Judith Butler
We need to be more than objects of ruin.
—RANDY MARTIN
I have been reflecting on the question of how best to begin this essay on humanities in the public sphere because the terms are large: humanities, the public sphere, or, perhaps more specifically, public life. Yet the sense of the task is quite precise: We have been asked to establish the relation between the two, or to provide some guidelines on how that link might be demonstrated. One reason we are asked to do this is that the link has become unsure. Certainly one of my initial responses to this invitation was simply to declare that the connection is clear. After all, we need to be able to discern what is happening in that sphere called public, to attempt to establish events and their meanings, to evaluate what we think is going on, and even to formulate modes of engagement when they are required. Can any of this happen without the capacity to read texts and images, to understand how our world is formed, and to ask what forms we want for our world, and to give reasons for preferring those forms? It would seem that all of those most basic forms of public engagement demand an education in how to read, in history, in culture and media, in philosophy and argumentation. Of course, critical thinking is a further operation of thought, which involves not taking for granted what the public sphere is. After all, that sphere has no permanently established borders, and the borders it does have are crafted in part of the exclusion of those who are to remain unpublic, shadowed, or private. And that is surely one good reason why political engagement may be an engagement in the public sphere—but also outside it and sometimes against it. So we need to know how that public sphere has been constituted, through what media and idioms, and how it has expanded and contracted in different ways, for what reasons, and to whose benefit and whose loss. We also have to be able to evaluate the changes in the public sphere that we track.
So to ask how the humanities engage that sphere, we have to be knowing about which version of the public is at issue, how and why it works as it does, and whether it really should. Many of us have made the case for the humanities by arguing that without cultural and even public literacy it is not possible to engage as a mindful citizen in civic and democratic processes, if not more far-reaching forms of democratic struggle. We have to be able to know how to read the newspaper or understand and evaluate images in television and film, on video, and on the kiosks of the street if we are to find our way with those parts of the world that present themselves to us commonly, which does not mean they present themselves to us all in the same way. If we are to understand ourselves as not only participating in that established public sphere but engaged in the very establishing of what counts as public, then an education of the senses is required. We have to be both receptive and critical to what should be known, heard, seen, and debated within the various idioms of public life, whether they are verbal or written, visual or acoustic, architectural or haptic and performative. In this way, an education of the senses is a precondition of what we might call a sensate democracy, one in which our capacity to hear and feel is not cut short by the media on which we depend to know that world. That happens when the sphere of what can be heard, the audible and the speakable, and what can be shown, the visual and the performative, and what can be touched or neared, the conditions of mobility, are limited by any number of constraining powers. The point is not to be perfectly free to hear, speak, and show everything, or to move everywhere, but rather to evaluate the implicit limits imposed upon the senses, to track their histories and their spatial organization, and to come up with critical judgments about how the world has been organized and how it might be organized better.
What is, of course, so increasingly difficult is that we are now under pressure to describe and defend a set of propositions and beliefs that we have taken to be true, and whose value informs our daily practices and broader sense of vocation. Of course, the pressures are different whether we are at public or private institutions and depending on how elite our institutions are. But the burden is to show that engagement in public life is bound up from the start with the basics of a humanities education that address how we learn to think, to work with language and images, and to read, to make sense, to intervene, to take apart, to formulate evaluative judgments and even to make the world anew. These are such basic issues for educators that I find myself stumbling here. Must this be said, and what are the conditions under which it has become more difficult to speak and to be heard? A gap has emerged between this discourse, one that I would have thought was obvious, and a new metrics of value that is making, or has made, a claim on the obvious. Indeed, sometimes I find myself quite incredulous because I mistakenly thought the public value of these activities is so obvious that they hardly needed to be defended.1
I trust we all know the basic parameters of the crisis, even though we shall probably hear different versions of what it is and how it came about. Public funding for the humanities and the arts are being cut, departments of French, Italian, Russian, theatre, classics, and philosophy have been cut, or whole language departments suddenly have been merged with one another in both the United States and the United Kingdom without regard for academic concerns. Derision is sometimes publicly directed to whole domains of knowledge, including ethnic studies and critical race studies (both of which have been declared illegal in the state of Arizona), and the public value of these activities has become rapidly less than obvious. I hesitate even to give you the list of all we need to worry about because, at least in this venue, I assume that you know it. But in addition to the highly publicized closing of the French department at the State University of New York at Albany and philosophy at Middlesex in the United Kingdom, numerous other universities within the United States have cut German, Latin, Italian, and French. In 2010, it was estimated that fifty-four language programs were imperiled.2 Now many graduate programs that used to take ten to twelve students a year have been restricted to two or even none.3 History departments have also suffered a great deal, with clear implications for graduate education and placement. The Chronicle of Higher Education tells us that African history job openings fell 62 percent in 2010. Latin American history also took a large fall, down by 43 percent. The largest fields, as has been the case for years, were European and U.S. history, and even these fell by 34 and 28 percent, respectively.4
One can respond, “But there is a budget crisis,” and either add the appellate “Stupid” or let it drift there, implied. And that has been, continues to be, true. Yet, as we know, the demand to reduce a budget or to increase revenues involves decision-making processes that invariably rely on broader schemes of values. It provides an occasion to cut programs about which doubts are raised or for which no persuasive justification is available. So if the damage done to the humanities and the arts is disproportionate, as it surely seems to be, then the question follows: What sorts of values incline administrators to decide where and what to cut? If the skepticism about the humanities (which is hardly a singular form of skepticism) informs such decisions, how does one counter that?
It was surprising for me to read the very interesting and well-researched argument by Christopher Newfield that the humanities do not constitute a drain on university finances but actually bring in the tuition that helps to fund others schools and disciplines within the university.5 This is an interesting argument for many reasons, but perhaps most clearly because it is not always possible to establish the profitability of the discipline—its costs have to be factored through other means. But it also points to something else: Although we are clearly seeing an increasing demand to establish the profitability of disciplines, we are also seeing a new regime of values that certainly includes profitability as one component, but which includes as well “impact,” marketable skills, managerial efficiency, donor appeal, the appreciation of human capital, and the internal demands of systems analysis, all of which have been identified as hallmarks of neoliberalism.6 This set of values requires closer scrutiny as much for what it includes as for what it effaces and even pushes toward oblivion.
Pushing back against oblivion is part of my task, but I would like to prepare the way by returning to this problem of the obvious, a sense of obviousness both lost and transfigured. So here, first, is the question of when and where one register of the obvious falls away, and when and where another register comes to the fore. As I hope to suggest, understanding this kind of change may help us redirect our attention to the problem of the humanities in public life. But I will need to ask for patience as we find our way there, thus suggesting that patience remains one of the values in peril here.
If we are not sure how the humanities relate to public life, perhaps it will suffice to mark that gap between the two domains, claim that it is either a valuable difference or an inevitable one, or simply interrogate the contemporary limits of audibility within public life. Although such tactics might describe the hiatus in ways that prove interesting, they will not take us farther than a ratification of impasse nor will they precisely address our despair. One article I read about this topic asked, “How can we save that which is already dead?”7 For that author, the fate of the humanities is tied to the fate of the university, and our energies would be better redirected toward saving the university. Though I do not deny the supervenient importance of such a task, it may be by focusing on what the humanities have to offer that we start to rethink the task of the university itself. At stake is an understanding of how the talk about a risk of death has come about, the pronouncements about a world already gone. To do this, we have to consider both the new metrics for determining value as well as the explicit forms of cultural warfare currently under way.
Although Rick Santorum exited the public arena early in the 2012 presidential race, his remarks certainly do linger and resonate in ways that remain cause for concern. They appeal to, and revel in, a thriving anti-intellectualism. His explanation for why his grades were poor at Pennsylvania State University was that his teachers were all leftists who punished him with poor grades on the basis of his political viewpoints.8 What Santorum and those who are stoked by that sensibility regularly do is misname intellectual inquiry as itself ideological, where ideology refers to an adamantly held and imposed political goal, viewpoint, or framework, rather than a considered and substantiated thesis. His reference to colleges and universities as “indoctrination mills” that convert students from religion to secularism is a case in point.
Because we are briefly making lists, I propose to include the banning of more than eighty novels and books from educational use in the state of Arizona, including Matt de la Peña’s Mexican White Boy, for containing “critical race theory,” which was perversely understood as “promoting racial resentment.”9 Such arguments reduce literary works (those of Sandra Cisneros included) to imagined political viewpoints, which suggests that those who make these arguments do not really know very much about narrative voice or character, that they do not want to bother with basic questions of genre and form, and that they assume that literary narratives are transcriptions of dogma. The charge of ideology in such cases is once again coupled with a virulent anti-intellectualism.
This is important because one could be against ideology in that sense and for a more properly intellectual approach to texts—but that would be the argument of the old conservatism (which, I confess, I sometimes think I would prefer to have as my antagonist). In these instances, a form of cultural warfare has now assumed legal dimensions in some states, and it is directly linked to the devaluation and distrust of the humanities. So let us hold both these thoughts together: The politically conservative attack supplements and fortifies the managerial or neoliberal calculus that is becoming ever more dominant, but they are not, or are not always, the same trend.
Indeed, part of what has become confusing is that those who dismiss the value of the humanities often present themselves as innovators, ushering in a new age, fighting against recalcitrant and hermetic forces within the university. It is a moment, oddly, when the old-style conservatives find themselves joining with their erstwhile foes on the critical left. Those introducing some of these new metrics within public institutions of higher learning often champion new revenue enhancement schemes that will putatively save the university and they defend online education, insisting that a poetry class can be taught just as well over the Internet as around a seminar table. When some of us at the University of California at Berkeley objected to online education for such purposes, citing the importance of the practice of reading together and conducting discussions in direct reference to a text, working over the lines together, we found ourselves branded as conservative and “sentimental.” So, I wonder, what has happened such that I can feel myself to be conservative within this frame of reference? It seems that different groups are now warring over the “new” and that the term has now provisionally been captured by those who seek to produce Internet-based revenue-earning programs at the expense of close reading and learning.
As a consequence, I, vacillating between feeling like a crazy leftist and a conservative, find myself resisting this version of the “new,” noting that such proposals are slowly coming to monopolize terms such as “creative” as in “creative solutions” and even “the future.” I find myself wanting to stave off a loss, one that is too great for me to bear. I even sometimes think maybe I will be lucky enough to leave the earth before I have to see the full destruction of the humanities. I note, with fear, that there are those who are willing to give up funding for the arts as “luxury items,” or the humanities as a haven for leftists or as clearly useless. When the neoliberal matrix of valuation combines with the anti-intellectual conservatism, a double bind is upon us.10 One kind of critic claims that the humanities are less than hard and profitable science and so are without value, and the other claims that the humanities deflect from the truth of religion and so are a social danger. One says there is no real world impact, and the other claims that our values have to come from “out of the pale,” as it were—some anemic heavenly elsewhere that inscribes our values and our laws.
What I assume to be a common understanding seems increasingly elusive. The obvious should be that to which we merely need to point to recall to ourselves its status. Yet what happens when what we have considered obvious becomes obscure, or when possibilities thought too obscure slowly become installed as obvious? It is not enough to be astonished or outraged because that does not translate into a way to reestablish a different sense of reality, a different register of the obvious. However, if we feel no astonishment or outrage, we have become inured to the attack itself, acquiescent or complicitous, effectively recruited into the project of accepting this new sense of the obvious, this sense of the obvious that now, eerily, lays claim to the new.
Of course, one can see that I am already on a certain theoretical terrain, for what does it mean that different versions of the obvious can be achieved or lost? It is not enough to say, for instance, that some version of the obvious has become dominant. If it is dominant, then there are rival understandings, however marginal, and so the version of reality we are discussing may be trying to achieve dominance but has not. The word ideology links with the problem of the obvious here. Of course, there are those who think that universities have become ideological and that the humanities are their ideological center; yet this position reflexively disqualifies itself, for its own position becomes an ideological attack on the humanities from the opposite side of the political spectrum, which is just a way of saying that it is all war. This view is finally unproductive if we seek to understand what is meant by ideology and whether it has a place in these debates.
Louis Althusser once sought to account for the ideological surface of things as “the obvious” and spent some time trying to fathom how the obvious gets established as such.11 He was, of course, talking about the relationship between the State and the facts of oppression, and what emerges from this relationship is what he called “a very special kind of obviousness.”12 Indeed, in his language, no one person or subject makes this happen, but the relationship between the State and its subjects gives rise to this special kind of obviousness as a feature of their rapport. He gives us the propositional form of this obviousness: “Yes, that’s how it is, that’s really true!”13 Our ability to grasp Althusser’s concept of ideology depends first on seeing how the one who utters these lines is related to the one who hears these lines. Because the voice appears in a written text, it follows that writing and reading become essential to a critical understanding of what he calls ideology; in fact, ideology is not just a system of thought, but constitutes us in relation to one another as the reading and writing subjects we are. Ideology does not induce our existence or cause us to be; rather, it emerges as a way of describing that web of relations that tethers authors and readers: In his words, “both live ‘spontaneously’ or ‘naturally’ in ideology.”14 So he describes the medium in which we live, one that is populated by readers and writers, but surely also by speakers and listeners—those appearing and seen, those moving or still in relation to others who are negotiating mobility as well. We live “in” ideology as we might live in a certain climate; indeed, it is a climate of historical belief with the proviso that it is not precisely we who manufacture and hold to a set of beliefs, but rather a set of beliefs breezes through us, animating the exchange of thought. So ideology is not precisely what a critic takes apart or gets beyond at a moment’s notice; it is rather more like an ethos in which we converge, if not the cultural surface that supports our gravity and mobility. This does not mean an ideology is always singular and cannot shift and change, as sometimes the obviousness on which it relies fissures, and that opening cannot be readily closed.
One might expect that the name of Althusser would be among those authors that Santorum is worried about (if, that is, it can be shown that Santorum knows about Althusser, which seems unlikely). Althusser might be required reading for the “indoctrination mill” that converts religious believers into secularists. My suggestion is that it turns out that belief is quite important to Althusser’s conception of ideology, as is the institution of the Church and its scriptures; in my view, it is not so easy to brand him a Marxist secularist because the form of belief he names ideological is not simply overcome or negated with a well-reasoned critique of its operation. Trying to explain this sense of obviousness that tethers us as readers and writers, Althusser sought recourse to Saint Paul. In his words, “As St Paul admirably put it, it is in the ‘Logos’, meaning in ideology, that we ‘live, move and have our being’.”15 Saint Paul is already describing ideology, and in that way making a contribution to Marxist theory avant la lettre. Immediately then, Althusser concludes, “It follows that, for you and for me, the category of the subject is a primary ‘obviousness’ (obviousnesses are always primary): it is clear that you and I are subjects (free, ethical, etc.…). Like all obviousnesses, including those that make a word ‘name a thing’ or ‘have a meaning’ (therefore including the obviousness of the ‘transparency’ of language).” In some nonobvious, nonapparent way, what Althusser calls ideology imposes “obviousnesses as obviousnesses.”16 At this point, a rather nonobvious, if perfectly obscure, use of language seems to emerge, because we are not used to that plural noun form “obviousnesses.” I even worry about stating it out loud because it could easily be used as grist for the mill—not the indoctrination mill, but the one that seeks to grind up the humanities for having experimented with language in ways that seem obscure, if not frivolous.
Still, when something is being established as obvious to us through a process of some kind, it surely takes place in a nonobvious sort of way, if not in an utterly obscure one. Obscurity names the process by which the obvious is established. When something is being made less than obvious, obscurity emerges, but the terms are clearly relative. For Althusser, an obviousness is that which we “cannot fail to recognize”; and we, as subjects, are defined in part by what he calls the “ritual practice of ideological recognition in everyday life.”17 We have friends, he tells us, who knock on the door, and when we ask, “Who’s there?” they reply “It’s me,” and at that moment of exchange we recognize that person as the friend we know. With some reflection, we understand that all sorts of “mes” say “it’s me” when someone asks, “who’s there?,” and so it could be any number of “mes” who are in fact calling or knocking at that instant. Despite the nonsingularity of my response, the singular me is sometimes recognized: “Oh, it’s you.” This happens between authors and writers, and between speakers and their audiences. Althusser then breaks out into reflexivity: “The writing I am currently executing and the reading you are currently performing are also in this respect rituals of ideological recognition, including the ‘obviousness’ with which the ‘truth’ or ‘error’ of my reflections may impose itself on you.”18
Take this example from Franz Kafka’s “Description of a Struggle,” a story he wrote in 1904 and completed about five years later.19 He is writing, we might say, in a world or in a climate where certain kinds of obvious realities are vanishing or where their episodic reappearance is no less than astonishing. It is a story that includes a scene in which two men encounter each other in church, but neither of them is able quite to stand up or balance with ease. The one moves his leg as one would move a prosthesis, though he is not wearing one. The other seeks to balance himself in ways that can only produce imbalance. They lunge awkwardly at one another in vain attempts at communication. The one leans back impossibly, and the other bows down near the other in ways that are both potentially sexual and utterly uncomfortable. The first-person narrator notes that he is no longer able to walk in an upright way, that normal steps elude him. He asks, “Am I not rather entitled to complain bitterly at having to skip along the houses like a shadow without a clear outline, sometimes disappearing in the panes of the shopwindows?” He continues, “Oh, what dreadful days I have to live through! Why is everything so badly built that high houses collapse every now and again for no apparent reason? On these occasions I clamber over the rubble, asking everyone I meet: ‘How could this have happened?’ In our town—a new house—how many does that make today?—Just think of it!’ And no one can give me an answer.”20 So what should be established and built becomes undone with surprising speed, leaving in its wake a sense that the spatial and temporal coordinates of the world do not hold, or rather no longer hold, or rather never did.
What follows is a description of everyday life that has gone awry, where what is most obvious seems to become most obscure. The narrator continues, “Frequently people fall in the street and lie there dead. Whereupon all the shop people open their doors laden with wares, hurry busily out, cart the dead into a house, come out again all smiles, then the chatter begins: ‘Good Morning—it’s a dull day—I’m selling any amount of kerchiefs—ah yes, the war.’ I rush into the house, and after raising my hand several times timidly with my finger crooked, I finally knock on the janitor’s little window: ‘Good morning,’ I say, ‘I understand a dead man was carried in here just now.’ ” Then, after some pausing and a failed effort on the part of the narrator to pass himself off as secret police, the man replies, “ ‘There’s no dead man here. Maybe next door.’ I raise my hat and go.”21
After such a moment, the body does not hold together, and gravity is altogether lost. A sharp wind rises, and the narrator looks up at a church where “the Virgin Mary’s cloak is coiling around her pillar and the wind is tugging at it. Does no one notice this? The ladies and gentlemen who should be walking on the pavement are floating. When the wind falls they stand still, say a few words, and bow to one another, but when the wind rises again they are helpless, and all their feet leave the ground at the same time.”22 And then, in a transition that seems like a non sequitur, the listener replies, bringing us back to that vanishing sense of the obvious with which we are concerned. He recalls an earlier moment in their exchange where the narrator asks, “Why is it that around me things sink away like fallen snow, whereas for other people even a little liqueur glass stands on the table steady as a statue?” Then, “So, you don’t believe this happens to other people? You really don’t? Just listen, then. When as a child I opened my eyes after a brief afternoon nap, still not quite sure I was alive, I heard my mother up on the balcony asking in a natural tone of voice: ‘What are you doing my dear? Goodness, isn’t it hot?’ From the garden a woman answered, ‘Me, I’m having my tea on the lawn.’ They spoke casually and not very distinctly, as though this woman had expected the question, my mother the answer.”23
“Me, I’m having my tea on the lawn”—the reply, a moment in which the woman simply refers to what she is doing and offers up that information to someone listening, certainly gives rise to a sense of obviousness, surely analogous to “Who’s there?” “It’s me.” This very exchange, however, is cited within another conversation, and in that new conversation, the old conversation is cause for astonishment and doubt. Later in the story, after the description of the buildings falling and the dead bodies whisked away inside of shops where the shopkeepers deny their existence, this simple story about having tea on the lawn is recalled. The one listening replies, “ ‘That story you told me earlier about your mother and the woman in the garden I really don’t find so remarkable. Not only have I heard and experienced many stories of this kind, I have even taken part in some. The whole thing is perfectly natural. Do you really mean to suggest that had I been on that balcony in the summer, I could not have asked the same question and given the same answer from the garden? Quite an ordinary occurrence!’ ”24 That last claim is only slightly belied by the exclamation mark by which it ends, suggesting that the ordinary emphatically seeks to counter a sense of the vanishing ordinary.
The whole exchange ends with the one who narrated the reported exchange between the mother and the woman in the garden feeling very much relieved, suddenly engaging in perfectly ordinary discourse, commenting on the other’s tie, how well dressed he is, as if the two are consecrating the ordinary. Like those who quickly forget that there were dead bodies on the street and now engage in small talk about the weather, the narrator clings to the daily discourse of chatter and compliments. Although the story was written in 1904, a decade before World War I, Kafka’s way of registering ineffable events such as these proved prescient. On August 2, 1914, he wrote in his diary, “Germany declares war on Russia—in the afternoon, swimming lessons.”25
In the sudden recourse to the ordinary and obvious has something thereby been resolved, or has something just been covered over? The final line of that section then arrives: “confessions became most comprehensible when they were retracted.”26 It is a paradoxical line, but perhaps not altogether confusing. After all, what is comprehensible is not precisely the ordinary exchange, the polite discourse, the everyday compliments; they cover over and defer a sense of the world that is losing its stability, pulled into oblivion. The wind that lifts those bodies up in the air, disrupts conversations, exposes the dead on the street, and unleashes fear might be understood as the particular climate of the obvious in which Kafka’s characters move and live. At one point when the pedestrians are lifted off the pavement, they hold onto their hats, and “ ‘their eyes twinkle gaily enough and no one has the slightest fault to find with the weather.’ ” The paragraph ends, “ ‘I’m the only one who’s afraid.’ ”27
I noted earlier that we could mark the hiatus between the emerging metrics of value and those that belong to the humanities, but that would not be enough to redirect our actions or to remake the world. Yet this gap within the obvious that Kafka’s writings opens up creates an ethical possibility. Exposing this very gap between what has become ordinary and the destructive aims it covers over and conveys, the reader is propelled into ethical responsiveness and alert. In Althusser, it seems that ideology names the effective functioning of the ordinary, in which when I knock, the “me” is then recognized—that is, when a simple act of saying what one is doing is received by another and understood. It is me, knocking at the door. Yes, you, glad to see you again. Me, I am having my tea on the lawn. There is a ground on which I might rest, a simple act of drinking, an ability to refer to myself and to say to you what it is I am doing. The basics of gravity, world, nourishment, and communication are intact for those brief episodes.
Yet Kafka’s story queries the conditions under which the solidity of the world and the possibility of exchange have slipped away or are currently slipping. Kafka’s texts tend to relay events in neutral and observational narrative voices (various “reports” and “investigations” refine the tenor of the bureaucratic voice). When scenes of outrage, destruction, and suffering are relayed through such a narrative voice, a gap opens between the mode of presentation and what is presented; the reader not only sees the outrage, but feels the ease with which outrage is normalized and covered over. A fissure emerges within the discourse of the obvious that shows the obscure workings of those modes of voice and discourse that cover over frightening and unacceptable destruction and loss. The narrative voice actually does the covering over of such outrages at the same time that it gives us the distance to respond to, and evaluate, that state of affairs.
As we read, we are brought into the mechanisms by which those dead bodies on the street are whisked away and the dissimulating function of daily chatter, and they prove to be unlivable. As we read those voices, as they depart from one another and converge again, we enact the ideological in Althusser’s terms, but we also are given reason for alarm, and we cannot turn away from what has just been shown. The point is not to engender shock and outrage without any further recourse to action. Rather, we are compelled to understand the loss of communication as the new obvious, the sudden vanishing of the image of suffering; the cover up through a neutralized and cheery discourse of devastations induces incredulity—is incredible, if not incredulous—exceeding the syntax that keeps it in place: the ordinary incredulous. The writing steeps us in the process of making and unmaking a world, which is not to say that the world is made through writing.
One could be tempted simply to say that we must gather the strength to defend the obvious. Alain Badiou does this when he cites Wallace Stevens’s poem “Man Carrying Thing”: “the bright obvious will stand motionless.”28 I am less convinced that the line from Stevens is without irony, but I can see why those who wish to retrench Plato would read it as Badiou does. My suggestion is that if Kafka can be read together with Althusser, one place where the obvious and its unraveling occurs is in reading and writing, in all the modes of exchange, visual, oral, and haptic, in which we are relatively tethered to one another. To rethink the problem of the ideological in Kafka’s terms, we might begin by asking whether the very basic propositions about speaking and listening, reading and writing, showing and seeing, have become undone, unleashing astonishment and fear, alerting us as well to what has been destroyed, what might yet be destroyed, and what it would mean to preserve and reanimate what is most valuable.
In the final section of this essay, then, let me consider some of the salient forms that the defense of the humanities has taken and elaborate on what I think of as the ethical task before us, one that is, in my view, indissociable from forms of critical judgment and what we might aptly call the struggle against oblivion. My point will not be that we need to refine our skills of critical dismantling, but rather I wish to link our critical practice to an ethical consideration of the forms of cultural aliveness and destruction for which we are compelled to struggle because they are linked with public questions of what is of value, and what should be.
In the past few years, I have heard and read several kinds of arguments about how best to defend the humanities. Here is a brief list: the humanities have intrinsic value; the humanities are useless, and that is their value; public intellectuals exemplify the value of the humanities for public life; the humanities offer certain kinds of skill development that are important for economic mobility; the humanities offer certain kinds of literacy that are indispensable to citizenship; and finally, the humanities offer a critical perspective on values that can actively engage the contemporary metrics of value by which the humanities themselves are weakened, if not destroyed.
Some of my colleagues claim that the humanities must be recognized for having the “intrinsic value” that they have. Of course, the problem emerges that others do not recognize that intrinsic value—at which point, the intrinsic value must be demonstrated. If it must be demonstrated, it has to be demonstrated within a language and an idiom that can be recognized by those who most clearly need to be convinced of that value. And that language is, increasingly, one that cannot recognize the value of the humanities, or can recognize it only with difficulty, because the kinds of values recognized by such a language, that are registered in that language, are those that cover over or consign to oblivion the value of the humanities.
The defense of intrinsic value has a close cousin in the position that the humanities are useless and should be defended as useless. For some, the humanities are themselves based on a critique of instrumentality, and they form the institutional venue for the critique of utility, functionalism, and instrumentality more generally. Theodor Adorno, for instance, had this to say about poetry: “The lyric reveals itself to be most deeply grounded in society when it does not chime in with society, when it communicates nothing.”29 For Adorno, to communicate nothing is precisely to refuse the structures of communication that ratify society, and so the most “critical” potential of the lyric is expressed when communication is refused. For Kafka, the loss of communication is minimally twofold: Its loss is mourned at the same time that its capacity to consign matters of life and death to oblivion, horrifying, sounds an ethical alarm.
Yet others point to the idea of the public intellectual or to examples of public intellectuals, or find in literary works examples of virtuous people or citizens we should try to emulate. In my view, in thinking about the humanities and the public sphere, we need to move beyond the idea of the public intellectual to a broader reflection on the humanities in the public sphere.30 The time for showcasing exemplary public intellectuals is probably gone—although some administrators and grant officers are eager to fund “leadership” proposals that allow exemplary individuals to be separated off and rewarded at the expense of funding institutional infrastructures or supplementing fellowships for students with limited financial means.
Another claim is that we must develop skills in our students that can be demonstrated to be useful for economic life or indispensable for public life and citizenship, more specifically. If we produce or instill skills, then we can show how skills can be used and implemented, which gives us recourse to a practical dimension. Strong defenders of the humanities take some version of this position. Geoffrey Harpham, for instance, writes that “we cannot simply insist that knowledge is only worthy of the name if it is pursued for its own sake, and that liberal education is contaminated when subjected to utilitarian justifications.”31 That seems to imply that we must adapt what we do to contemporary measures of instrumentality, or that we must find some way of translating between what we do and those particular metrics of value. In any case, we cannot afford to continue to understand our vocation as a form of purity.
I agree that the arguments of intrinsic value or uselessness do not suffice (though some of my heartstrings, I confess, are pulled by both). But still, we have to ask: 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? Indeed, we are faced with new metrics and standards of evaluation, and some of them are rather disorienting for those who have worked for a lifetime within the humanities. Interestingly, not all ways of “making a difference” count as having a calculable impact, according to these new metrics. A colleague in the United Kingdom proposed a conference for funding from their Arts and Humanities Research Council that would focus on the various meanings of monarchy for European countries at the present time. The proposal was rejected, and the reason given was that it failed to demonstrate “impact.” When she queried what “impact” might mean for such a conference, the grant administrators said that she would have to show that the findings of any such conference would be applicable to contemporary policy; indeed, their Web site explicitly states that “impact” refers to the “demonstrable contribution that excellent research makes to society and the economy,” and adds that “contribution” can be gauged by demonstrating how the knowledge generated can be “transferred” to individuals and communities outside of the academy. Her response was to suggest that the conference might help bring about the downfall of the monarchy, but her potential funders were not amused, and the project failed. Yet what other result would have fulfilled their requirement? Oddly, for her to have provided impact under such a circumstance would have immediately made her available for another sort of criticism, namely, that scholarship has been skewed by ideological aims, especially of the left-wing sort that are regularly associated with the humanities both in the United Kingdom and the United States—without, I would add, good grounds for doing so.
Of course, I want to say, and do say, that the humanities matter. But as soon as we say that, we have to show what we mean by mattering, and that is where we get into a set of disagreements that are both difficult and invaluable. If we take Harpham’s point to mean that we have to adopt instrumentality as the measure of value, then we have accepted that particular scheme of evaluation as the most relevant and appropriate. But I think what he is claiming is that we cannot avoid considerations of instrumentality altogether. Here is the bind: We may well think that we must conform to the standards implied by the demands themselves in order to offer a satisfactory answer and receive the funding we need, whether those are internal allocations, revenue from investments, government grants, the largesse of private donors, or the budget lines from state assemblies if we are in public institutions. Yet if we comply too well—that is, too perfectly—we run the risk of forfeiting one of the most important tasks of the humanities, namely, to think critically about modes of measurement and schemes of evaluation in order to figure out which ones are justified, which ones really suit their objects, and which ones are introduced and maintained by the scholarship and teaching in the humanities. This process of thinking critically involves reading closely the various public documents that are deciding our fate while also exercising a particular kind of judgment as we read. As I hope to suggest, this exercise of critical judgment also establishes an important link between the humanities and public life.
We also could call this the critical problem of value. If there are competing ways of measuring value or making evaluations—some of which argue explicitly that value cannot be measured, or minimally that not all kinds of value can be measured—then how do we begin to adjudicate that situation? The humanities are under pressure to demonstrate their value under historical conditions in which competing schemes of valuation are brought to bear upon the humanities. We can simply conform to the ones that look most lucrative, at which point we may well be able to fund the humanities, until it becomes clear that we do not actually do what we said we were going to do in order to get the funding we need. “We have funding for the humanities! The humanities are lost.” But even if we decide that, tactically, that is the only way to go, we compel the humanities to conform to models that misrecognize or even efface their value, at which point we have to ask what we are actually funding, and at what cost, and how it relates to the ideal we want to preserve and animate.
Critical judgment implies an investigation of the problem of value, something that is a problem precisely because values are plural and do not always complement one another. In the second instance, that form of critical judgment implies finding ways to evaluate disparate schemes of valuation, that is, asking about which schemes are best for the humanities and how might we demonstrate that persuasively. When ideas of instrumentality, impact, skill building, and revenue enhancement become the dominant modes of evaluation, then certain managerial, financial, and more broadly neoliberal modes of valuation gain ascendancy. It then remains for some group of interested educators to query whether those schemes are finally sufficient, and whether the humanities can even successfully make a case for itself in the terms required by those schemes. One could become a realist under such conditions and argue that we have no other choice: We must make those arguments and in those terms. Or one could become a purist and say that we will never make those arguments within those terms. But no matter which way we go, we are still left with a problem of knowledge that needs to be foregrounded and safeguarded, namely, the very practice of asking about the value of these values, whether they are comprehensive, what they facilitate, what they foreclose, what kind of world they establish, and what kind of world they destroy.
How does this issue of critical judgment bring us to the question of how the humanities link up with public life—more particularly, the relation between the humanities and citizenship or, more broadly, the forms of democratic engagement? The meaning of citizenship, if it is to be valuable for our purposes, must describe a set of practices that can be undertaken by the documented and the undocumented. So citizenship has to belong to those who are not legally stipulated as citizens. Citizenship is thus a topic for public debate, which means that established stipulations on citizenship cannot be equated from the public sphere. Indeed, the public sphere can be a place where the noncitizen feels endangered or exercises rights that are not guaranteed by any existing form of citizenship. Sequestered within the public sphere, the undocumented expose the limits of using citizenship to define the public.
We can begin with some of the prerogatives of citizenship to find our way into this larger question. We have reason to doubt whether democracy is possible at all without an educated public, and to wonder what forms of education are necessary for democracy to work. Here it seems important to note, as Wendy Brown has argued, that as public and affordable higher education becomes out of reach for the poor and the working class, new class hierarchies emerge such that the monied not only get more education but also gain access to more prestigious institutions and greater upward mobility, protecting their already upward trajectory.32 Although this surely counts as an “instrumental” argument for increasing educational opportunities for those who cannot afford them, there is another argument that is implicit in this one. Brown remarks that citizens have to deliberate on how best to make a world together, and this requires that they are able to reflect on how they themselves have been formed, especially on the political formations that have brought them to where they are, to the views they hold. They also need to be able deliberate together on how best to organize their world, and this means working together on the question of where to find or make ideals, how best to evaluate them, and how to make a world that might either realize those ideals or keep them alive as possibilities. Dana Villa said something similar in his book, Socratic Citizenship, when, drawing on Arendt and Socrates, he argued that only through a common reflection on the world do we begin to exercise judgment as individuals who are bound with others.33
As you can see, the living scene of the seminar, or reading and writing and disputation, is in some ways related to the practice of citizenship, often a conflicted process that requires forms of interpretation, deliberation, and the setting forth of ideals. But it can also be that the practice of interpretation leads us to say no to an entire regime, to refuse it, to counter it, and to demand a new way of ordering the world. The analogy with citizenship breaks down, however, when we consider that sometimes reading can take us to an insight into the necessary limits of a regime, especially when we see the losses it induces and refuses to mourn. This might imply undoing forms of public engagement that exceed the existing forms of citizenship, or even calling for their remaking. And when we arrive there, or when we defend that practice of calling into question whether a regime should continue as it is, we are exercising a form of judgment that is precisely not valorized by the regime itself. This form of evaluating is not just about bringing something down because it is unjust or because its consequences are destructive in ways that cannot be ethically abided, it is a bringing down and bringing forth; it is thus the condition, we might say, of both revolution and critical judgment.
The point is not only to reflect on the history that makes our present world possible, or the various forms that bespeak and ratify our contemporary modes of valuation, but to figure out in common what we make of it and what we want to make of it. If we are presented with a debate, for instance, in which we have to show that the humanities can have a larger impact or that the humanities can be profitable, and we are asked to choose between them, this is surely a moment for pausing, refusing, and offering another perspective. Socially and politically, we are in a bind because the imperative to “save” the humanities often propels us into states of urgency in which we imagine that the only future left to us will be one secured precisely through those metrics of value that are most in need of critical re-evaluation. Oddly, our very capacity for critically re-evaluating is what cannot be measured by the metrics by which the humanities are increasingly judged. This means that the resource we need to save the humanities is precisely one that has been abandoned by the metrics that promise to save the humanities if only we comply. So perhaps we must retrieve from the threat of oblivion those ways of valuing that can put into perspective the closing of the horizons enacted by the metrics we are asked to use. These are metrics of forgetfulness, perhaps, or metrics of effacement, conduits to oblivion, where the calculus emerges as the final arbiter of value, which means that the values we have to defend are already lost. This does not mean that we become conservative, endeavoring to reinstate a former time; rather, we must move forward in new ways, through new idioms, and with some impurity, to reanimate the very ideals that guide and justify our work.
Here, one can see how easy it is to resolve upon mourning or to rise up in impotent outrage and refuse to go gently into that dark night. But is there a politics that fights against the pull of oblivion? Let me end with an example that perhaps makes my point in a way that I hope will not prove to be too obscure. But if obscurity is sometimes the necessary corrective to what has become obvious, so be it.
I was asked to help devise a proposal to have an institute funded that would be, ironically, dedicated to the problem of values. One of the grant administrators let me know that I would have to be able to show “the deliverable.” I asked whether this was really a word, and she replied that it surely was, and offered me a definition from a Web site called Investopedia.34 Here is that definition:
Deliverable: “a project management term for the quantifiable goods or services that will be provided upon completion of a project. Deliverables can be tangible or intangible parts of the developmental process, and are often specified functions or characteristics of the project.”
The Web site, by way of offering a further explanation, continued:
Deliverables serves as a general term that encompasses the requirements of a project. A deliverable may be an object, used in the greater scheme of the project. For example, in a project meant to upgrade a firm’s technology, a deliverable may be a dozen new computers. Alternatively, a deliverable may be a function or an aspect of the overall project. For example, a software project may have a deliverable specifying that the computer program must be able to compute a company’s accounts receivable.
Actually, the question posed to me did not distinguish between singular and plural forms of the deliverable. It was simply “What is the deliverable of your proposal?” As I scrutinized the word, I thought first that a deliverable must be different from a delivery, or something that can be delivered, such as a package or a gift, a kiss, a legal summons, or a swift punch to the jaw. The deliverable seemed to be a noun form that seeks to make a concrete thing out of the very possibility of a delivery. In other words, the term seemed to refer to what can be delivered, what it is possible to deliver. For me, this immediately brought up questions of theology and semiotics alike, though I can imagine also situations of love and bribery that center on the idea of what can be delivered. There is surely a question of whether, for instance, God’s word has been delivered, can be delivered, will ever yet be delivered. There is also a question about human communication: Is it possible to send a letter that will be delivered, and delivered in a sense that means that the letter arrives at its destination and is received or read? (This is the problematic of Kafka’s “An Imperial Message.”) The delivery of a letter or the delivery of God’s word both seem to depend on a form of communication that works, that is, where what is sent and what is delivered turn out to be the same, or, at least, where what is sent can become what is delivered through some set of relays, technologies, transpositions, or translations.
It interests me that the Investopedia clarification of the term distinguishes between tangible and intangible forms of the deliverable. I find myself eagerly anticipating the intangible. But when it then gives examples of the two, the tangible seems to be “new computers” and the intangible seems to be “the ability to compute a company’s accounts receivable.” The line that seeks to explain the deliverable ends with the word “receivable,” at which point my attention as a literary reader started to flare. We do talk about “receivables” when we talk about accounts, and in some way the receivable is implied by the deliverable. If we do not deliver, we will not receive. But even that formulation does not quite capture what is at play, because the term is concerned less with what is delivered than with what can be delivered, and what can be received. These are potentialities of a process, and they are given a noun form.
There is an odd resonance with what some of us do. When I pose a question, after reading Kafka, for instance, such as “whose lives are grievable and whose lives are recognizable under conditions of war?,” an editor usually comes back to me with the suggestion that I simply ask whose lives are worthy of grief, and whose lives can be recognized. I balk a little because I want to draw attention to a quality that gets lost in that simpler formulation. I want to say that sometimes people seem to be endowed with a certain value, that is, their lives are regarded as valuable and they assume a certain form and bearing under that regard. Great efforts are made to protect and defend those lives, and yet in other instances, lives are regarded as disposable or are so stripped of value that when they are imperiled, injured, or lost, they assume a social ontology that is partially constituted by that regard. Hence, they are not cause for worry; their potential loss is no occasion to mourn. Someone who never existed has been nullified, so nothing has happened. The “grievable” postulates a future conditional, a perspective from the future; indeed, to be grievable is a precondition of being valuable in the present: If there were a war or a disaster, some populations would be designated as worthy of grief whereas others would not. As a way of conjecturing, even fictionalizing, that adjectival noun seeks to bring to bear the ethical relation to a future loss on the thinking of the present. I suppose the conjectured temporality implied by such a noun-adjective is not unlike the way that utopian fictions sometimes establish an imaginary future perspective from which critical light can be shed on the inequalities and injustices of the contemporary organization of society. It is also necessary for what Ernst Bloch once called the principle of hope.35
I mean to say that a certain group of people considered grievable could be mourned if they were lost, and so carry that quality in the present; in contrast, the ungrievable bear the mark of those who will never be mourned because they were never understood to be living. So what does this have to do with the deliverable? When am I going to deliver? Is this essay finally deliverable? We might ask of the deliverable: Does it also sustain a relation to the future and, if so, what kind? If something is a deliverable, it does not have to be actually delivered to sustain that quality. It has only to be an object or a function or an aspect of a project that could be delivered, if certain conditions were to be met. Indeed, in the context of the grant application, the deliverable can become the delivered only on the condition that the project is funded and then executed.
If “receivable” belongs to the world of accounts, then the deliverable belongs to the prior world in which the receivable is anticipated. These are aspects of a process and a project, and certain questions cannot rightly be asked of this framework: who delivers, what do they deliver, and who receives, if anyone does? What is undeliverable, or deemed undeliverable by this process? In other words, who loses, and what is lost?
Such terms contain a futural or even transcendent function, and perhaps we can read them as recirculating in fugitive forms the traces or remnants of a theology and a semiotics that belong precisely to the domain that is no longer recognizable within their terms. For the deliverable is the possibility opened up by the project, a way of organizing and regulating time, constraining the future. After all, the deliverable refers to the general conditions of delivery, and so is something that transcends every particular delivery, every particular package, every particular fund that is actually received in any particular account in payment for what is delivered. Perhaps the deliverable is thus the ruin and remnant of Platonism; perhaps, it is the perversely animated trace of transcendence, a new obviousnessness that carries and condenses the no longer translatable form of the humanities within a single word, adding insult to injury by virtue of being a very bad kind of poetry. It puts out of play any question of what can be received or should be received, any question of who stands to receive or who stands to lose, questions that pertain to distributive justice; it sets aside questions of what values it preempts, and what values it installs as the new obvious.
Perhaps this strangely condensed noun gives off a peculiar illumination that belongs to our time, opening a future that is bound precisely through a discourse that consigns to oblivion some of the questions that are most valuable. The deliverable might be said to displace and efface the history of value that it is meant to gauge. In this way, we can perhaps conclude that the deliverable produces the ungrievable, absorbing and renaming the trace of loss so that we are no longer able to stay with the thought of those bodies on the street or more broadly the question of what we undergo, whether it is just, and what new forms of life we have yet to make.
So if we return to where we began, with the question of how practitioners of the humanities can be more than or other than the objects of ruin, we now have a slightly different path. 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. What can those whose language is consigned to oblivion do? They can reenter the fray, open up the space between the language that has become obvious or self-evident and the enormous loss it has already accomplished and still portends. That gap is the advent of an ethical relation not only to the past and the future but to the possibility of incredulity and astonishment when the value of the new regime of values has yet to be evaluated. This means that we exercise critical judgment in the breach, reentering the obscure into the obvious in order to affirm what is left between us still to lose, to keep, to keep animated. In this way, we militate for a sphere of audibility within which to pose our question and have it heard: What now is the value of our values?