’ souls as to what this was really about.
DIDIER FASSIN: I have a few points, the first of which gets back to a discussion we had earlier about Agamben and Foucault. It concerns the translation of the humanities and philosophy toward the public sphere in general, and maybe more specifically toward the social sciences. The uses that are made of the humanities often correspond to an impoverished version of philosophical theory. The literal importation of concepts such as biopolitics or bare life, which are applied almost mechanically to interpret the social world, does not account for their complex texture and ends up being antiheuristic. So we need to think about this problem of translation not in terms of dogmatic faithfulness but as respectful treason, by which I mean we should translate these theories in a way that keeps them alive and should adopt these concepts only so long as they help us to think further and deeper.
The second point deals with the division between the social sciences and the humanities, which has been described earlier in terms of an opposition between positivism and interpretation. We must be aware that the social sciences are diverse and that they are diversely constituted, depending on national or even local contexts. Anthropology, whether it is qualified as cultural or social, is largely based on an interpretive epistemology. Even sociology, probably much more in Europe than in North America, has an interpretive tradition. But it is correct that certain disciplines, such as economics or politics or international relations, are more inclined to positivism as well as more ready to adopt the language of public authorities and respond to the question “What should we do?,” which is not typically the type of question we are very comfortable with. We have to resist this positivist trend, which has gained substantial legitimacy today, being aware that it does not so much separate the social sciences from the humanities but actually distinguishes two ways of thinking about the world, with a line that comes across both domains.
The last point I wanted to evoke concerns human rights and humanitarianism, and our criticism of those whose politics are based on these principles. In fact, social agents, when they use this language to defend their cause, do not necessarily adopt it in an innocent way. They are aware that it is the legitimate language of the moment, which makes it good leverage. Therefore, when we criticize the individualistic approach of human rights or the compassionate move of humanitarianism, we probably neglect the fact that agents involved in these fields are often themselves reflexive about it. When they refer to abuses or exhibit suffering bodies, they use this language as a strategy to claim more broadly social rights or civil rights. They are often less naïve and more “political” than we assume. This is something that ethnography constantly reminds us of: People have a kind of social intelligence.
MICHAEL ROTH: How can we connect what Judith Butler called the desire to read with what Patricia Williams called the renaming capacity, or the ability to notice people, groups, and events and have them count for us? I am thinking of this in a pretty mundane way—that as teachers in the humanities, if we are lucky, we have students who come to our classes with a desire to read. For me, the question is how do we connect that desire to read to this capacity to rename, to remake, to have things count for us, and to a general capacity to not participate in this wave of conformism that is sweeping over the academy? I think the cuts we are seeing in Europe and the United States, and the efforts of administrators to streamline the university under the guise of instrumentality, are creating the university as a site of ultraconformism to current norms.
What we see in our classes—the desire to read, or the desire to be absorbed in a painting, or in a work of music—how can we as professors and teachers turn that into antimoralism and nonconformism, or anticonformism?
BROOKE HOLMES: One thing that hasn’t been on the table is the relationship between the humanities and the sciences, to take that extra step as it were. Something that Paul Kahn said really resonated with me in rejecting the idea of quantification. If I understood Paul correctly, there is no causal necessity in the interpretive act, the generative act, the responsive act, so that causal and quantitative analysis will not capture that singularity, that creative energy.
It strikes me that that is an important point to be made not just about the human but also about the nonhuman and the material world more generally right now. We are moving away, and watching the sciences themselves move away, from an understanding of matter in reductive causal terms. So I think there is a moment or a question on the table: Is that causal complexity—the way in which life itself is showing itself to be interpretive, interpreting its surroundings, generative, creative—an entry point for the humanities? If interpretation now is the mark of the humanities, it is also a kind of passageway into thinking about—I do not want to say posthumanities—something that would move us beyond that sphere. So I think there is a kind of invitation to take that point, to think, to go one step farther to the territory of the sciences, where we are in a way least welcome and most afraid of going because for so many years matter was necessity, it was deterministic.
In fact, can we afford not to? Can we afford not to be engaging in those conversations and trying to create hybrid interpretive acts with the sciences or at least to trying to break through that barrier that has been in place, that nature/culture barrier, for so long? We are at a point, I think, historically and theoretically where we might be able to move through it.
PAUL KAHN: I think that’s a great point. I completely agree that the next step, the way in which this should be extended, is to be thinking about the relationship between the individual, the State, and the larger universe, cosmos, and nature.
I want to connect this problem of reading and the humanities to an idea of freedom, which I think is the critical idea running through all of this. Jonathan Lear’s point, which is why I liked his essay so much, gives us a concrete example—what it looks like in practice, as you were saying. Jonathan, too, made the same point about how it is not causal, and this also goes to your point about the necessity of formal and final causes.
So I think there is a unity of coherent themes here. I do not know if this is right, but I do think there is a bit of inversion. There is this idea now that maybe the humanities were engaged in a critical project and it became seen as kind of destructive or negative—but, of course, negation is also an entry point to creation. Now there is a reconsideration, a reconstruction, so that it is a creative destruction. I think this is also related, Peter, to your point about speaking in different voices, and letting truth be a kind of occupying or taking up of these voices.
JONATHAN LEAR: This has been an intense practical problem for me, as well as for my colleague Mark Payne in his book The Animal Part.1 Instead of the model of the dominant culture teaching the nondominant culture “here are our truths,” we need to explore something different. Payne’s book looks at the rich history of Latin and Greek poetry that consists of our talking to animals. Part of what makes the book so beautiful, I think, is that rather than a kind of hermeneutics of suspicion in which we assume a priori that this did not happen, the a priori is “Who knows? Maybe it did.” What his book brings to light is a huge, rich Western, Latin, Greek tradition in which we speak to animals and they tell us very important things. And, of course, that is the heart of Crow culture. Two cultures could meet here without one saying, for instance, we cannot learn anything from Western civilization because it is just the white man’s corrupt universe, so we have got to go over to the wisdom of the natives, or (on the other hand) we must learn this because it is the wisdom of the West. There is a kind of discovery of a rejected or ignored tradition of talking to animals and them talking to us, and us learning from them. This is one of the places where having this conversation has been a real success.
PATRICIA WILLIAMS: I am actually less optimistic, particularly in the context of bioethics. I acknowledge, as Didier Fassin said, that there are circumstances in which people are using certain vocabulary in very strategic ways. But what really concerns me is the lack of self-consciousness about the way in which certain kinds of determinism are actually being reinscribed, despite precisely a moment in scientific and technological revolution in which it ought to be exactly the opposite. The human genome project, for example, says that there is virtually no difference among us; yet scientists and science journalists and the media make us think there is a gene for this and a gene for that, even though that is actually not what the data show. It is not a text but a chemical process. For example, I think Skip Gates told the audience on one of his programs that Stephen Colbert was 100 percent white. Now 100 percent white actually refers to the data sets that matched him up with nine people in northern Wales, which was then labeled or called Caucasian (but had nothing to do with the Caucasus) and then that became “white.” In expressing it as 100 percent white, it becomes a reinscription of notions of racial purity. That kind of romance really troubles me because a lot of it operates at unconscious levels.
Also, we live in a certain ultralibertarian moment where all our constitutional discourse, all our criminal discourse, and all our tort discourse is ultracontractarian—all in private contract terms rather than social compact terms. That is why I am not sure that even speaking in the first person, alone, is liberating because the first person according to this model is Homo economicus.
BH: I think in a way that is precisely why occupying the space where there is neither pure causal necessity nor pure agency is so important. There has to be a space between.
JONATHAN CULLER: The remarks so far have made it clear that there is an endless array of new domains for critical analysis and no end of things for the humanities to address. I have two comments in relation to the previous remarks. First, for a long time, one of the arguments about the value of the humanities was that we did the work of considering what it means to be human. This has often not gained much traction within the university, partly because it is deemed rather abstract and self-serving. But the new domain—the broad domain of human/animal studies—has actually given it a concreteness that makes it available. Also, it does open up possibilities for interaction with scientists, always with a critical edge. So I think the reinvigoration of this discourse about what it means to be human seems to me in some way a more promising domain for the humanities than, say, critical analysis, which has had a good run but may not be doing its work anymore as it used to.
The other thing is that we have been talking a lot about instrumentalization, and I am very aware of this trend at Cornell University at the moment because we are building a campus in New York City that is entirely devoted to technology transfer and instrumentalization. In this domain, some of the scientists—especially, say, the theoretical physicists—are very much on the side of the humanities. They understand better than others in the university that research is about knowledge, and knowledge for its own sake. Sometimes the ideas theoretical physicists come up with may have applications, but many of them do not, and these scientists want to continue their work whether the practical application is evident or not. So they are really very good allies for the humanities, where we also think studying works is a value in and of itself, independent of whether social benefits might accrue.
WILLIAM GERMANO: I want to respond to Michael Roth. We began with Judith Butler’s wonderful essay, which hit so many different points that we could spend more time on, but one of them was the notion of metrics. We are so resistant to metrics. Our conversation today has been very much about the independence of what we do, and the values of freedom that underscore the work of the humanities, yet still I feel we have not articulated anything really to demonstrate the value of what we do. I think, in a curious way, this might be an easier thing to accomplish than to substitute for a metric something else that could satisfy this cultural and social pressure to demonstrate that we at least can prove to ourselves that we accomplish what we say we are going to accomplish.
We are all in institutions where the culture of assessment is absolutely part of the discourse of our departments and programs, yet it is a very awkward conversation to have wherever you go. I do not know whether anybody wants to step into that muddy pool. But I think the notion of having some language that we can use to talk about what we see ourselves accomplishing is a crucial piece that is missing in our discourse.
PB: And to the extent that I have looked at the existing models, such as the Collegiate Learning Assessment, they are a total misfit because they are all instrumentalist problem solving, the kind of thing you learn in the first year of Harvard Business School. They have nothing really to do with the kind of practice of reading that we do. I agree with you that we are going to have to come up with some way to self-assess because otherwise someone will impose it.
RALPH HEXTER: I think we are laying out many future conferences with possible connections with the sciences, with bioethics, and with the animal/human. What I was most struck by was when Jonathan Lear described the formal and final causes of a culture being destroyed; given the coming change of our environment, it may be a very powerful opportunity to get a lot more people focused on what we need to be studying and interrogating. At a campus like mine, humanities are a very small part of what we do—we are very much a science campus. So I keep thinking of ways in which the discourses in the humanities can also have resonance among some of the people working in the sciences and other areas, as there is considerable debate going on in those disciplines as well.
ELAINE SCARRY: One postscript—I have no idea whether it is testable that the humanities instill ethical learning, but I remembered that the Hastings Center actually, in the 1980s, did an extensive inquiry into the disciplines and the degree to which they can serve as vehicles of ethical learning. Literature and history, if I remember correctly, were the two primary disciplines that seemed to be very good, in their view.2
Second, I mentioned earlier that I think by not bringing up things like empathy, beauty, and disputation in the classroom we actually diminish the power of these things, and I gave the example earlier of beauty. But I want to talk for a minute about the question of empathy. When we bring up empathy in the classroom, we tend either to celebrate it or disparage it, but not to get beyond that; however, there are very interesting observations that have been made. For example, Walsh McDermott at Cornell Medical often spoke about the fact that whether or not we are good at narrative compassion, when compared with statistical compassion we are brilliant at narrative compassion. That is, we cannot do statistical compassion at all. So I think it is important in class to talk about empathy and talk about the fact that whether we are good at narrative compassion or not, we are dreadful at this other thing called statistical compassion.
Even a novel by Dickens or Zola or Balzac, which may ask us to hold on to the fates of sixty characters, is nothing compared with what we are being asked to think about in political life. We ought to be cognizant of that. On the other hand, I think that literary works are most helpful insofar as they expose the limits of our ability to think empathetically. Novels—and Thomas Hardy is for me an example of this—can show a character to be so substantive and weighty but regarded as weightless by all around her. For instance, by the time Hardy is done describing Tess in Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), she weighs about a thousand pounds emotionally in our minds, and yet we see the other characters only being able to understand her as a piece of gossip. That is an incredibly helpful model. In literature, the failure to grasp the reality of other people and how they can be injured is often done through underexposure and overexposure, and these are absolutely the ways in which injuries and misrepresentations are carried out in political life and in the media. If all we do in the classroom is say “empathy yes” or “empathy no,” we never get to these other important attributes of empathy.
Finally, one last postscript about the idea of critical skepticism. Several people have brought up Geoffrey Harpham’s work. His most recent book on the university talks about this dialogue between Michel Foucault (or I think Didier Fassin would say the younger Foucault) and Noam Chomsky.3 Chomsky allows the words “human nature” to be used but Foucault does not, and a kind of political constraint comes from a prohibition on using that language. One other book that to me has been very helpful is by a young scholar named Christian Thorne, a brilliant investigation of skepticism in earlier centuries and the conservative ends that it serves.4 He looks at people from Montaigne up through Hobbes, and it is really an extraordinary book because we pride ourselves on thinking that skepticism is going to come out on the side of liberalism—yet that may not be its history at all. It is often very disempowering, making you think it is not actually a tool to be used.
JB: To the question of conformism, we do need ways of evaluating the current metrics, and we need ways of evaluating our own work that rival or contest some of the notions of assessment. I think we need to reanimate critique as precisely a way of thinking about the competing schemes of evaluation and evaluating them.
My last thought is this: There is a little bit of sadness when we talk about metrics or measurement. I think that, although the term connotes the completely quantifiable now, there was a time when we talked about poetic measure or metrics, or about measure as an important part of Aristotelian ethics. You know, there is a measure for measure. We have to figure out a measure for measure.