Peter Brooks
Over the past few years, I have taught a seminar for students and faculty under the title “The Ethics of Reading and the Cultures of Professionalism.” The seminar asked these questions: What leverage does reading of the attentive sort practiced in the humanities give one on life? Does such reading represent or produce an ethics? Should such an ethics of reading inhabit professional training and the public sphere as well? These questions were posed for me with brutal force after reading the “Torture Memos” released by the U.S. Department of Justice, in the years following their composition in 2002.1 These documents presented arguments that justified the use of torture by the most twisted, ingenious, perverse, and unethical interpretation of legal texts. Many others have taken apart these memoranda from the Office of Legal Counsel—supposed to provide the highest standard of legal analysis—so I will not detail here how they interpret the meaning and usage of words and phrases in ways that are arbitrary and authoritarian rather than probative. No one trained in the rigorous analysis of poetry, I said to myself, could possibly engage in such bad-faith interpretation without professional conscience intervening to say: this is not right. That was the position that I tried to stake out in the seminar, all the while knowing that it could not be taken as an article of faith, that it needed exploration and analysis if not proof. That seminar (to which I brought a number of distinguished visitors) led to and called for the “The Humanities in the Public Sphere” symposium, which furnished the material for this book.
The issue of the Torture Memos and my classroom experience in interpreting legal texts led me to the claim that the humanities can, and at their best do, represent a commitment to ethical reading. This commitment, and the training and discipline of close reading that underlies it, represents something that we as teachers of the humanities need to bring to other fields, especially those that undertake the training of professional readers such as lawyers, whose work includes interpretation.
Teaching the humanities appears to many to be a disempowered profession with reduced status within American culture. The widespread perception of a crisis of the humanities is the most acute manifestation of a crisis of American higher education in general. So we have been told by countless books that have been rolling out since the 1980s, from Profscam and Tenured Radicals to Academically Adrift and Higher Education?2 In 2011, the New York Review of Books entitled an article by my colleague Anthony Grafton “Our Flunking Universities.”3 The very value of a university education, for so many decades a central article of American faith, now has been put into doubt. The whole enterprise, we are told, may be a waste of time, money, and national commitment. There is even a philanthropic organization—the Thiel Foundation—that offers prizes of $100,000 to induce smart kids to drop out of college and become entrepreneurs on their own, on the theory that college impedes rather than enhances the development of creative ideas. In this “crisis,” the humanities are made to appear a kind of zombie wandering in a world that should be producing technocrats and entrepreneurs.
But the crisis may truly lie elsewhere, in the marginalization of humanistic thought and analysis. The ability to read critically the messages that society, politics, and culture bombard us with is, more than ever, needed training in a society in which the manipulation of minds and hearts is increasingly what running the world is all about. We who practice the interpretive humanities need to be less modest, and to stake a claim to the public importance of our task. Shelley was not entirely wrong to insist that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind: Cultural change carries everything in its wake. The close reading practiced in the humanities ought to be an export commodity to other fields, and it should take its place in public life.
My own field is literary study, and what I have said so far sounds as if I were interested only in literary analysis and interpretation. In fact, I would argue that the close, intense, disciplined reading crucial to literary study underlies the humanities as a whole: The “interpretive turn” of philosophy in our time has had its cognates across the range of humanistic disciplines. Very often, humanistic interpretation starts from a specific act of reading—of a document difficult to decipher, a word needing to be glossed, a fragment of an artifact needing reconstruction, a visual detail suggestive of iconographic meaning, an idea begging for context—and moves from there to larger interpretive structures and theories. Insofar as the humanities are an interpretive enterprise—as they mostly are, when not engaged in simpler forms of data gathering—they cannot do without reading of a careful, analytic, self-conscious kind.
I began by evoking the Torture Memos because in that case the disastrous results of not reading—of merely pretending to read while in fact inserting one’s own prejudices and preferred outcomes between the reader and the text—are so clear and so horrible. To misread the Convention Against Torture and Cruel and Inhuman Treatment, as incorporated in the U.S. Legal Code, shows in a consequential way what bad-faith interpretation can produce. Though the consequences of other sloppy, misguided, pernicious interpretations may not be so spectacularly awful, they can skew everything that follows in their wake. The New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer claimed that the Bush administration began its distortion of reality with the distortion of language.4 That seems to me profoundly true, not only in that specific case but in contemporary culture in general.
This should not be construed as a call for single meanings of complex texts, a flight from ambiguity and uncertainty. On the contrary, reading as a self-conscious practice—“reading in slow motion,” as it has been called—tends to suggest the inadequacies of the simple and the certain. I do not believe, either, that reading good books necessarily makes one a good person. There are plenty of examples from our history to give the lie to that idea: People can spend the day killing Jews and go home to read Goethe in the evening. What I want to defend is not a product but a process and a practice. The practice of reading itself, pursued with care and attention to language, its contexts, implications, uncertainties, can itself be an ethical act. To make sure that our interpretation can be defended in the context of the text (and its contexts) means that—unlike the authors of the Torture Memos—we must constantly submit what we want the text to mean to the constraints of the lexicon, the historical horizon, and the text as a whole. This submission to culture as something beyond one’s individuality is in itself a discipline. It is a version of what T. S. Eliot meant when he claimed that all great art is impersonal.
I have not quite finished with the question of reading as a practice, in the classroom and elsewhere; I will say more about it later. But I want to come to the other voices in this volume. My thoughts about the ethics of reading led me to the idea of a symposium on the subject and to the gathering of this exceptional group of people. My premises and speculations needed testing by a range of thinkers whose work crosses from the practice of reading to large ethical and social concerns. I sent those I invited to participate instructions stating my goals for the meeting, exhorting them to write focused, pointed comments on the topics raised. This was not to be a meeting where professors came to read scholarly papers, but an exchange of views, a conversation. Each talk was to be no more than fifteen minutes, and for each of the three sessions there would be two speakers and two or three respondents, then general discussion with the audience. So the oral exchange (largely included here) was really just as important as the written statements.
To start the symposium, I thought we should have a keynote talk of somewhat greater length by someone whose work was recognized by all as crossing in crucial ways from the practices of reading into public life. Hence, Judith Butler presented (to a predictably overflow crowd) her lecture “Ordinary, Incredulous,” which responds to the occasion by addressing a critical issue in our understanding of and wish to defend the humanities: How do we defend our practices without using the very language and the very framework of values of those who wish to see knowledge in purely instrumental terms? The conception of knowledge as essentially instrumental, as measured by its worldly use value, dominates talk about education worldwide at present. Even if to us—the kind of people who talked and listened at the symposium—the value of the humanities is obvious and in no need of defense, we imperil our commitments if we reply to our detractors that we will not bother to answer their critiques, if we take any defense of the use of the humanities off the table. Yet when we do undertake that defense, we can quickly be caught up in the very language of instrumentality that has contested our worth. One cannot argue the intrinsic worth of the humanities to those who simply cannot recognize it. But, asks Butler, “If the humanities are to make a difference in public life, does that mean we have to say that they are instrumental to some other social good? Is instrumentality the only way we have of thinking about what it means to make a difference?”
Here we are at a crux that anyone in the academy recognizes as real and present. Faculty in the United Kingdom, subject for some years now to the “Research Assessment Exercise,” have been forced to demonstrate the “impact” of their work, the social outcomes that can be expected from it. In the United States, a movement well-funded by various foundations and think tanks urges that universities test the “outcomes” of the education they provide and charge tuition for, that they measure the “value added” by a college education. A profitable testing industry has developed, touting such metrics as the College Learning Assessment, which aims to offer grounds for comparison of the effectiveness of various programs and institutions. I will come back to these tests, which appear to define knowledge “outcomes” as largely instrumental, as problem solving. They do not begin to test the kinds of understanding taught in the humanities. To use a grandiose and unfashionable but perhaps apt word, they do not test wisdom.
As Butler writes further, “our very capacity for critically re-evaluating is what cannot be measured by the metrics by which the humanities are increasingly judged.” The query she received in response to a grant proposal—“what is the deliverable of your proposal?”—leads Butler into a dazzling riff on the notion of “the deliverable,” as precisely the instrumentalization of knowledge into a package that can arrive on someone’s doorstep. By the end of her discussion, she has reposed the question in stark terms: “We find ourselves housed and displaced within language with metrics of value that not only cannot gauge well what we do, but have so monopolized the field of value that they threaten to consign what we do to oblivion.” Resistance to oblivion means re-posing the question of values, questioning the obvious, and refusing instrumental metrics while keeping in play a critical relation to the kinds of contemporary deployments of language that Butler holds up to examination.
I respond to Butler’s analysis with something like awe at her dialectical abilities and her capacity to draw an audience into a mode of thinking that precisely demonstrates the kind of resistance that must be exercised. She offers a sinuous and persuasive argument that must be followed through the detail of its movement: It is not designed to produce a packaged “deliverable” but rather a form of critical thinking. As an initiation into the kind of attention our topic needs, Butler’s essay is exemplary.
The symposium continued with three sessions followed by a final roundtable. The first session addressed the underlying assumption on which I had been working—though also questioning—in my seminar: “Is There an Ethics of Reading?” What do we learn when we read in self-conscious awareness of the interpretive process? The interpreter, etymologically and still today, is a go-between, a kind of ambassador of meanings who brings an effort at understanding from one region to another. Why, we may well want to ask, is interpretation necessary? Why does understanding of the written necessarily activate the go-between role of the interpreter? Why can’t meanings simply be read off? What does the need to interpret teach us about language itself, about its role in regulating and defining the human? Elaine Scarry, a literary scholar of wide reach, and Charles Larmore, a philosopher, address these issues in very different ways, yet both, I think, are directly on target. Scarry directs our attention to the long tradition of poetry that is deliberative and argumentative, that stages a dispute or dialogue of two voices. By way of this formal structure of poetry, she extends claims about reading’s capacity to inculcate empathy—as in Lynn Hunt’s contention that human rights discourse really derives from the eighteenth-century novel.5 This in turn moves to Scarry’s concern with beauty as creating a responsive capacity within us. Her essay begins with the question of whether reading diminishes the injuries of the world, but by the time she has worked through her argument the answer must clearly be yes—not in any simple sense (not that reading makes us better people), but rather in the capacity of reading (perhaps only reading) to nourish that which makes us human.
Charles Larmore directs us to a problem identified by Plato in his Phaedrus: that texts “roam about everywhere” and are subject to readings and misreadings by anyone, without the author at hand to offer correction. This perception leads Larmore to a meditation on the ways in which reading might be said to implicate ethical relations. If a text cannot be protected from misreadings—and if in any case we would not necessarily accept the author’s own reading of the text as definitive—what does this say about the careful relation that a reader ought to establish with a text? In closing, Larmore cites Karl Kraus on the respect for language, as a “mental discipline that enjoins the highest measure of responsibility toward the sole thing that can be wronged with impunity, namely language, and that serves like no other to teach respect for every other kind of human good.” That sense of “responsibility” toward language, which of course includes respect for how it works in any given utterance addressed to us, very directly goes to the issues of an ethics of reading that most concern me.
Larmore’s insistence that the ethical relation of reading need stand in relation to an author, a person, and not simply to a text brings a measure of dissent from the respondents Kwame Anthony Appiah, philosopher, and Derek Attridge, literary scholar, who offer reinterpretations of who or what it is that we may feel responsible to in the act of reading. Jonathan Culler, a literary theorist, on the other hand, dismisses the notion of an ethics of reading as an attempt by literary critics to rescue their work from the charge of nihilism or futility. Texts “roaming about everywhere” may be subject to all sorts of uses. I find my own sympathies falling in line with Attridge’s careful modifications of Larmore’s thesis, which lead him to a restatement that emphasizes that writing a text is an act in which one makes oneself “vulnerable” to others—and that our treatment of the vulnerable is a test of our ethical character. This, for Attridge, touches on the ethical thinking of Emmanuel Levinas, based on our recognition of and responsibility for the other. If texts represent an attempt—fragile, vulnerable—by someone else to communicate with us, we might conceive our responsibility to be one of respectful attention to the communication. To me, this does not necessarily entail evocation of the person or persons who created the text—who are largely inaccessible as persons—but to the act of attempted communication itself.
My original title for the seminar, “The Ethics of Reading and the Cultures of Professionalism,” indicated my concern that the kinds of reading practiced in the humanities at their best might need to be more strongly represented in professional education if we are seeking to prevent the types of readings found in the Torture Memos. So in our second session we turned to “The Ethics of Reading and the Professions.” Professional education may be the most characteristic and powerful product of the modern American university. Has the drive to professionalization—as found, for instance, in the emergence of modern American law and business schools—suppressed attention to an ethics of reading? Do humanistic traditions of reading need to be better represented in professional schools? Would a more rhetorically aware pedagogy of reading provide a useful corrective to largely pragmatic assumptions about language? Once upon a time, the high-ranking British civil servant tended to have been recruited from the study of classical “greats” at Oxford or Cambridge. This model never quite obtained in the United States, and it seems quaint today. But it may be important to ask whether there are ways to create a new and forceful public relevance of the kind of reading, interpretation, and reflection that constitute the humanities at their best.
Our speakers on this subject were Patricia Williams of Columbia Law School—who is also a columnist for The Nation as well as someone who has intervened decisively in American political discourse, especially on issues of race—and Ralph Hexter, trained as a classicist, who is currently the provost and vice chancellor at the University of California–Davis. In her paper, Williams summons every reader to consider his or her captioning of the world, and she herself performs a cultural reading of responses, including captions and fictions, to extreme events. Hexter then situates reading within a corporate and collective context where interpretive outcomes and their ethical effects matter very much in people’s lives. In this context, he forcefully proposes that “as readers—that is, as interpreters—we should skew deontological.… That is to say, we should be ethical in our process rather than use ends to justify unethical means.” In response, Michael Roth, the President of Wesleyan University, offers a provocation: The turn to an ethics of reading may in his view mark an avoidance maneuver, a flight from playful and violent reading, which he associates with the heyday of deconstruction. The ethical does not, in my view, exclude playfulness—one could reach back to Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind to argue that play lies at the heart of any aesthetic reading—but I must register a deep disagreement on violence, which does not seem to me a serious option. We came back to these questions at the end of the day.
Richard Sennett, a sociologist, urbanist, and cultural critic, in turn evokes the potentially tragic circumstance in which art, playfulness, self-expression, and reading (in my sense) might only find support and a place for their exercise in a few elite institutions. William Germano, sometime editor at Routledge and Columbia and currently the Dean of Humanities at Cooper Union, directs us to the relation of writers and readers as essentially ethical: “Write as if you mean it, and write as if what you write can change the reader. Because it will.” A summons to which I think most of the participants would assent.
In our third session, we took on the problematic and currently much-debated relation of the humanities to human rights. Humanists do not necessarily teach the humanitarian. I think it only promotes confusion to claim that studying the humanities makes one more humane—there are plenty of examples from throughout history to the contrary. Though we surely want to promote the reading of good books, we should beware of assuming they have beneficial results. And great books, from Job and Oedipus the King to Moby-Dick and The Brothers Karamazov have in fact always given a large place to dissent from conventional virtue and the pretty picture of human life. The humanities as we know them largely descend from Renaissance humanism’s concern to restore ancient texts and to learn to read them. The enterprise of the literae humaniores is human in that it deals with human reflections on the human condition. It is not necessarily on the side of what we would consider right thinking about human rights.
To what extent can humanistic learning provide the basis for reflection on human rights? Is the form of imaginative sympathy promoted by literature and its attentive reading indeed foundational for human rights discourse? I mentioned earlier the argument advanced by historian Lynn Hunt in her book Inventing Human Rights that the concept of human rights really derives from eighteenth-century literature, primarily from the novel—and most of all the epistolary novels of Samuel Richardson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau—that teach us to put ourselves imaginatively in the place of others. That, too, was the argument of Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. What the eighteenth century called “sympathy” or “pity,” and we tend to call “empathy,” derives from this capacity to see and feel the world from another’s point of view. Our noticing of violations of human dignity has been decisively promoted by fiction, from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. Yet may there not be limits to an understanding of rights based on fictional identifications? Rousseau himself warns us of the dangers inherent in the capacity to simulate emotions: The simulation itself can satisfy, and unsettle our moral compass.
Speaking to these questions were Jonathan Lear, philosopher and psychoanalyst, and Paul Kahn, a legal scholar whose work has ranged from analyses of Marbury v. Madison to King Lear. Jonathan Lear gives an arresting account of how the words of the last great chief of the Crow Indians provoked a reaction in him—some fifteen years after hearing them—that led to his engagement with the Crow in a joint philosophical and psychoanalytic interpretive effort to come to terms with a grievous loss of cultural identity. Lear’s account here represents an exemplary connection of interpretive skill and ethical commitment—putting one’s life into the consequences of one’s interpretive acts. Lear draws clearly the pertinence of his argument to our topic: The measuring tools of the social scientists (the Crow have been much studied by them) are inadequate to a full understanding of cultural devastation and the loss of a belief system. Only the interpretive reading of the humanities can begin to foster this understanding. When Lear calls for a “poetic” response to the harms inflicted on Crow culture by the dominant American culture, he understands poetry to mean words that can awake us from complacency and lethargy, to make us see the world anew.
Paul Kahn offers a skeptical view of human rights law as a universal consensus grounded in sympathy for the pain of others and agreement to prevent it. The political imagination values not only sympathy but sacrifice, and that promotes violence. To Kahn, the humanities can provide something that the law and social science cannot: the act of interpretation as itself an act of creation. He makes the important point that “the truth of an interpretation is not separate from the act of interpretation.” That is, the making of an interpretation—which can only be answered by another interpretation, in a potentially endless conversation—needs to be judged not only on its product but on how it is carried out. A belief in human dignity, according to Kahn, needs to be based not in sympathy for the suffering of others but in the shared mystery of human creativity.
Responses came from Kim Lane Scheppele, the director of Princeton’s Law and Public Affairs Program, and Didier Fassin, professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, whose work has led him from Doctors Without Borders to anthropology and the politics of humanitarian intervention. Scheppele, starting from Kahn’s defense of human creativity, considers the meaning of self-authorship as a claim to the dignity of individuals. Here, she calls on her knowledge of Russia and Eastern Europe, and the practices of resistance to totalitarianism through irony, quotation, and musical dissonance—tactics or techniques that Sergei Oushakine calls “mimetic resistance.” Within a space that the state wishes to close and police, creativity is an interpretation and an act of defiance. Didier Fassin, from his engagement with humanitarian intervention efforts and with the issues of human rights, offers both a defense and a critique of the humanities, and a proposal for creative dialogue between social sciences and humanistic thinking. If the “imaginary of human rights and humanitarianism is saturated with the generous ambition of the good one can do for others by defending and assisting them,” this needs to be subject to critical thinking, for it can produce harm as well as good. The human rights claim can trump and obscure political claims to basic rights. That Fassin ends by citing Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the emissary of a colonialist “progress,” beautifully turns the problem, for Kurtz is precisely the humanitarian imagination gone mad.
We reserved time for discussion with all the panelists—and the audience—at the end of each session and for a roundtable at the end of the day. In these discussions, we came back often to what was always the central question of the symposium: Can we claim that there is an ethics in the humanities, derivable from the kind of work done in the humanities? Jonathan Culler and Michael Roth had delivered especially negative judgments on this issue, and I agree with them that the ethics that may be derivable from the humanities is no simple matter. Learning “the best that has been thought and said in the world,” to quote Matthew Arnold’s defense of culture, does not create an ethics, though it might be a necessary precondition for intelligent ethical thinking. But as I have already suggested, I think the issue needs to be reframed, not as one concerning the outcome of reading but rather the very practice of reading. As Paul Kahn observed in his remarks, the truth of interpretation in the humanities cannot be separated from the act of interpretation.
It is my own view that the teacher of literature (and this can be true as well for the teacher of philosophy or art history or music, for instance) has the strange experience of not speaking quite with or in his or her own voice. In the classroom, we let other voices, from the past for instance, speak through us. As interpreters, we are mouthpieces of others—we are ventriloquists of the ideas and words of others. This experience of otherness—perhaps an experience akin to what Keats called “negative capability,” the capacity of the poet to inhabit other personalities and perspectives—seems to me characteristic of reading and interpretation in the humanities, and it leads to a certain ethics: a self-dispossession in favor of the text, another voice in the room. That text, of course, can also be a painting or a potsherd or a musical phrase, and the object of interpretation shares the stage with the interpreter. At its best, such an attitude allows the voice of the other to develop its full force, its full articulation, without censoring it—in a kind of dualism of feeling. When class begins, the text or the artifact may appear absent or mute; it is our job to try to give it voice: not our voice but one we create from our understanding of it so that students can enter into dialogue with it. We, as teachers, are speaking in dialogue with another voice, which we try to make present in the classroom with full justice to its claims in order that we may make the dialogue just.
The discipline of close reading thus lies in this attempted fidelity to another voice or presence, perhaps more accurately the animation of this voice or presence through our own speech acts. I come close here to Larmore’s claim that the reader must engage an “author,” but I think it is not so much a real as a projected or imputed author, something like one of Henry James’s ghosts. To insist that the reader encounter an author is to discount too much the mediating practices of textuality, of convention and genre. We re-create, to the best of our investigative, analytic, and imaginative ability, that putative author to whom we impute intentions of meaning. Reading in this sense is very much the discipline of a practice—not a nugget of content or a lesson taken from what is read, but what we discover in the reading process itself, in the disciplined effort to come to terms with what that text means.
When we talk of “sympathy” and “empathy” as central to the experience of studying the textual humanities—very often the basis of the claim that the understanding of human rights originates in the understanding of other subjectivities provided by the novel, for instance—this need not be an easy sentimentalism. I don’t think we want to make the claim that reading Clarissa or Madame Bovary will make one behave more ethically: It might, but that claim is essentially sentimental, and sentiments are easily perverted. Indeed, the Marquis de Sade wrote his own versions of the eighteenth-century sentimental novel, gleefully twisting their educative claims. But rejecting a sentimentalist claim does not mean we cannot make a perhaps more modest but more precise claim: that the ethics of the humanities lie very much in its practices of reading, that its discipline is the discipline of close, attentive, faithful interpretive acts of reading. Getting that right can itself be an ethical act.
My understanding of what we do in the humanities brings me full circle to where we began, in Judith Butler’s urgent question about how we defend the humanities and their importance in our public life without using the very language and the very framework of values that demand that we see knowledge in purely instrumental terms. This issue has gained new immediacy in the demands, registered in the United Kingdom as well as the United States, that we humanists show the deliverables of what we think and write, that we measure the impact of our research. This extends to our teaching as well. Ever since the publication of the Spellings Report (Margaret Spellings was George W. Bush’s Secretary of Education) in 2006, there has been an increasing demand for a metrics to assess how much students are learning during their college education and whether college represents a cost-effective investment by parents and state agencies.6 The problem, avers the Spellings Report, is that “parents and students have no solid evidence, comparable across institutions, of how much students learn in colleges or whether they learn more at one college than another.”7 Note the language of “how much.” The solution? “Student achievement, which is inextricably connected to institutional success, must be measured by institutions on a ‘value-added’ basis that takes into account students’ academic baseline when assessing their results. This information should be made available to students, and reported publicly in aggregate form to provide consumers and policymakers an accessible, understandable way to measure the relative effectiveness of different colleges and universities.”8 The measure of “relative effectiveness” as “value added” may remind us of the value-added tax long familiar to Europeans, which estimates the price added to a commodity on its way to market outlets.
The threat to the autonomy of universities and to academic freedom in such proposals is clear: It is a replication of No Child Left Behind on the university level, and if implemented it would have the similar result of teaching to a standard metric—indeed, teaching to tests invented to gauge that metric. I have looked at examples of the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), a test recommended in the Spellings Report; the CLA is claimed to be designed to test core outcomes espoused by all of higher education—critical thinking, analytical reasoning, problem solving, and writing. The CLA has gained a fair amount of traction, is supported by some foundations, and stands to make a great deal of money if widely adopted.
The exercises on the CLA appear to test problem-solving skills. One (touted in the much-reviewed book by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift) asks the student to play the role of assistant to the president of DynaTech, a company that makes precision electronic instruments and navigational equipment.9 A member of the sales force has recommended that DynaTech purchase a small corporate plane, the SwiftAir 235, to reach customers more efficiently. But then a SwiftAir 235 crashes. The student is given a set of documents: newspaper articles about the crash, a federal accident report on in-flight breakups of single-engine planes, charts of SwiftAir’s performance characteristics, an article from Amateur Pilot magazine comparing the 235 with competitive planes, and internal company e-mails on the proposed purchase. The student then must prepare a memo that assesses the information given and provides a recommendation as to whether DynaTech should purchase the plane.
The problem presented may resemble real-world simulations that a student would work through if he or she took a job with McKinsey Consulting. In fact, it is much like the case studies pioneered at Harvard Business School that are now considered standard in business education. It does test the student’s capacity to assess data, some of it conflicting, to write a report that lays out options along with their benefits and liabilities, and to show the process by which one reaches a conclusion on the basis of the available facts and interpretations. Nonetheless, there is much that it does not test—essentially, the whole of the humanities, where the interpretation of data (that is, texts, art works, artifacts, which are often partial and incomprehensible without a deep understanding of historical, linguistic, stylistic, sociopolitical, or other context) is very different. In the humanities, interpretation is aimed not at an instrumental result (should DynaTech buy the plane?) but rather at an understanding of a past culture or the worth of a present cultural innovation. It is simply, and profoundly, a different kind of learning and knowledge.
The CLA promotes an idea that Judith Butler deplores, which has already made great inroads in our culture and our universities: that knowledge is instrumental. How do we find the language not to answer—for that would be to meet instrumentalism on its own terms—but to subvert this claim to police the field of values? Not, I think, by saying that the humanities are to be cultivated precisely because of their valuelessness. I refuse to believe that what I teach is without value. On the contrary, I think I deal with values every day. But the way in which my teaching might help my students to deal with the world is hard to specify; it surely has something to do with self-conscious reading, an ability to understand that the messages that daily claim our attention (or inattention) are created or manufactured, the productions of rhetoric rather than a natural process. I have not devised a test for the effectiveness of such teaching; but if I could concoct such a test, I think it would have to be given to the student around the time of his or her twenty-fifth reunion. It is that kind of temporal arc that I think teaching in the humanities is about.
Judith Butler at the very end of our final discussion referred the question of “measure” back to Aristotle, and I will confess that for me it is not only his Ethics but also his Poetics that offers some idea of what “measure” might mean in what I do: a treatise not about meanings but about how meanings are created, the grounds of our meaning-making acts. I hope that I teach something about that. I hope that teaching reading as a disciplined practice enables students to understand more about the human inhabitation of the world. To quote Wallace Stevens,
From this the poem springs: that we live in a place
That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves
And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.10
That’s, of course, from his Notes toward a Supreme Fiction. In claiming a place for the humanities in public life, we are arguing that fictions are not distractions from reality but a central means to an understanding of where and how we live in reality.