Eric Hayot’s Humanist Reason: A Tautegory Exchange

This is the first of our Tautegory Exchanges series. Tautegory Exchanges aim to provide an alternative form of scholarly communication by drawing several authors into a critical conversation on a subject, text, or problem of mutual interest. Our hope is to open a space unencumbered by familiar academic conventions that will generate and foster new lines of inquiry and debate.

This exchange is focused on Eric Hayot’s Humanist Reason: A History, An Argument, A Plan (Columbia UP, 2021). Hayot’s timely and ambitious book addresses the much-lamented crisis in the Humanities. Humanist Reason differentiates itself from other works in this emerging genre by proposing a new metadiscourse for the Humanities that might orient institutional and curricular reform. The Tautegory Project invited Hayot and four humanistic scholars to participate in an exchange intended to elaborate and explore the main arguments and implications of Humanist Reason. You can find the complete exchange, including Hayot’s response to his fellow humanists, below.

Truth or Consequences: A Question for Eric Hayot

Marshall Brown

On the day I began reading Eric Hayot’s book, the New York Times reported that the laboratory finding of arsenic in the Jacob Riis public housing complex was erroneous.  However, a different lab found evidence of legionella bacteria in the water, so residents were still advised not to drink the water.  This despite the fact, as reported, that legionnaire’s disease is contracted through the air, not through contact or ingestion.  The next day, the report of bacteria was shown to be mistaken.

So much for scientific truth.  It exists, certainly, but it’s fragile and susceptible to the vagaries of human understanding.  Medical science is one thing, medical practice another.  Medical practice is fallible because people are fallible.  Medical science is uncertain because it is based on observations, surveys, statistics, probabilities.  Nonetheless, the interaction of the two branches of medicine produces continuing and wonderful advances.  As you say on p. 156, “claims do not have to be true be effective.”

Since your aim is to reduce and even overcome the distance between the humanities and the natural sciences, I assume you mean this dictum also to apply to the sciences.  I doubt that you would find much disagreement on that from any quarter.  Yet the discussion of truth in your introduction (indexed “5,9,” but actually extensive) stakes claims for truth.  You aim “to understand what is historically true,” and you don’t even blanch when the friend who challenges you understands that as a claim “that you’re saying things that are true.”  Truths are not exclusive, but they are “certainly [not] false.”  And you rebut the “very compelling and serious critique, within the intellectual field, of the very idea of truth.”  (The twofold “very” there works cleverly at cross purposes; it’s a “very compelling critique,” but only of the “very idea,” not of any more general notion of truth.)  And, to consolidate, you reject the notion of humanist “knowledge as only merely possibly true, but not ‘really’ true.”  Indeed, if you “bypass the humanities,” you may be forgoing “true pictures of the world.”  Strong stuff, that.

Yet the briefer, but still substantial unindexed discussion in chapter one strikes different notes.  Wilhelm Windelband’s conception of truth seems distinctly more guarded.  Scientific experiments produce “true-enough repetition” Here, hyphenating the qualifiers brings them closer to “tru-ish” than to “sufficiently true.”  That “things interact” is “especially true for concepts, though it may well be true of anything”; in this formulation, truth is a merely relative value.  And even the relativity of truth is itself only relatively true: “Windelband’s intuition…is true” only “from a certain perspective.”  In his wake, “humanist scholars…think, like Windelband, that their method describes something true about the world.”  A lot more modest, this.  To be sure, to “humanist scholars” (but not to you) the nomothetic approach “feel[s] so powerful, so right, so true?”  But they need to be taught a lesson, namely that their approach isn’t unique, let alone uniquely privileged.

I have to say that I find your scrutiny both bracing and, yes, correct.  You aim to rectify attitudes and then adjust curricula to enhance the true value of the humanities.  Still, true attitudes might be different in kind from ”really true” knowledge even where “really” gets marked as scared.  And so I’d like to invite you to reflect a little more on the meaning, or the various meanings, you attribute to the little word “true” as well as the bigger word “truth.”  Truth isn’t a topic in chapter two, but it returns in chapter three, if now unsystematically and, again, unindexed.  Here truth is variable; a new perspective can “alter” the “truth” of your knowledge.  There are different angles; humanists are out for “the most socially compelling version of interpersonal truth.”  If we don’t say “true things with 100 percent certainty, then, if nothing else, we are at least trying to.”  Truth starts seeming more like a regulative ideal, less and less like a possible possession, glossed at another moment as “reasonable, epistemologically grounded, shareable in common,” but definitely “short of utopia.”  “And yet humanists regularly make verifiable truth-claims.”  And yet, on the other hand, your account of Max Weber draws pointed attention to the limitations of mere correctness, particularly the “nearly obvious correctness” of one geographer’s watchword that, alas, “puts the reader epistemologically in the shit,” and not just in, but “deeply” in.

Mere facts won’t save mankind.  That’s why, instead of “quantitative, scientific, ‘precise’ thought,” you want “to teach students how to think humanistically.”  That one, I have to confess, is a truism, not solid enough to be a truth.

My favorite aphorism comes from Thoreau’s “Natural History of Massachusetts”: “Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth.”  Is Thoreau’s “one day” a prediction–near-term? long-term?–or a utopian dream?  I admit that, though a long-standing, great admirer of yours, I approached your new book with some wariness.  In the event, I found it powerfully conceived, powerfully researched, and powerfully argued.  You want to make the humanities flower and, along the way, the sciences too, where hypothesis-confirmation too often takes the place of the rich thought promoted in your concluding summary of humanist method.  Like any great book, it has its kinks, but the sort of kinks that kick readers into heightened alertness.  It is in that spirit that I ask you to clarify the coloration and the aroma of your blossoms.

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Response to Brown

Eric Hayot

Dear Marshall,

My first thought, upon finishing your response, was to laugh and ask myself, who’s in the shit now?

But as long as I’m here I think I will try to wallow. Does the book have a coherent, sustained theory of the truth? Probably not. I would have had to do more work, more work than I can do here. But I do think that some of the inconsistencies that may arise can be clarified, if not resolved. Let me try to do that, as an opening to more conversation.

“Truth” happens at the center of a set of social practices that define it; it is the end of a process (even when presented as self-evident). At any moment the process and the social formations that surround it (the divining rod and the priest, the test tube and the scientist) contest and compete against a number of other such processes, which together compose a structure or pattern that can be helpfully described with Raymond Williams’s old residual/dominant/emergent idea. 

The last centuries have seen the rise of new dominant truth-process, a process that is like all such processes both an abstraction and a fantasy—an abstraction in the sense of an accurate and useful generalization/simplification of a process, a fantasy in the sense that such a simplification will tend to take on a life of its own as the thing-as-such, allowing its users to forget the actually existing complexities and behaviors that make it up. The difference between something like the “scientific method” and “how scientists behave when making science in the institutional/professional context” captures some of that distinction. I do not claim that such an abstraction is “false” (as opposed to true) insofar as it distorts or erases the “true” version of science (which would be in this structure something like the “how scientists behave” model). In fact I think this is a bad use of the true/false distinction; or rather a use that has its own ideology of truth (that the description at the anthropological or concrete level is always truer than the abstract or fantastical one), to which I am opposed.

The rise of this new dominant truth-process (associated with but not fully of “science”) has produced a critique, one that is basically a version of a version of Foucault, which says that all truth-claims and truth-processes are suspicious because they are associated with the production of social dominance. This critique takes a particular form in the modern humanities, whose logic I explain in the book, that makes, against this dominant truth-process, counter-truth claims based on another process that consistently inverts (as the idiographic does the nomothetic) the perceived/caricatured version of the scientific dominant. 

That produces in turn a situation that I can only call “weird,” which is the adjective I use when I’m trying not to use “paradoxical” or “self-contradictory,” in which humanist scholars resist the idea that they are making truth-claims (because to do so would be to align themselves with dominance) while in fact making all kinds of truth-claims anyway, and relying along the way on a number of other kinds of truth-claims.

A complete mapping out of the regime of truth-claiming that governs humanistic scholarship would identify, I think, five or six major types, of which only one is ideologically dominant, for this group of truth-claim makers. So for instance you can frequently find in humanist work unsupported truth-claims about well-established facts small (for instance the publication date of a novel, or the fact that French is spoken in France) and large (that the novel is a genre that emerges in the modern period; that texts often don’t mean what they say)[1]; quick-hitting secondarily supported claims (the kind of thing where you refer someone quickly to a footnote, or, in certain citational styles, simply stick [Authorname 2008] at the end of a sentence); lesser-known but not taken to be essentially arguable, important claims that need to be set up with significant support and evidence, but are not the subject of major argument; claims that announce themselves as novel (either entirely so or novel in relation to what others have said) and require the most evidentiary support; and claims that rely for their force on the lower-level claims made elsewhere in the work. 

My argument is that the humanities have chosen to organize their own self-conceptualization around only the second-to-last of these, and indeed to a particular version of the second-to-last of these, namely the idiographic type.

So here we have what I described earlier as a tension between an abstraction, on the one hand, and an anthropology, on the other, where the abstraction reduces the various types of claims (and their organization into a system) I describe above into a single kind of truth-claim, and the anthropology demonstrates a complex variety of practices that exist prior to their abstraction. Since I am not against abstraction my response cannot be: “the anthropological description is the true one, stop abstracting things!” For that would reproduce the very logic I am trying to address—it would repeat the idiographic ideology of truth by assigning the “real” truth to the description of behavior and the “false” truth to the abstraction. My response is instead: we need a better abstraction.

(We also need a better description! One thing I toyed with while writing this book was to do something like I did with Elements of Academic Style, where I reconstructed as a kind of rhetorical practice the organization of truth-claims, attending to them as a mode of production. That book would have been called How to Think Like a Humanist. Part III of Humanist Reason is a short version of that idea.)

Why do we need a better abstraction? Well, that’s mainly the argument of Part I, but I would say, now, in response to your response, that a better abstraction would give us a working theory of truth-claiming—and a description of truth-processes—that would (1) empower people and thinkers and ideas I care about in a couple of ways, and (2) be truer than the one we have now.

I could have stopped at “empower people and thinkers”! That would have been the wiser, more Rortyian thing to do. And in many respects it would have been enough. I think the current humanist ideology of truth is bad for humanist scholarship, and that it participates in a system of truth-claims that is also bad for the natural sciences—that is bad, in fact, for all of us. But I didn’t.

I didn’t because I wanted to challenge myself to come up with an ideology of truth that would not fall into absolutism (which is a surefire path to being wrong, if not immediately then certainly in the long run) but also not fall into a pure relativism/historicism, or a kind of strong philosophical kicking the can down the road (à la Rorty). In short: I didn’t want to punt.

That’s how I found my way to Weber, and to the idea of the true as that which can be held in common, as that which is produced necessarily in dialogue. This democratic idea of the truth has the advantage, as I see it, of fulfilling the single most important feature of the idea of the true—that it should be true for everyone—while also leaving lots of room (via dialogue) for the idea that any truth, no matter how widely agreed-on, can always be the subject of significant revision by actors in the future. In this way you get a model of truth that is the result of the right kind of process, and you also get a process that can never be complete. If tomorrow we discover that the universe actually is riding on the back of a giant turtle, then talking about that fact will get us to new truths, and our old truths will be, by the standard of this new one, no longer true. But the process will, I think, still be valid. 

A truth-process that is democratic and dialogic best fulfills, I would argue, the function that the truth is supposed, socially, to provide. (What is that function? To provide us with language to distinguish that which can be held in common from that which need not, or cannot be; to allow social force to flow through claims that deploy, correctly, the truth-function; to participate in a framework for the adjudication and meta-adjudication of that force and those distinctions.) That is the sense in which my description of the truth attempts to be true: true to a social function, true in its capacity to perform the work that we need it to perform. (This probably makes me a Rortyian after all.) 

I don’t know, honestly, if I managed to hold that idea of the truth together for the whole of Humanist Reason. I was juggling at various moments a few different versions or meanings of the idea—this one, which I knew I would get to, the stupid economistic one that doesn’t think the humanities ever prove anything, the equally foolish humanistic one that was afraid of making truth-claims while nonetheless making them all the time, the idiographic practice oriented to the idea of truth-from-below, and probably a few more besides. But this is where I was trying to end up.

I feel like I’ve explained myself better than I did in the book. But it may be that what felt like digging out will be, to you, more digging down. In any case it smells ok where I am, and there’s enough fresh air for further dialogue.

[1] Note that these facts can in some texts be taken as the subject of direct investigation—their facticity can be challenged, and indeed undermined completely. But work that does that will in turn take another set of facts as true; the totality of system of truth-claims in a given piece of work will always include claims of several types, including this one.

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Dispersing the Humanities

Sheila Liming

What, if anything, constitutes “truth” within scholarly humanist discourse? This is the question that Eric Hayot explores in his Humanist Reason, and one that prompts him to grapple, on a rhetorical and functional level, with questions of what humanists do, or what they believe they do, when they speak according to the dictates of their disciplinary training. It’s a tricky question because, as Hayot demonstrates, conversations about “truth,” when they are deployed within the confines of humanities research, quickly arrive at a point of impasse. 

Hayot sketches the paradox of humanist “truth,” which works like this: if a humanist professes to assert the truth, that’s bad; on the other hand, if a humanist refuses to engage in discussions of truth, that’s also, potentially, bad. The first happens because humanists view themselves as participating in a “battle against [a] particular ideology of truth” and that stance “helps create a world which humanists warn one another not to say that they think they are saying things that are true” (6). But the second, Hayot warns, happens because humanists are too eager to “casual[ly] dismiss” their own knowledge on the grounds that it is “only merely possibly true,” which in turn “restricts the kinds of knowing that can be available to policymakers and voters and institution-runners” and the like (7). In other words, for a humanist, to insist on truth constitutes a violation of disciplinary norms, but to resist truth is to be judged irrelevant in the eyes of everyone who operates outside of those norms.   

Humanist Reason documents Hayot’s search for a middle point between these two apparent poles, between insistence and resistance. Along the way, he takes great pains, and devotes a lot of attention, to describing the problems associated with each of those two positions. What results is an exercise in dialectics and, to many, it may to feel like a familiar one since it recalls the work of Michel Foucault. Half a century ago, Foucault observed the differences between scientific and humanistic knowledge via an investigation of the role that the author plays within each. The difference in the way that authors are viewed or treated, Foucault previously argued, is the difference between the sciences and the humanities: whereas science “returns” to its authors for the sake of locating “basic and constructive omission,” the humanities “rediscovers” its authors time and again, adding links to a never-ending chain of what Foucault labels “isomorphic” knowledge production. Through such rediscovery, humanists seek to reposition old authors and old wisdom, inserting both within “current forms of knowledge” (Foucault, “What is An Author?,” 1634). The humanist glance is multidirectional, looking forward and backward, while the scientific one, we are told, remains fixed on the horizon ahead. 

This is why, in Foucault’s view, humanistic knowledge is not valued to the same degree as scientific knowledge. And this is also why, in Hayot’s view, humanistic knowledge does not matter to non-humanities disciplines today, though humanists themselves garner plenty of insight from research taking place in other scholarly arenas. In describing the problem of why humanist knowledge doesn’t count, and in working towards his plan of how to make it count, Hayot indulges in a history that is older than Foucault, even. He focuses on a period of German intellectual history, 1850-1890, which bore witness to similar debates about disciplinary value, and borrows two figures of speech—the words “nomothetic” and “idiographic”—from the philosopher Wilhelm Windelband in order to shore up the connections between Windelband’s epoch and our current one. As concepts, “nomothetic” and “idiographic” are not new of course, but worthy of “rediscovery,” to recall Foucault, and thus Hayot uses them to get at the perceived contemporary division between humanistic and scientific knowledge. That knowledge, as a result, ends up looking less divisive than it did at first glance. 

Nomothetic knowledge, Hayot explains, is supposed to refer to generalizable laws (28) while idiographic knowledge (in a way that recalls both Foucault’s isomorphism as well as Ferdinand de Saussure’s langue / parole) is supposed to designate wisdom that is gleaned from, or associated with, a unique instance (a historical event, a specific text, an individual author). Hayot reveals how these binaries are actually not binaries at all—scientists are just as invested in the unique and the particular as humanists are, it’s just that their discursive scholarly norms have evolved to camouflage that interest—and how, in spite of it all, “institutional reification” has sought to maintain them and thus “kept us from seeing alternatives to the way we think now” (33). 

Hayot, meanwhile, is very interested in seeing and imagining such alternatives, which is where the “Plan” of the book’s subtitle comes into play. Having established that the two main branches of knowledge production are not as diametrically opposed as many have otherwise assumed, he outlines a proposal for their further convergence. While acknowledging that the such changes are “almost certainly impossible,” he calls, first, for dispensing with undergraduate majors in the humanities and, second, for dispersing humanist knowledge by scattering it throughout the undergraduate curriculum (167). Doing this, he predicts, would serve to redirect the goals of humanist education, making it more about engagement and participation in a wider discourse of critical thinking and less about mastery of an individualized branch associated with that thinking. The overall objective would involve the cultivation of an active critical consciousness rather than knowledge of a particular discipline’s unique components (a historical event, a specific text, an individual author). 

As a scientist, I read all of this with interest—especially the part about uprooting humanistic knowledge and replanting it, like groundcover, to grow all throughout the undergraduate curriculum. And mind you, when I speak as a scientist, I do so because that is my professional designation, one which has been conferred upon me by the institution that I work for which, a few decades ago, attempted to overhaul its curriculum in a manner similar to the one that Hayot outlines in his plans. I do not speak as a trained scientist, or as someone who conducts research in the sciences or even teaches science; rather, I speak as someone who majored in English and got a C+ in Biology, which was the last science class I ever took, back in 2005, when I was in college. I speak as a scientist because that is what I am called now, in spite of my lackluster academic record where scientific pursuits are concerned. When my college restructured its curriculum to focus on professionalization and a career-focused undergraduate education, it converted all of its degrees—even English degrees, which are the kind I’m involved in overseeing—to Bachelor of Science degrees. This was done, as I understand it, in an effort to avoid the stigma associated with arts and humanities degrees. Students who progress through my creative writing and literature seminars and go on to graduate now earn B.S. credentials where they might have once earned B.A.s or even B.F.A.s. That makes me, as their professor, a scientist. Or something. 

The point, of course, is that I am not a scientist and that I do not become any more of one by simply being called one. But the compulsion to seek out new words for old things—to view renaming as an extension of rediscovery—is, I would argue, likewise a key feature of discourse in the humanities. At the college where I work, it is also a strategy that has been thoroughly put to the test: our undergraduates do not major in disciplines but in jobs, or in purported jobs, like Cyber Security Engineer, Graphic Designer, or Professional Writer. We have no majors in the humanities. Instead, to complement all that professional training, students are exposed to dashes of humanistic thought through what is known as the Core Curriculum. They take two Core classes per semester on topics like navigating information, critical thinking, and interdisciplinary research methods. Then, in the final semester of their senior year, that somewhat amorphous training culminates in a capstone project which is supposed to unite the skills of their chosen major with some of the scholarly approaches they’ve learned about in their Core classes. Our curriculum, much like the plan that Hayot describes in Humanist Reason, endeavors to make humanistic training and knowledge central to the work that any student would do, regardless of their major or career path. A 2013 article in The Atlantic, even, praises my college’s attempts to do, ten years ago, much of what Hayot proposes today, lauding the “inventive” and “ideal” qualities of all that curricular restructuring. 

But experience has taught me this: what gets dispersed, especially within hyper-professionalized and hyper-specialized arenas, also tends to get discredited. I’ve learned this from teaching in such a curriculum, which is one that struggles to make space for, interpret, value, or reward me and my colleagues’ scholarly training, much of which is based in the humanities. And I’ve also learned it from listening to my students, most of whom (even the Professional Writing majors who, given that program’s adjacence to traditional humanistic training, ought to know better) resent their Core classes, viewing them as a waste of time. When an institution’s focus falls on a select range of outcomes—jobs, in this case—anything that threatens the success of those primary outcomes starts to look like a hindrance. It also becomes progressively more inscrutable over time, as the appreciation for specialized knowledge wanes when there are none being trained to receive it.

Hayot’s plan is thus one that I agree with on principle even as I struggle, every day, with the way its effects play out in practice. And in response to it, my main question is this: How do we go about creating audiences for the kind of knowledge that we, as humanists, value—the kind that furnishes “useful guides to understanding and explaining the world” (7), in his words—without disciplinary training? If, to paraphrase the work of the philosopher Yves Citton, institutional frameworks function as declarations about what is worth paying attention to, how do we cultivate those attentional capacities while devoting less curricular attention to them, and encouraging others to do the same?  And if we do uproot humanistic knowledge and let it grow wild all throughout the undergraduate curriculum, how can we prevent its being viewed (by students, especially) as something akin to a weed—a necessary evil and a distraction from the real aims of education, meaning job preparedness? 

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Response to Liming

Eric Hayot

Dear Sheila,

Those questions at the end are great questions. In fact they’re the questions, in many respects, for the institutional future of the humanities as I understand it. And your experience at Champlain College offers a powerful cautionary tale for overly enthusiastic reformers like me: be careful what you wish for.

Let me try to break out and paraphrase a couple of your questions:

  1. How do we assure the future of the humanities if we don’t have disciplines?

So here I should be clearer: I don’t think we should get rid of the disciplines entirely. The modular/widespread curricular model I propose in Humanist Reason leaves the door open for students to pursue curricular pathways that look very much like the traditional majors. I also say there that I think the graduate/PhD programs in the disciplines should stay more or less as they are: though I don’t love disciplinarity’s disadvantages, I see quite clearly the advantages that accrue to historically stable institutions—conferences, journals, discourse communities, patterns of thought that do not have to be reinvented each time, intellectual traditions, and the like. For me then, the disciplines “stay,” though surely not exactly as-is. But they stay because disciplined knowledge is the key, as you rightly observe, to the continuation of the humanities as scholarly fields. 

It’s not that having disciplines is necessary to the humanities as a whole; if the disciplines disappeared tomorrow people would go on reading and watching and otherwise enjoying culture, having opinions, critical or evaluative, about it, and of course writing and talking about it. But my argument throughout Humanist Reason has been that the results of humanistic scholarship are valuable regardless of the state of the humanities outside the university, and that that value stems from both their capacity to increase our understanding of the world and their ability to transform the ways we think about it (and hence, through our actions, our institutions, our laws, our discourse, and so on, to change it). We need the disciplines because the knowledge the disciplines produce is useful. (And we know that that’s true because we have lots of proof.)

As you say, without disciplinary training, you really can’t learn what the disciplines teach; the humanities are not just topics but in fact modes of thinking. It’s not enough to teach about “the good life” or “the problem of justice” unless you have some sense of how one might approach such a question (historically, logically, inferentially, deductively, archivally) and how those approaches affect the results we get. To me these methods constitute the core of the modern (institutionalized) humanities; jettisoning them is out of the question. In fact I think they should be made more explicit in the undergraduate curriculum than they currently are, which is why when I imagine “skill” modules I would include not only the traditionally humanistic speaking and writing skills among them, but also things like “how to think historically” or “how to think about society” or “how to think about culture”: courses that would assert that the core of the modern humanities is composed of a set of epistemological approaches.

2. If we manage to spread the humanities across the curriculum, how do we avoid having students feel that the humanities are just the dumb useless stuff you have to pretend to be interested in, while waiting to be able to focus on what’s really going to get you a job?

My sense is that some students are going to think this no matter what—not everyone likes the humanities, just like not everyone likes the natural sciences. But the main factor influencing student beliefs on this topic is not, for me, anything about the humanities, but instead the debt burden US society now imposes on the vast majority of its undergraduates: what Sarah Brouillette has recently called “the university’s role as a site of production of indebted life” (https://www.publicbooks.org/reading-after-the-university-english-departments/).

I continue to believe that the most fundamental source of the current situation in the humanities disciplines is the attempt, conscious and unconscious, by the forces of capital and the forces of social conservatism to produce a population of citizens too indebted to do anything other than acquiesce to domination. We have decent evidence of both the humanistic and the social scientific variety (some of it is in my piece “The Sky is Falling”) for the idea that students under debt pressure move their college development towards job-oriented fields and away from humanistic disciplines. And when you’re paying $40,000 a year (or more, or less) for college, finding out that the institution is forcing you, “for your own good,” to spend two of those years studying stuff that you technically don’t have to learn, well, frankly, it’s a lot harder to feel good about your humanities courses than when tuition is close to free.

That students are wrong or short-sighted about what their “own good” is or could be, that they might benefit in ways that they can’t yet (and may never) understand from their humanities courses—well, yes. But that doesn’t change the fact that by imposing that debt burden upon them and their families directly—rather than absorbing it, as we should, across society as a whole—we force them into a situation in which they cannot afford, or do not feel they can afford, to make long-term speculative bets on their own happiness. (This for exactly the same reasons that you don’t want to force poor people to avoid medical care until they have to go to the emergency room: another place where we have lots of evidence that short-term profit produces on net long-term social expenses, and allows these latter to be externalized onto the body politic.)

My answer to your immediate question is, then, I don’t know. Wait for the revolution, I guess.

But in the meantime it does seem to me that even in these conditions there are things we can do in our curricula and in our courses that might help our students (a) value our knowledge and our classes, and (b) understand why they are valuable. We know what some of them are, since they are what happens in our classrooms every day of the semester; we know that we are reaching some of our students, since they tell us so in person and in course evaluations; we know when our teaching moves them, because we feel it in the energy and excitement of the room. And we know that many of them understand that the humanities (as epistemological modes and as sites of pedagogy) have something to offer that they would choose more of if they could; every single one of us has had a student tell us, “I wish I could take more courses like this, but I can’t, because I’m an engineering (or nursing) major,” or, “This is the only class where I get to talk about my own ideas,” etc.

My effort has been to try to take those feelings and those ideas and to make them more explicit in the curriculum—to use our undergraduate curriculum to speak in ways that make sense to the current audience for it (an audience under debt pressure). This means for me changing three things at the same time: (1) the structure of the curriculum (majors, concentrations, minors, etc.); (2) the language in which the curriculum presents itself to students (the names of our courses and programs); (3) the articulation of the curriculum in the classroom (focus on topics relevant to students; not organized around disciplinary knowledge, at least early on); (4) the integration of metadiscourse into the curriculum (making clear what humanistic skills are; making clear what those skills do) and the classroom (talking actively about these things with students, rather than assuming that they’re obvious). All these seem to me to be more or less fully under faculty control, and therefore worth trying.

p.s. One more thing: it is possible to confuse a version of what I’m proposing in Humanist Reason with an unsubtle transformation of the humanities into service learning for job training, and to do so in a spirit that diminishes humanistic knowledge (both scholarship and the kinds of knowledge we provoke for students) in a maximally cartoonish way. Turning all your degrees into B.S. degrees is, frankly, exactly the kind of bullshit I’m trying to avoid; so is the idea that all knowledge production is “science.” I recognize that much of what I’m saying risks being co-opted in this way. I was trying to write a book that would give us language that would allow us to be brave enough to imagine change, and to pursue it, without co-opting ourselves, or being co-opted by those who do not wish us well.)

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Humanist Deliberations:
A Response to Eric Hayot

Andries Hiskes

Dear Eric,

For the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking with, through, and occasionally ‘against’ your book, Humanist Reason (as a good literary scholar, to think ‘about’ it would be confessing to mild heresy. Although that happened too). While I was gathering my thoughts, jotting down notes, considering what the focus of my response to your book was going to be, I was invited to participate in a session where a group of higher-ed professionals would reflect on an elective program on inclusion and diversity at a university of applied science, that would be aimed at students from all departments and programs. The program would be 10 weeks in duration, and a core team of lecturers and researchers had been working hard to develop the contours of the study program and its aims. 

As the session started, we were informed that we would begin with a presentation by an external research bureau that had conducted a large-scale survey on the perception and experiences concerning inclusion and diversity of students, recent graduates, and employees of the university. PowerPoint was fired up, showing a series of slides of the different ways in which these groups each encountered difficulties on these topics. As the presentation progressed, the presenters crafted a careful narrative on how they came to formulate their questions. They were largely about what were referred to as identity characteristics: disability, gender, race, sexual orientation. All the usual suspects. As the presentation went on, my thoughts drifted to some lines from your book: “methods are also objects. And vice versa” (131). And that “If every “concrete,” phenomenal object can be recognized as abstraction—which it can—then it is also true that every abstraction can also be understood, from another perspective, as a concretion” (130). One of the final slides showed that 39% of respondents had experienced some kind of discrimination on the basis of identity characteristics in the university, and 30% had been witness to such discrimination. Moreover–the presenters expressed triumphantly–a large majority of respondents, over 80%, felt that the university didn’t do enough when it came to inclusion and diversity, and that an elective was a valuable addition, but not fully sufficient. 

As these last numbers were shown, I exchanged knowing glances with a social scientist friend of mine. We raised the question: “but who were in that 39%? What if 100% of people that have experienced some form of marginalization based on identity characteristics constituted that 39% of the total respondents?”. These numbers weren’t at hand, the presenters replied, but they could of course be looked up later.

My issue with such a large-scale survey (that won’t surprise many humanists) was how its use and its results were employed as a justification for the potential existence of this elective—that it required this type of empirical justification in the first place. After all, 80% had said we weren’t doing enough! But what if this had been 15%? And what if the number of respondents that had experienced discrimination of some kind (and was willing to confess in a survey) was 12%? 

As my social scientist friend and I offered our feedback, I thought about another line from your book: “In a world where people believe that X is stable, humanists will work to demonstrate its instability; in a world where people think that X is unstable, humanists will work to demonstrate its stability” (154). X is here not only the method of the large-scale survey, but also the narrative that is constructed around such a survey, the relationship between them (which, in this case, was one of justification via method). But, if we read a little bit into your quote, this also makes the humanist a contrarian figure, trying to stabilize what is deemed (socially, culturally, scientifically, politically) unstable or vice versa. 

I connect this point to article 9 of the third chapter of Humanist Reason: that the work humanists do has value, and more specifically, what you delineate as social and scientific/epistemological value. On the way in which value to humanist work is socially ascribed, you write that “The tendency of the most effective forms of humanist work to expand and to belong to everyone, so that their results no longer count as a matter of humanist work, partially explains why people imagine that the humanities do not create social value” (155-156). The quote seems to suggest that (some of) the topics/subjects humanists work on are so socially ubiquitous (as is their relevance) that it can be hard to trace how work done in the humanities has impacted the way we think about these topics in society at large, even though there has been a strong ‘trickle down’ effect (like work in gender theory, animal studies etc.). The issue is that this is something that every humanist would aggressively nod in agreement with, but it still does not necessarily persuade the relevance of humanist work to a wider, non-humanist audience. To come back to my (ideographically described, of course!) case study, most of my feedback was appreciated by the people who were present, even if I took the contrarian position (by destabilizing what was presented as stable—their method). But, while I introduced myself as a literary scholar in the introduction round, I wonder how many of the attendants would establish any sort of connection between my background and training and the nature of my comments.

I want to connect this to the final chapter of the book, which argues that 1. Undergraduate studies should not be organized around institutionalized disciplines. And 2. Humanist reason should be found everywhere in the university. As someone with a background in literary studies who is currently teaching at a nursing department, I find myself both recognizing and agreeing with most of the points you make in this last chapter. I teach nursing students to think about matters that they do not necessarily think of as ‘humanistic’ (if they even know the term). Like the way in which we produce knowledge concerning the human body, or how patients and caregivers employ narratives to make sense of experiences of illness, or how, besides care ethics, we can also think about care aesthetics. 

Most of the students that have taken these classes find them valuable, and I believe this has to do with the fact that I can show them how X (or what they believe to be X) is unstable, rather than the often positivist X is presented to them. I try to work and think with them on how to approach and understand X (like how we construct knowledge about the human body) from different kinds of perspective. I find this work both rewarding and enriching specifically because it challenges how I can and should translate what I have learned to a different field of study.

And yet. As mentioned, most of the people I teach and work with do not themselves attribute what I bring to the table due to my training in literary studies. When a colleague, who is a philosopher, left the department, no one raised the question that the knowledge and skills he brought in, as a philosopher, were being lost to the rest of the department; it remained unrecognized. Simultaneously, we often actively recruit lecturers on topics such medical biology, nursing skills and so on–especially when colleagues who teach those classes leave. But, in line with the arguments you make in this last chapter, we could question the value of recognition via disciplinary attribution.

So, my questions are as follows: If we create broader (and inter-, trans- or post-disciplinary) humanities curricula, how could we strive towards better and more effective recognition and social valuation for the work we do and the knowledge we ourselves produce from both a wider range of other academic domains as well as society, considering the social, political and cultural ubiquity of the topics we often work on? Secondly, do you still see any affordances left in which the categorical thinking that disciplines manifest (like ‘history’, ‘literary studies’, ‘linguistics’ and so on) may aid in the persuasiveness of the value of our work and its relevance?

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Response to Hiskes

Eric Hayot

Are there any more dramatic words in the English language than, “PowerPoint was fired up”? How can it be that a thousand novels have not already launched themselves from this proud slipway, this “Sing, O Muse” of the Microsoft century? Surely they exist, though the only instance of the phrase I can find online comes from a 2019 memoir by Edward Snowden. (The question of whether its influence on you was direct, or a matter of the structural ventriloquism of the Zeitgeist, I leave to a future biographer.)

All of which is to say that I found your account of the DEI presentation, and your questions for me, both delightful and provocative. Word was fired up, and I penned (sad anachronism!) this reply.

You ask: “If we create broader (and inter-, trans- or post-disciplinary) humanities curricula, how could we strive towards better and more effective recognition and social valuation for the work we do and the knowledge we ourselves produce from both a wider range of other academic domains as well as society, considering the social, political and cultural ubiquity of the topics we often work on?”

I think we lived for a while in which a certain set of social conditions (related to what Raymond Williams would call “residual” forms of approval/recognition, or, less pleasantly, to the role universities play in the reproduction of upper-class cultural capital) made the justification for the humanities more or less obvious (just as they made, for a while, the study of Latin or Greek obvious, well beyond the era of their clear epistemological or financial utility). During that time there existed many forms of humanist self-description and self-justification, which may or may not have been successful in increasing respect/recognition; I don’t know. In any case they existed.

Now the social conditions have changed. The change has been a long time coming but it seems now to have reached an inflection point. It is certainly the case, as your story illustrates, that the kinds of thinking and knowledge the humanities make possible is not particularly visible these days. And of course where it is visible, or made visible, it is often so that certain social groups can criticize it and attack it—as we see with attacks on feminism, queer theory, and “wokeness.” So the problem is both a lack of visibility (in certain contexts) and a kind of hyper-visibility in others. It’s also worth saying that in very few of these cases are the “humanities” at stake as such; most people don’t know what they are. But that’s what people mean when they talk about, for instance, “woke university professors”—not the scientists but the humanists.

Part of the problem is that it’s not clear, especially at the university level, how humanities thinking works as a whole, or what such humanistic thinking does in the social. Humanistic thinking certainly does things—it affected your meeting after all, and it affects the impact your philosopher colleague had—but that doing is not attributed to the humanities or indeed to any humanistic discipline. It’s not clear to most people what it would mean to “think like a historian” or “think like a literature major,” even though professors in both those fields could begin to give you an answer.

So what can we do? 

Well, first, I would say that if we are complaining that our students don’t know something important about the humanities—which is that they are a collection of linked modes of thought, and have a history of doing things in the social—then we have one easy way to solve the problem: we can teach them. I don’t mean teach them in the usual implicit way: I mean that we need to teach them these things as explicit matters of our curriculum. We didn’t used to have to teach them, sure, but now we do. So the easiest thing to do is for each of us in the humanities to teach—in every single class that we teach—the following:

  1. That the class, the methods that organize it, the questions it pursues, and the skills it imparts all belong to the specific field (history, literature, etc.) and to a larger field called “the humanities.”
  2. That the humanities have an intellectual history—a history of methods and of research accomplishments—that includes the development of specialized modes of thought, research methods, patterns for conclusion-drawing, key resolved and unresolved questions—in which the specific class is taking place.
  3. That this humanistic method, though complex and fuzzy (in sometimes useful ways), has a history of having effects on the social that are comparable to the kinds of effects on the social that students are used to assuming that science has or engineering has.
  4. That the specific frame of the course takes place here (wherever that is) in that longer history, and that its goals appear here in that history; that the methods we are learning and the ways of learning them are products of that history and have value within both that history and the building up of skills in humanistic work. 

I now do this, not just in one class period but frequently over the course of a single semester. I believe that we need to teach the students what they need to know in order to understand what we are teaching them. I believe that because I believe that it’s pedagogically important to do so. But I also think that doing so helps solve the problem you’ve identified above.

What would happen if all humanists did this for the next 20 years? Maybe nothing in the overall picture. But I am sure that our students would learn more, and would learn more from what they learn, than they would otherwise—because I have seen that happen in my classrooms.

Your next question: “Secondly, do you still see any affordances left in which the categorical thinking that disciplines manifest (like ‘history’, ‘literary studies’, ‘linguistics’ and so on) may aid in the persuasiveness of the value of our work and its relevance?”

When I talk about reforming the undergraduate curriculum in the humanities I emphasize that I do not think that the current graduate disciplines need to be subject to the same kind of interdisciplinizing, radical treatment. There is enormous stored and shared value in the institutions of the disciplines as they exist, value in the conferences, journals, and professional associations, and value in the intellectual histories of each discipline as they shape themselves and create dialogues over time. It would be foolish to simply do away with them, even if we know that within this ecosystem of disciplines it is also often useful to cross-fertilize, to break out of one’s own discipline’s standard questions, to continue doing the overall work that we want to do.

In short my recommendations for the radical remaking/rethinking of the humanities are focused much more on the undergraduate curriculum and the general public/social discourse of the humanities than they are on the traditional graduate disciplines.

That said, I do also believe—and am beginning to build an argument in this direction—that the aesthetic/literary history of the twentieth century, during which those disciplines took their modern form and institutionalized themselves, has some especially unusual characteristics that may make the disciplines as a whole worth rethinking. The shortest version of my argument goes something like this: (1) The role that literature plays in society as a transmitter of elite culture and as a seismograph of the historical more generally is shockingly important for most of the last 5,000 years. (2) The assumption that all language learning should eventually lead to the reading of highbrow literature in the new language is part of that importance. (3) In the twentieth century in particular literature has a place as the reigning art, considered in terms of its capacity to capture the Zeitgeist of a historical moment or to register the stirrings of new futures (we talk about the possibility of a great American novel; not about a great American painting or piece of sculpture). (4) New storytelling media have completely changed that situation, and literature is now not only less prestigious but actually less important than it was. (5) The disciplines have not adequately updated themselves to reflect this shift. (6) A new reconfiguration of the disciplines ought to invite literary scholars to recognize the ways in which a local historical formation (namely the outsized importance of literature) has caused them to make a variety of interesting and important institutional and epistemological errors (the overreliance on form as novelty is one major instance here).

If I could wave a wand to magically transform the humanities I would, accordingly, give much less place to literature in the current disciplinary formation than it currently holds. (At most US universities the literature scholars outnumber the historians, and often the anthropologists and sociologists combined). I also believe that the removal of literature from the other humanistic fields has made those fields less interesting and intellectually serious than they might have been. If it weren’t going to be difficult to manage at the institutional level, I might like to collapse all the humanities under the general rubric of “historical anthropology,” which is what I think we really do. In fact if I could I would rename the humanities something like “historical anthropology” (already a name like sciences humaines is deeply preferable, but historical anthropology works better in my view; the Chinese translation of humanities, 人文学 renwenxue, means the study of people and texts, which is not bad but misses the historical element). 

By virtue of its calling out both to the idea of the centrality of human life to the work we do, and with its strong emphasis on the historical element—which is at the core, for me, of the methods and the problems that the humanities today encounter in both their actual work and their public discourse—something like “historical anthropology” captures nicely both the task and the promise of the work we do. That’s why it’s the sort of thing I, for one, get fired up thinking about.

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Two Ways of Seeing the University

Jeffrey J. Williams

Much of the commentary on the university, particularly from humanists, goes back to Kant, or more generally the German research university, which emerged in the late 18th and early 19th century. It is taken as a model because it fostered advanced disciplinary research, unlike the British or American systems at the time, which were largely organized around undergraduate colleges and followed a fixed, classical curriculum. Typically, the main point drawn from Kant is that the university is grounded on Reason, elaborated in his Conflict of the Faculties (1798). For instance, Bill Readings, in University in Ruins (1996), takes Kant’s Reason as one of two cornerstone ideas of the university, albeit one that has been lost. (The other is from Wilhelm von Humboldt, who had a hand in building the German university system in the 19th century and held that its grounding idea was “national culture.” That rationale continues to inform most universities in the US, especially public ones.)  

Kant’s Reason recurs in many justifications for the humanities, including Eric Hayot’s Humanist Reason, which distinguishes the humanities according to its form of reasoning. For Kant, the division was between philosophy and the disciplines of theology, law, and medicine, whereas for Hayot and most other contemporary commentators, the division is more likely between the humanities and STEM. Kant held that philosophy was a privileged logical or epistemological referee for thinking that undergirds the disciplines within the university, whereas more recent justifications don’t usually assert quite as authoritative a role but petition for the distinctive qualities that the humanities bring alongside other disciplines. 

For the sake of comparison, I would call the Kantian view the idealist view of the university. The idealist view casts the university as grounded on and carrying out a primary idea, in a sense its Geist. That’s why it harks back to the German research university and its commentators: they form the origin from which all presumably descends. As I see it, Hayot follows this idealist line; as he puts it, “the intellectual work humanists do were all formed in this nineteenth-century crucible” of ideas (44). Hayot’s innovation is to call attention to Windelband’s lesser-known distinction between “idiographic” methods that focus on singular instances and “nomothetic” methods that aim to adduce the larger principles of phenomena. Hayot does this, of course, for a good reason: to defend the humanities in the face of recent dismissals and emphasize that it offers a distinctive contribution to knowledge, one that is an essential part of human understanding and a gap in nonhumanist approaches. Implicitly, Hayot also demonstrates the idiographic method: he examines a few select cases in the history of ideas. 

In contrast to the idealist view, I would pose a pragmatist view, that sees the university not as generated from the fundament of an idea but from the interests, needs, and constituencies that institutions serve, which are varied, often contradictory, changing over time, and fashioned in the wooly fabric of material, political, and cultural conditions. To talk about and moreover change the position of the humanities now, I think one has to look especially at those conditions, especially of academic labor, administration, and economy. This is not to dismiss talking about ideas—how can we not?—and I believe that one part of our struggles over higher ed is on the level of ideas. But in my view, the problem with the humanities is not that people lack the right idea of them, as Hayot suggests in a recent essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “The Humanities Have a Marketing Problem” (March 2021). Rather, the problem is that people give priority to other ideas and interests, like monetary or managerial ones. In other words, the humanities have a political economy problem, especially concerning labor. 

In keeping with a pragmatist view, if you look at the actual history of US higher education, research universities and their disciplines arose less from the principles of Reason and much more from conditions in the period after the Civil War. James Turner and Paul Barnard provide a needed corrective to the over-emphasis on the influence of the German university, reminding us how varied developments were and how the German model does not really account for the changes in American higher ed between 1850 and 1900 (“The German Model and the Graduate School: The University of Michigan and the Myth of the American University,” in The American College in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Roger L. Geiger [Vanderbilt UP, 2000], pp. 221-41). And if you look at the rise of disciplines in the US, they largely stem from practical education in fields like engineering that arose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Harvard forged electives under Charles Norton Eliot to accommodate students precisely not equipped in the humanities. In his 1869 Atlantic essay on “The New Education,” he doesn’t take the model of Germany; rather, he poses the idea that new elective tracks might serve less-prepared students, developing a multiple-track system whereby elite higher ed can carry on with a humanistic vision of wide intellectual training, whereas applied disciplines can forego that to follow a more practical track. Recall that this happens when professions like engineering, accounting, and many others are burgeoning to feed the exponential growth of new industries in the US, as David Noble recounts in America by Design. 

We can also see the undermining of the idealist view in Kant’s own situation, which spurred him to write Conflict of the Faculties. Rather than Reason, one could take it to show that the actual ground of the university is conflict or struggle among pragmatic interests, between then-dominant professions and the state and philosophy or the humanistic faculty. If you’ll recall, Kant distinguishes the “higher” faculties of law, medicine, and theology from the “lower” faculties of philosophy or what we would consider the humanities. The figure of height has caused some confusion: Kant was not attributing higher value to the higher faculties; rather, as professional or practical disciplines, they have a more direct connection with society, so are higher or closer to it. In contrast, the lower faculties focus on logic and language that undergird thinking, and because of that reflexive and critical orientation are more removed from the public. 

Further, Kant’s idea comes out of his own legal struggle. Kant was defending himself from serious charges of insulting religion: he had commented on religious reason and was censured by the Minister of Justice, who also headed the church and schools (see Mary Gregor’s useful introduction to her translation of Conflict). Religion was the most powerful discipline at the time, particularly under a new Prince who was very devout, and Kant was fighting for his autonomy. His defense might be a curious one to our ears: he claimed that his discussion of religion had no effect on the public since philosophy was removed from it and an intra-academic matter. Kant’s justification of humanistic reason was entirely the opposite of a public humanities. 

Kant’s own instance shows a university based on multiple, sometimes symbiotic, and sometimes competing interests. Finally, it is no doubt a tall order to navigate those interests, and I share with Hayot the desire to use the tools in criticism and theory to work toward solving the problems we have. I just worry that Hayot goes down a self-contained road. Where I most align with Hayot, though, is in the implicit belief that the humanities have a distinctive role in criticizing and understanding higher education, the value of humanistic work, and politics, distinct from the disciplines that serve the interests of professions and businesses inside and outside the university. 

Two questions:

–Can Hayot imagine this more pragmatic bearing and would it present a different starting point for talking about the humanities? Or simply, how does labor enter into his account, especially when the large majority of humanists do not have decent jobs? 

–This book seems caught between a rock and a hard place of wanting to justify higher education and the humanities to a general audience, when the audience is actually mostly academics in the humanities who might care about Kant or an exposition of Windelband. Who did Hayot want to reach? How would one explain this to those outside this professional group? 

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Response to Williams

Eric Hayot

Dear Jeffrey,

Someone who heard me give a talk on this book a couple years before it was published said it reminded him of the joke about the drunkard looking for his lost keys under the streetlight. Not much point to looking for a solution to the crisis in the humanities by addressing the intellectual conditions of its formation and development (this is what you’d call the “idealist” explanation); the real answers are out there in the dark. 

I thought of that response when I read your concern that I am going “down a self-contained road.” For you and for that earlier interlocutor what’s out in the dark is the set of real concerns: labor, institutional pragmatics. That’s where we should be letting our lights shine, looking for keys, solving the real problems, looking at “interests” (and forms of social force) rather than ideas.

Is the “true” origin of the American university the idealist story or the institutional one? Like everything else it’s some combination of both. There are no interests without discourses about those interests; interests do not emerge sui generisbut from a set of already existing discourses that shape and frame them; and discourses likewise emerge from interests that help make them what they are.

That said you do choose what to focus on, and it’s true enough that the choices I made in Humanist Reason really involved focusing on a set of idealized discourses and forms of self-justification for the humanities, not the institutional conditions of their existence. My goal in the book was to describe (and criticize) the intellectual logics and self-justifications that dominate the current situation of the humanities—to explain, also, where they come from (intellectually) and where the basic ideas that ground those justifications emerge. And then to produce, if I could, a functional redescription and justification of the humanities that did some things better than the currently dominant modes. (Specifically: I think my version describes the work the scholarly work that humanists do better than the existing discourse does; I think it breaks through some limitations that the current discourse imposes, and thereby opens large areas for new humanistic work; I think it articulates a more compelling public version of the scholarly work humanists do.) 

Does that explanation also tell us what has happened to the humanities as institutional formations in the American university, either since 1850 (a question you know more about than me) or since 1950? Not really: the answers that involve labor and institutional questions don’t have too much, I think, to do with the ways that humanists have described themselves to themselves (or others), and more to do with the strains placed on social democracy by political and economic forces beyond any academic’s, or academic institution’s, control. Other people have written the books that describe those events (you mention some of them in your response.) I didn’t. 

Do I think—and this was, if not yours, then certainly the accusation being made by my earlier interlocutor—that if we just get the right ideas in place, then all the economic and institutional problems will solve themselves? No. I’m not an idiot. The “pragmatic bearing” you refer to does offer a different starting point for thinking about the place of the humanities today. But it doesn’t—and here I insist—tell us very much about the forms of intellectual self-justification that humanists proffer about humanist discourse that were the subject of my book. (Is the story I told partial? Does it rely on the extensive analysis of a small number of privileged examples? Yup. I still think it tells a true story, and does so in a way that makes visible the things I wanted to make visible.)

What is a “pragmatic bearing”—one that includes a specific focus on the state of the PhD job market—then good for? I think it does a great deal, as your response shows, to explain to us the institutional and social formation of the modern university (and the liberal arts colleges that both exemplify some of its tendencies but also deviate from it), and the place of the humanities in that institution. It explains why the undergraduate and graduate curricula look the way they do; why tenure-line faculty are being replaced by adjuncts, why the PhD job market is collapsing, and why undergraduate majors in the humanities have dropped by 50 percent in the last 15 years (certainly in the US and Europe; I don’t know enough to add “worldwide”). My feeling is that these problems are caused by social forces operating high above the level of the academic department—they’re the results of decisions being made in Provosts’ and Presidents’ offices, in meetings of boards of trustees, in state legislatures, and in the shaping of federal support for higher education. 

Am I claiming that there is any relationship at all, then, between the intellectual history of humanities-justifying discourse and this set of institutional problems? Yes. To explain why I have to answer your second major query, which asks why the book seems to have a double audience. My audience is mainly academics in the humanities—it is their self-descriptions that I am trying to change, their discourse about the humanities and humanist scholarship that I am trying to undo and alter. The reason I would like them to change their descriptions is twofold: first, I think they are false (that is, not accurate). And second: they are rhetorically ineffective. 

It’s the latter that may help connect the institutional situation to the discursive/intellectual history one. If persuasion is possible—if, that is, there is something in the world other than “interests” or “forces” narrowly conceived, or if interests and forces are composed of, and respond to, language at all—then it seems to me that it would be good to abandon a form of self-description and self-defense that is clearly unpersuasive in favor of one that might change a few minds. I aim this criticisms at the humanist scholars themselves—they’re the main audience of the book. But insofar as they take the criticism to heart they should, I think, change not only the ways they write about their work in their own scholarship, but the ways they integrate that scholarship into universities and colleges as institutions: in their course titles, in the structure and organization of their certificates, minors, and majors, and in their teaching work. In this way the indirect audience of the book operates outside the humanities and ideally outside academia as a whole. But my goal was primarily to convince humanist academics to change the way they talk to those audiences (including the audiences that are students), and then to let the carryover effects do the rest of the work.

If I sound a bit annoyed here, I think it’s that I’m much more annoyed at that earlier questioner than you, since he was clearly implying that I was stupid for thinking any of the work in Humanist Reason was at all worth doing. Only a dupe would focus on words and ideas when all the keys are over here, in the realm of production and labor. The problem with such a point of view, as I see it, is that it’s not clear at all how its very articulation confronts its own content: clearly the remark was an attempt to persuade me (or the rest of the audience of the talk I gave) of something, which presumes that language in fact does have some real capacity to work. (I know you believe that it does too; I don’t want to set up some stupid binary in which you think only the pragmatics matter.) What’s interesting to me about the state of the contemporary humanities is, in fact, the ways in which these two mighty realms of cultural activity—the ones we’re calling here the pragmatic and the ideal, but we might also call the material and the linguistic, the institutional and the rhetorical—do not seem to correspond, seem in fact to be speaking in different languages. Part of my book was an attempt to give humanities faculty a more “realistic” language (in the ways that I define that term in the third section of the book) to work with. 

Looking back on the book, I see that things would have been clearer for everyone, me included, had I managed to say something like that there. But of course back then I had not had the advantage of your response, which has been so productive for me. I hope I was able to shine a light in the direction of the keys you were looking to find. My own search continues.

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