DOING THE HUMANITIES (WITH BRUNO LATOUR)

Rita Felski

Given at the “Recomposing the Humanities with Bruno Latour” Conference

University of Virginia, September 18 2015

What exactly would be lost if we lost the humanities? Perhaps this question can serve as a

thought experiment for clarifying why the humanities matter. It puts things in a fresh perspective

by inviting us to imagine an experience of loss and to anticipate the reactions triggered by this

loss. Only in the grey early morning light, when a lover departs in a taxi for the last time, are we

suddenly made aware of the depth and intensity of our passion. So too, perhaps we can only

fully appreciate why the humanities are necessary by contemplating the prospect of their non-

existence.

A common answer is that the loss of the humanities would be the loss of critique. These

two terms have long been intertwined. The idea of critique has a long history that can be spun in

diverse ways; as a synonym for Socratic or Kantian modes of philosophical questioning, for

example, or to denote an adversarial and agonistic style of political argument. This latter use of

the term interests me especially, as one that has gained increased traction in the humanities in the

last half century. Critique, in this sense, typically includes the following elements: a spirit of

skeptical reflection or outright condemnation; an emphasis on its precarious position vis-à-vis

overbearing and oppressive social forces; the claim to be engaged in some kind of radical

intellectual and/or political work; and the assumption that whatever is not critical must therefore

be uncritical.

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This association of the humanities with critique has recently been underscored by Terry

Eagleton in the pages of The Guardian and The Chronicle. “Are the humanities about to

disappear?” Eagleton wonders. He goes on: “What we have witnessed in our own time is the

death of universities as centres of critique. Since Margaret Thatcher, the role of academia has

been to service the status quo, not challenge it in the name of justice, tradition, imagination,

human welfare, the free play of the mind or alternative visions of the future.” The declining role

and influence of the humanities is thus tied, Eagleton declares, to the evisceration of critique.

Thanks to an increasingly instrumental and market-driven view of knowledge, underwritten by

ballooning bureaucracies that cast professors and students in the roles of managers and

consumers, the concerns of the humanities seem ever more peripheral and irrelevant.

We can share Eagleton’s concern about the sidelining of the humanities without,

however, fully endorsing his defense of them. Indeed, his own words might give us pause, for

they do not support his argument as well as he might think. Some of the ideas he invokes—

imagination, perhaps; tradition, certainly—are hardly synonymous with critique; indeed, they

have often been seen as its antithesis. “Critique” may be too broad-brush a term to help us think

through the various practices of the humanities. Helen Small writes: “the work of the humanities

is frequently descriptive, or appreciative, or imaginative, or provocative, or speculative, more

than it is critical.” This seems exactly right. That intellectuals in the humanities so often invoke

“critique” as a guiding ethos and principle may speak to the stubborn persistence of an either/or

mindset: the fear that if one is not negating the status quo, one is therefore being co-opted by it.

The practices of academic life may turn out to be more messy, more ambiguous, and more

interesting. And it is here that I found Bruno Latour’s work very helpful in working through a

different set of ideas on why the humanities matter

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Can we develop a defense of the humanities that is not anchored exclusively in the value

of “critical thinking”? Are there other attitudes, actions, orientations in play? To what extent are

humanists engaged in practices of making as well as unmaking, composing as well as

questioning, creating as well as subverting? And can we talk about the social ties of the

humanities in ways that avoid the dichotomy of heroic opposition or craven cooption? Perhaps

we need a multi-dimensional defense of the humanities; one that accumulates rationales rather

than limiting them or narrowing them down. Today I offer four terms: curating, conveying,

criticizing; composing—hoping that the lure of alliteration will not overly compromise the force

of my argument! (I make no attempt to be comprehensive and welcome other suggestions about

what the humanities do and how we do the humanities)

Note that these terms are verbs rather than nouns; my emphasis is on actions and

practices rather than entities. In current defenses of the humanities, we often see the revival of

the two cultures split: the sciences deliver better bridges or cures for cancer: the humanities make

us ethical citizens, more empathic persons, or critical thinkers. The preserve of the sciences, in

short, is the material and natural world, whereas the humanities are seen as making us more

human Such a dichotomy and division of domains seems unfortunate, especially at a time when

the humanities are becoming increasingly concerned with ecological questions, climate change

and the future of the planet. Thinking about the humanities as a series of actions may thus prove

more helpful.

Curating

What does it mean to speak of “curating the humanities?” I mean by this term something broader

than simply mounting exhibitions in art galleries and museums. Curating, rather, involves a

process of caring for—the word has its origins in caritas—of guarding, protecting, conserving,

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caretaking, and looking after. We might think of the humanities as curators of a disappearing

past: guardians of fragile objects, artefacts undone by the blows of time, texts slipping into

oblivion. What often characterizes these historical remnants, as Stephen Greenblatt writes, is

their sheer precariousness, testifying to “the fragility of cultures, the fall of sustaining

institutions…, the destructive effects of warfare, neglect, and corrosive doubt.” The wounded

and vulnerable artefacts of history depend on our caring for their survival—without which they

are in danger of vanishing, like endangered species, never to reappear.

This defense of curatorship may seem like a conservative definition of the humanities,

but this view would be mistaken. We need to disentangle the meanings of conserving and

question the assumption that caretaking—taking care of the past--is conservative in a political

sense. It is now CEOs, after all, who speak breathlessly of change-making, who sweep away the

old-fangled and worship the cutting edge. In short, the temporal schemes of modernism—which

counterpose the sluggish, backward-looking time of the dominant culture to the rupture and

innovation of a marginal avant-garde—have lost their last shreds of analytical purchase. Of

course this association of innovation with corporate interests became all too evident here on

grounds when Teresa Sullivan was fired for not being committed to “creative disruption”-- an

increasingly favored term in the rhetoric of business and marketing.

In the face of this cult of consumer choice and technological innovation, it is important to

insist on an ethics of preservation—on the value of the seemingly outmoded or the non-relevant.

Without the humanities, how many of us would loiter and linger amongst the voices of the past?

Who would ever come to feel, in their very bones, the bewildering strangeness of distant forms

of life? Among all the forms of knowledge in the university, writes Mark McGurl, it is the

humanities that are most invested in time-travel, in moving back and forth across time. We need

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not only to conserve the texts of the past, he continues, but to conserve those institutions—such

as universities and libraries-- that care for these past texts and that are increasingly under threat.

There is a need, in short, for an impassioned defense of institutional structures—structures that

were often hailed as the enemy within a romantic-liberationist strain of literary studies but that

are crucial to conserving and care-taking.

In the opening pages of his Inquiry into Modes of Existence, Bruno speaks to this

question: instead of criticizing institutions, can we also learn to trust them? Actor-network-

theory has devoted much effort to describing the institutional networks that allow for the making

of knowledge. Against a modernist rhetoric of iconoclasm and emancipation from ties, it insists

on the inescapability of our attachments: we exist only because of our ties to countless co-actors.

Meanwhile, Bruno’s work is pitched against philosophies of history that privilege the new and

the now. Questioning the rhetoric of revolution and the vanguard, the new broom and the clean

slate, he underscores the depth of our entanglement with the past and the ubiquity of

transtemporal connections. Here we can find resources for another vision of the humanities: one

that takes seriously their role in conserving and taking care of the past.

These comments also resonate with an e-mail discussion that recently took place among

the English faculty about how to best respond to a planned digitization of UVA’s library

collections and the removal of most of its physical books. Elizabeth Fowler circulated a

document that spoke eloquently about the need to curate and preserve the past. Beth Sutherland

invoked the library as a space of possibility and unexpected finds, of encounters not just between

texts and readers but of material objects with bodies and senses. (Here is another confirmation

that the humanities deal not just with spirit but with matter.) Jerry McGann noted that humanists

have no unique capacity for critical or ethical thinking, but that they are “people of the book --

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philologists with a vocation for "the knowledge of what is and has been known." Books, we

might say, are non-human actors whose conservation and preservation matters.

Conveying

One risk of the language of conserving and preserving, to be sure, is that of calling up pictures of

home-made marmalade or pickled beetroot, arrayed in silent rows in a darkened pantry. History

is never preserved in this way, sealed off behind glass, but can only be actualized in relation to

the concerns of the present.

It is here that “conveying” serves as a second key idea for the humanities. “Conveying”

means both to communicate and to transport. To point out that the humanities are conveyed is to

say that they are transmitted across time and space into new venues and unexpected arenas. And

in being transported, they are also translated—into the concerns, agendas, and interests of diverse

audiences and publics. Translation is, of course, a key term in actor-network-theory, often

referred to a sociology of translation. Translation is not something imposed on the world—an act

of aggressive encroachment on pristine otherness-- but something that defines a world that is

always already composed of acts of mediation and transformation. In contrast to what Bruno

dubs “double click”—the fantasy of effortless information transfer—such translation is never

faithful or complete. He writes: “Everything is translated. . . We may be understood, that is,

surrounded, diverted, betrayed, displaced, transmitted, but we are never understood well. If a

message is transported, then it is transformed.”

“We are never understood well”: a phrase to be kept in mind in the light of a growing

interest in extending academic networks. We are seeing, for example, a new attention to “the

public humanities” and the “engaged humanities”—a realization that universities need to make

stronger alliances with interests and communities outside their walls. At Brown, for example,

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students can now enroll in a masters program in the public humanities: a program that combines

intellectual content with “practical skills such as techniques of recording, presenting and

interpreting, from oral history to museum collections and exhibits; ways of working with

communities and in organizations, from government to management to fundraising.”

Now, there is, of course, much work in the humanities that cannot be easily measured in

terms of public utility or direct impact: that may indeed resist or challenge such criteria. Yet this

point also needs to be conveyed, along with a case for more complex, subtle, and specific forms

of accountability. Meanwhile, the call to demonstrate the value of the humanities cannot be

waved away as just a neo-liberal imposition or a grievous symptom of anti-intellectualism. Being

accountable—accounting for what we do and why it matters—is a task to be taken seriously: one

that is far from synonymous with attempts to transform institutions of learning into knowledge

factories. At a time when the traditional idea of Bildung as a form of self-cultivation for a

cultural elite has lost its credibility, we need other justifications for the costs of the humanities

and more eloquent accounts of its contributions. The cultural studies scholar Ien Ang puts it well

in her recent assessment of her field: “We need,” she writes, “to engage in a world where we

have to communicate with others who are, to all intents and purposes, intellectual strangers—

people who do not already share our approaches and assumptions.” These intellectual strangers

are not just dim-witted bureaucrats or Fox News pundits, but diverse constituencies who may be

nonplussed or mystified by what we do. Scholars are often reluctant to engage this larger

audience—thanks, in part, to the influence of critical theories that pound home the ideological or

metaphysical dimensions of ordinary language. Against this trend, Ang argues for a scholarship

more willing to engage in positive interventions and recommendations, less quick to bridle at lay

interpretations or appropriations of academic discourse. In short, conveying what we do to

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“intellectual strangers” means being willing to go down unexpected paths and into

uncomfortable places, to recognize that transportation always involves translation.

Let us consider, in this light, a third aspect of the humanities: criticizing. To call for

humanists to engage more actively in public life is not to suggest that our task is to rubberstamp

what currently exists. The so-called stakeholders of higher education—whether we are thinking

of bureaucrats, politicians, tax payers, private donors, foundations, journalists and public

commentators, parents, or students themselves—have diverse expectations of what the

humanities should do. However, one widely endorsed and accepted function is that of criticizing,

disagreeing, objecting, and taking issue. This is not a role that is likely to disappear. .

Note, however, that I use the language of criticizing rather than critique. Criticizing, as I

define it here, includes the history of philosophical and political critique, but leaves room for

other forms and genres of disagreement. On the one hand, the humanities cannot jettison critique,

simply because critique has played a defining role in the history of the humanities. Students, in

my view, should not be allowed to graduate in a humanities discipline without some knowledge

of Kant and Marx, Foucault and feminism. In spite of its own critique of tradition, critique is

now part of tradition—the intellectual tradition of modernity—and thus falls under the curatorial

function of the humanities. We cannot make sense of the last two centuries of thought without

some knowledge of the diverse histories of critique.

On the other hand, via the wider term criticizing, I want to suggest that there are other

ways of disagreeing than those signaled by the term critique. Critique, in fact, often insists on its

difference from mere criticism, understood as disagreement or objection, by underscoring its

superior vantage point and epistemology. In traditional ideology critique, this is a matter of

contrasting the illusions or delusions of others to the critic’s access to truth; in poststructuralist

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critique, techniques of troubling and problematizing now signal the critic’s self-reflexive

distance from the naïve or literal beliefs of others. In both cases, though, we see the

methodological asymmetry that characterizes critique. Ideas that scholars object to or disagree

with are traced back to hidden structures of which actors themselves remain unaware—

ideological, psychic, linguistic, social. Critique itself, however, remains the ultimate horizon—

it is not an object to be contextualized, but the ultimate context: a synonym for rigorous and

radical thought. Hence the deeply asymmetrical nature of the discourse of critique: “I speak

truth to power while you are a pawn of neo-liberal interests.”

I am not persuaded by these claims to epistemological superiority and believe we would

do better to jettison the concept of critique—with its halo of rigor and radicalism—and to admit

that we are engaged in objecting and disagreeing. Meanwhile, we would also benefit from

exploring styles of criticism more willing to combine disagreement with empathy, that are more

dialogic and less diagnostic. It is hardly sufficient, for example, to explain away attitudes one

does not agree with by invoking the nefarious force of ideologies and isms. This kind of analysis

—which portrays one’s opponents as being driven by hidden structures that only the critical

theorist can penetrate—speaks about others rather than to them, in the discourse of the vanguard.

Criticism can only hope to engage others—rather than chastise or admonish others-- if it is also

willing to put itself in their shoes.. As Stefan Collini argues in his account of the humanities, we

need to extend imaginative sympathy to the agents we study. “Depth of understanding involves

something which is more than merely a matter of deconstructive alertness; it involves a measure

of interpretative charity and at least the beginnings of a wide responsiveness.” Criticism that

adopts such a stance is not only less dogmatic but also more likely to be heard by the

“intellectual strangers” invoked by Ang.

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I come, finally, to my fourth term: composition—and as Stephen Muecke has already

spoken eloquently on this topic, I will only say a few words. In a Manifesto published in New

Literary History, Bruno turns to the idea of composition as an alternative to that of critique.

Critique, he notes, is good at deconstructing and demystifying, seeking to render things less real

rather than more real—whether because they are products of ideology, as Marxism would have

it, or because they are “socially constructed” and thus need to be defamiliarized. In short, it is

good at pulling out the rug from under one’s feet, while failing to provide a place where one

might stand, however temporarily or tentatively.

The idea of composition, by contrast, speaks to the possibility of trying to compose a

common world, even if this world can only be built out of heterogeneous parts. It is about

making rather than unmaking, adding rather than subtracting, translating rather than separating.

Composition is a matter of both art and politics; theory and practice. The word has roots in art,

music, theater, dance, but also speaks to the creation of communities and political collectivities;

it directs our attention away from the uninteresting distinction between what is constructed and

not constructed to the key question whether something is well made or badly made. “It is time to

compose,” writes Bruno, “in all the meanings of the word, including to compose with, to

compromise, to care, to move slowly, with caution and precaution.”

Could this idea of composition inspire an alternative vision of the humanities? One that

that places less emphasis on “de” words—deconstructing, demystifing, debunking—and more on

“re” words—reassembling, reframing, reinterpreting, remaking? That is less invested in the

iconoclasm of critique and more invested in forms of making and building? In a recent book, the

French scholar Yves Citton remarks that politicians are fond of invoking the “knowledge

economy” and the need to equip students for the “information society.” Let us do our best, says

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Citton, to replace such slogans with references to “cultures of interpretation”—a term that

affords a stronger case for what the humanities offer. Interpretation, here, is not a matter of

recovering “original meaning,” but of mediating and translating, as texts are slotted into ever

changing frames. This view of interpretation as remaking dovetails nicely with Bruno’s

emphasis on composition, of forging links between things that were previously unconnected.

Interpretation becomes a co-production between actors that brings new things to light rather than

an endless rumination on a text’s hidden meanings or representational failures. It serves as one

key element of the humanities

At the same time, the language of composition draws us closer to those in other fields

who are invested in making, building, constructing, whether out of joists and steel plates or

musical notes and physical gestures: engineers: painters; set designers; composers; novelists;

web-site builders; scientists; dancers. Such rapprochements should be welcomed, as forms of

conveyance that can bring unexpected fruits and unanticipated insights. For this reason, an oft-

cited adage—it is the humanities that make us human—strikes me as a misstep and a wrong path.

Sarah Churchwell, for example, writes: “The humanities are where we locate our own lives, our

own meanings; they embrace thinking, curiosity, creation, psychology, emotion. We need the

advanced study of humanities so that we might, some day, become advanced humans.”

Can we really claim, with a straight face, that the sociologist and the physicist are less

human than the philosopher or the literary critic? That their work does not include intense

curiosity, bursts of creativity, affect and emotion? And does it make sense to underscore the

exceptional status of humans at a time when our entanglement with, and dependence upon,

countless nonhuman actors has never been more evident? As Bruno remarks in his recent Tanner

lectures, the humanities and sciences need to find common ground, to create new alliances in the

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face of shared threats to academic institutions. What they share, he suggests is a puzzlement

about phenomena; while scientists start with the unfamiliar, humanists render things unfamiliar.

In both cases, the effect is to turn self-evident substances into complex constellations of actors.

Whether we work in libraries or laboratories, we are all, fundamentally, hair-splitters,

passionately concerned about distinctions invisible to others. And here Bruno gives us our

rallying call: “hair splitters of all disciplines unite!”

I have sketched out an account of the humanities that does not pivot on either the

presumed supremacy of the human or the primary value of critique. The humanities, I have

suggested, are about practices of curating as well as criticism, about preserving, conserving, and

caring for. Because they are conveyed and communicated to intellectual strangers, we should

expect, and even welcome, translation, mistranslation, and transformation. And rather than

embracing a perpetual ethos of deconstructing or dismantling–a persisting tendency in my own

field of literary studies—we might think more about making, building, and connecting. Perhaps

retooling our frameworksalong these lines might help us make a stronger and more eloquent case

for why the humanities matter.

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