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Do the Humanities Have To Be Useful?

Edited by

G. Peter Lepage the Harold Tanner Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

Carolyn (Biddy) Martin University Provost and Professor of Women’s Studies and German Studies

Mohsen Mostafavi Dean, College of Architecture, Art and Planning and Arthur L. and Isabel B. Wiesenberger

Professor in Architecture

Cornell University

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What Is Essential to the Humanities?

Dominick LaCapra

Are the humanities useful? What is essential to them? Is their usefulness what defi nes what they essentially are or should be?

At least in the general public, the question of usefulness would in all probability seldom arise with respect to the natural or even the social sciences. The question might rather be how one could avert certain dangerous uses or abuses of them (the making of so-called weapons of mass destruction or the development of techniques of total surveillance and control). That the question of usefulness is so readily and prevalently posed about the humanities might be interpreted as symptomatic of a defensive posture as well as of a feeling that the humanities are essentially of no real use, whether positive or negative. The response to this orientation seems relatively obvious: the humanities may not essentially be of short-term use or deliver immediate, technological pay-offs (although literature or philosophy majors may, of course, fi nd jobs in communications or go to law school). The “use” of the humanities is more indirect and long-term. As is often said, they contribute to the quality of life, and the fact that people in retirement return to the study of humanistic subjects is

testimony simultaneously to their centrality and to their marginality in our culture. I would in any case suggest that their pursuit is more than a sign of their function as status symbols or “cultural capital.” It is also an indication of their valorization as components of worthwhile experience and a life that is more than one-dimensional. Indeed the nature and role of the humanities at their best go beyond use-value (and its complement in a utilitarian, pragmatic, capitalistic frame of reference: exchange as well as money-making value). The humanities point in the direction of generosity and gift-giving. The latter provide one important meaning of “liberal” in the term “liberal arts,” and the humanities are liberal arts par excellence. And while they go beyond narrowly conceived use-value or practicality, they are not entirely useless, for they create bonds, sometimes very durable bonds, and they are both good to think with and good to live with.

A spirit of liberality, generosity, and gift-giving can be proposed as essential to the humanities — essential not in some dogmatic or exclusive sense (it may in fact also characterize signifi cant aspects of work in the sciences) but in a sense that stipulates what is important and relatively distinctive but continually open to debate and contestation. For the latter qualities may also be seen as essential to humanistic understanding and exchange, and argument or even polemic can be undertaken in a liberal, generous spirit. Indeed one might contend that an intelligent, informed, spirited critique is a better gift than a conventional, vapid encomium. Moreover, inquiry into a problem cannot be a zero-sum game or competition since the recurrently debatable question is the nature and relative value of contributions to problems that

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do not lend themselves to a defi nitive solution or fi rst-time discovery. Basic problems in the humanities are repeated (and repeatedly thought about) with variations over time, and temporality itself from a humanistic perspective is this very process of repetition with variation or change, occasionally abrupt, decisive, or even traumatic change. (However it is construed or misconstrued, “modernity” is often seen as marking one such traumatic break or “shock” experience.)

Here a crucial distinction is that between problems and puzzles. A puzzle (or puzzle-like “problem”) may be solved, and its solution has an immediate use-value (how does one build a more effi cient engine or devise a faster way of accessing the Internet?). Puzzles have a place in all studies, including the humanities (for example, the dating of a document, the attribution of a text, or the identifi cation of a reference or allusion). As important, even more important, are problems into which one inquires and which one may elucidate or even deepen but not solve. If asked to propose a single sentence to designate what is essential to the humanities, I would offer the following: the study of cross-disciplinary problems that are not narrowly utilitarian but instead allow one to intervene in, or contribute to, an open, questioning, and self- questioning process of inquiry as well as implicate the self in relation to those processes and to the past itself in ways that may enable possible, and possibly more desirable, futures. How should one understand the terms of this “defi nition” of what is essential as well as liberally empowering in the humanities?

Cross-disciplinary is not simply interdisciplinary in that it does not merely combine existing disciplines to investigate

What Is Essential to the Humanities?

and provide better answers to existing questions. It inquires into problems that themselves cut across existing disciplines, may be treated with different emphases or infl ections in them, and perhaps even suggest the need for newer disciplines, subdisciplines, or institutional units such as programs and departments. What are some cross-displinary problems that may be elucidated but not solved as if they were puzzles? Without pretending to be all-inclusive and exhaustive, one might mention violence, victimization, surviving, mourning, trauma, and oppression but also gift-giving, trust, compassion, responsibility, agency, community- and institution-building, laughter, and joy, as well as the sacred and sacrifi ce. Sacrifi ce is particularly knotty from an ethical and political perspective since it typically confl ates oblation (or gift-giving) and victimization, with the victim as the gift to a higher being or even as an offering when there is no belief in a determinate higher being or personalized deity. And sacrifi ce may be displaced into secular contexts in often obscure and disavowed ways, appearing in the form of a cult of violence or a belief that through violence (even victimization) one may regenerate or redeem the self or the group.

How could one possibly solve such problems and processes as trauma, victimization, sacralization, sacrifi ce, trusting, assuming or ascribing responsibility, and gift-giving? One can at best work on and through them in a manner that more or less “usefully” expands the possibility of accentuating whatever may be judged to be desirable in them and opposing, diminishing, or even eliminating what is judged to be undesirable. Hence, with respect to sacrifi ce, the challenge (should one call it humanistic or posthumanistic since it

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concerns not only humans but also other animals?) is to valorize the gift while disengaging it from, and counteracting, victimization.

A recent cross-disciplinary problem that has risen to prominence, notably in its relation to extreme events (such as rape, abuse, and genocide), is trauma, and trauma theory or trauma studies not only crosses disciplinary boundaries within the humanities but even involves the sciences and social sciences (neurophysiology, social psychology, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, narrative medicine). One might argue that, like trauma, the most essential problems in the humanities are precisely those that are not “owned” by any given humanistic discipline but often studied, at times with unsettling or uncanny effects, in various disciplines, including disciplines not generally seen as humanistic. They are also the problems that are not confi ned to the academy but have a bearing on the public sphere and the larger society.

A similar point might be made about specifi c texts, art works, artifacts, and, more recently, media that are studied in the humanities. What discipline “owns” the works of Sophocles, Dante, Freud, Virginia Woolf, Fellini, or Picasso? One or another may be studied more in one discipline than in another. But would a scholar in art history or visual studies be justifi ed in prohibiting a discussion of Picasso in literature or history? What is distinctive about basic humanistic works or texts is the way their signifi cance exceeds any given discipline. And they may be appreciated, read, or studied outside the academy. Indeed the degree to which they enter the public sphere is an index of general culture, including

What Is Essential to the Humanities?

the richness and diversity of a culture that combines such interests with prevalent forms of popular and media culture. Popular media themselves are enlivened, enhanced, and at times critically challenged by a sustained relation to so- called high or elite culture — and vice versa. Just as Walter Benjamin would not be Walter Benjamin without both an intimate knowledge of traditional high culture and arresting insights into popular culture, so Monty Python or the Beatles would not be what they are without a comparable interaction between the high and low or elite and popular. (No song is more “Heideggerian,” indeed a tribute to Gelassenheit, than “Let It Be”!) Both elite and popular culture tend to become involuted, mannered, and even mindless to the extent their range of reference and concern remains insular. And a prominent feature of high cultures not only in modernity or postmodernity but across the ages has been (with rare exceptions) their sustained interaction with popular cultures, including the popular carnivalesque culture of laughter. The diffi culty in this respect is not the existence of “canons.” The latter exist even in popular culture. The unfortunate possibility is insularity as well as the process of canonization when a canon is used for exclusionary and discriminatory social and political purposes.

A criterion of a humanistic approach is a certain relation to its past, including canons as institutions which help constitute that past in changing ways. A science may rest on the belief that whatever is essential to it that comes from the past has been integrated into the present state of the art. Hence a physicist qua physicist may not experience a professional need to read Newton or Einstein, or a biologist to read Darwin.

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These fi gures are studied in intellectual history or perhaps in science studies, which straddles (like much of history) the social sciences and the humanities. One might well argue that a cultured biologist should in fact read Darwin. But such a claim would relate to a broader, quasihumanistic or “liberal” understanding of what a cultured biologist as a scholar and an intellectual should be. (By the same token, a truly cultured humanist should have at least basic literacy in the sciences and social sciences.) But, without ever having read Einstein or Darwin, a scientist could well win the Nobel Prize for a contribution based on relativity or evolutionary theory. Such a state of affairs would be unacceptable, or at least raise eyebrows, only if natural sciences were to be defi ned in broader sociocultural and intellectual terms that would make certain “externalities” more internal to the defi nition of the discipline. These internalized externalities might, of course, also include the role of critical responses to forms of experimentation (notably on other animals) and to possible “uses” of discoveries.

The humanistic relation to the past assumes it is still part of the present with implications for the future. Aspects of the past, including its canonical texts or artifacts, may well be criticized but must also be known and play a key role in the present state of inquiry. For in the humanities the very way the past and its artifacts are read, reread, and responsively understood is constitutive of learning processes and renewal in the present. Moreover, the relation to the past, its processes, and its artifacts is self-implicating. The observer is implicated in the object of observation in a way that cannot be confi ned to one, easily bracketed dimension of research

What Is Essential to the Humanities?

(for example, with respect to the observation of very small particles). Self-implication extends throughout the entire range of signifi cant inquiry (and in the humanities the small, seemingly insignifi cant, easily bracketed detail may be the site of displacement of the most valorized, affectively charged problems). In psychoanalysis, this relation to the other is termed transference. And once it is distinguished from its more circumscribed Oedipal and familial context, transference implies that the observer or inquirer tends to displace and repeat on a basic level processes active in the other or object of research that s/he studies. Hence, for example, the student of the Holocaust confronts the transferential problem even on the elementary level of naming or terminology, for especially in emotionally charged, value-laden areas of study, there are no neutral or innocent terms. If one uses “Holocaust,” one may stir the sediment of sacrifi cialism, for etymologically the term refers to a burnt offering. If one resorts to “fi nal solution,” one repeats Nazi terminology, and the use of scare quotes is a necessary precaution that may always be ignored or misread. “Shoah” bears witness to the role of the media in modern culture, for its use was not widespread before the appearance of Claude Lanzmann’s fi lm in the mid-1980s, and the term may have an exoticizing potential for those who do not know Hebrew. Even Nazi genocide (perhaps the most neutral of terms) still seems to grant a proprietary hold over the genocide to the Nazis and, however unintentionally or remotely, realize their desire to totally dispose of Jews (including the question of how Jews would be remembered). The point here is not to foster nominalism or engender terminological disarray but

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to indicate the necessity of careful qualifi cation and the need to be sensitive to one’s “transferential” implication in processes.

The broader need is to work through a relation to the past rather than blindly and even compulsively repeat its processes, at times with fatalistic, negative results. Such a caveat indicates the limitations of full objectifi cation of the other, whereby self-implication (or transference) is disavowed or denied but typically acted out in uncontrolled, unacknowledged fashion. But it also signals the crucial importance of careful, indeed meticulous, research and close reading that may check inevitable projective and repetitive tendencies that are especially insistent to the extent a problem is still alive and pressing. The problems I have signaled in relation to the Holocaust are prevalent in history, especially in the case of extreme, traumatizing events such as genocides, and pose particularly insistent challenges not only to the humanities but to all related forms of research and understanding.

A fi nal point about humanism and the humanities is on the cusp between critical theory and generosity or gift-giving as well as on the threshold between humanistic and other forms of understanding, including the scientifi c and social- scientifi c. And the gift in question cannot be seen as going in a one-directional sense from the human to the other. It depends on the differences within the human, especially including those brought about by being a human animal — from a certain perspective, a kind of hybrid or compromise formation. Indeed the horizon of humanism may well be posthumanistic in a specifi c sense. Along with such crucial

What Is Essential to the Humanities?

questions as race, class, sexuality, and gender (all of which have been intimately bound up with issues of victimization and its relation to survivorship and agency), one should also stress the role of species, which may well be the next major concern in a critical and self-questioning humanistic approach. The concern for species gives a needed twist to the sometimes parochial, self-centered interest in the global and transnational, and it is intimately bound up with broad ecological issues. Indeed the humanities have traditionally had their covert scapegoat that global studies may itself repeat, even when the values asserted are purportedly universalistic or at least worldwide. The other-than-human animal has typically been the constitutive other of humanism and the humanities, and there has been a recurrently displaced, compulsively repeated quest to fi nd the essential criterion (or theologian’s and philosopher’s stone) that decisively separates the human from other animals, in the process justifying virtually any “use” of other animals by humans. This elusive criterion, which often functions as a disavowal of the animal in the human, has taken many forms (creation in the image and likeness of God, soul, spirit, reason, freedom, language, and so forth — but not the capacity to suffer, be traumatized, be victimized, be trusting, or be joyful). What has become increasingly obvious is that the criterion can never be established with the decisiveness and, more essentially, with the invidious and exploitative consequences, with which it has been overtly or covertly postulated. And the genuine problem may lie not simply in the elusiveness of the object of the quest but in the misguided nature of undertaking the quest itself and the kinds of invidious, typically self-congratulatory

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investments to which it attests. This realization, which cannot be confi ned within the anthropocentric realm of animal “rights,” should bring about an essential shift in the self- understanding of the humanities (or posthumanities) whose nature and implications are in the process of emerging. And it reopens the question of the relation between humanistic, scientifi c, and social-scientifi c disciplines. It is clearly a basis on which the humanities will have to be extensively rethought and in whose generous terms its other crucial concerns will have to be reconfi gured, in certain ways from the ground up. In a word, what is essential to the humanities may now require a posthumanistic orientation that both counters the hypocrisy of a human dignity at least implicitly based on a scapegoat mechanism and generously extends the fi eld of concern to other-than-human animals and to the differences within the human as well.

What Is Essential to the Humanities?

Dominick LaCapra is professor of history and the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies and was the director of the Society for the Humanities. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University (1961) and master’s (1963) and PhD (1970) degrees from Harvard University. His books include Writing History, Writing Trauma (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Cornell University Press, 2004) and History and Reading: Tocqueville, Foucault, French Studies (University of Toronto Press, 2000). He received the Award for Aesthetic Theory from the Dactyl Foundation and an Institutional Grant from the Mellon Foundation for program enhancement at the Society for the Humanities, both in 2001.

G. Peter Lepage is the Harold Tanner Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and professor of physics. He holds a bachelor’s degree from McGill University and master’s (1975) and PhD (1978) degrees from Stanford University. A theoretical particle physicist whose recent research has focused on numerical simulations of quantum fi eld theories, Lepage joined the Cornell faculty in 1980 and has spent his entire professorial career as a physicist. He has had visiting appointments at the Institute for Nuclear Theory, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the Institute for Theoretical Physics, the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996–1997 and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in 1990.

Rose Ellen Lessy is a graduate student in the Department of English.