The futility of the humanities

“Besides, everyone knows that Pride and Prejudice is not about mate selection. ”

Sorry, can’t resist: I thought that was a truth universally acknowledged? But then I’m not a lit crit…

It’s OK, we still love you. And you’re quite right about the absurdity of the notion that Theory cut off lit crit from the mainstream of the humanities. What isn’t sufficiently addressed, however, is whether the humanities were already cut off from the mainstream of cultural experience, or became so because of Theory, or weren’t, or aren’t, or were and are and who cares nyaah-nyaah I’ve got tenure…?

p.s., DD, P&P is the one with the wet trouser scene, S&S is the one where Emma Thompson cries and Kate Winslet falls over…

Y’all have fun now…

“In other words, during the years when Theory was at its peak, when everybody knew that Habermas was wrong and that anything Gayatri Spivak told you three times was true, the English major actually drew in tens of thousands of new students, some of whom may actually have liked the fact that their literature classes were places they could read and think and talk about gender and sexuality and textuality and even some of that power/knowledge flimflammery.”

I’m not sure it makes sense to treat the entire period of Theory’s “empire” as a single undifferentiated thing. As M. Berube noted, it reached a point when folks could (and did) “write this stuff in their sleep”.

I don’t think it’s a particular slam against Theory (not to say that I don’t enjoy slamming Theory every now and then) to say that it eventually played itself out. It’s an inevitable part of the intellectual/academic lifecycle that the moment will arrive when it’s more exciting to critique the power/knowledge construct than it is to use the power/knowledge construct to critique things.

Quantum physics is cut off from common sense, but it has been a very productive avenue of inquiry.

Well, okay, but once you’ve cut yourself off from common intuition, and you never had mathematical rigor or falsifiable experiment, then what are you left with?

I suppose what you’re left with specialist intuition. And it’s certainly reasonable to think that in some fields this is all we’ll have. On the other hand, it’s also reasonable for outsiders to doubt whether intuitions that only a select few have access to have any meaning deeper than the prejudices and politics of that select few.

If it’s personal and not universally valid, then it’s problematic to say that it “help us understand who we are, where we came from and where we’re going.”

Yes. Theory cut off the humanities from the main currents of mainstream thought.

Theory departments tended to have a theorist that applied theory to anthropological discourse, another that applied it to literary discourse, another that applied it to scientific discourse, and etc. That is not AT ALL the same thing as connecting in any meaningful way with the anthropologists down the hall in the anthropology dept., the guys in the physics department, and etc. So it was a lingua franca that connected Theorists to one another, whatever the content of their theorizing. NOT to other disciplines.

I also blame Theory for the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress. But I won’t go there.

Never listen to the French. Never, never listen to the French.

(And PS I am inclined to think that what killed Theory was less the Sokal thing than the discovery that half of them were down with the Nazis. )

“To paraphrase the mighty Fafblog, “Oh no! Not common sense! That’s where all my friends live!” Certainly, we can’t have a form of literary criticism that cuts the field off from common sense. Literary criticism should be devoted to the elaboration of insights that pretty much anybody could come to, and that most people would agree with.”

Well sort of. But maybe you aren’t really appreciating what common sense is good for. Us intellectuals sometimes like to take things step by step by step to their ‘logical’ conclusions. The problem is that if we are just a little bit off in our intial presuppositions, 300 steps in we can be very far off from reality. Common sense critiques can bring us back to reality.

Early in college, I remember getting sucked into some discussion about the subjectivity of ‘blue’. It was noted by some people in the conversation (I don’t remember who, it might have been me) that since we can’t get into each other’s heads, that even among the non-color-blind, one person might experience ‘blue’ the way another experiences what the first person calls ‘red’ and we would never know.

After listening a while, an exasperated physics major said something along the lines of: “If you all call the color that people see at around 475nm ‘blue’ what practical difference does it make if you see it the way I see ‘red’?”

And he had a point.

Thanks for the link to Deresiewicz’s lament about his inability to talk to a plumber. It gave me much amusement.

My second favorite bit was his comment that OMGWTFBBQ?! Did you know that some of those “best and brightest” smart people at the Top! Ten! Universities! aren’t actually all that smart?

Which, if he attended such a prestigious university, I would have expected him to maybe notice while he was there. That was certainly where I first learned of this important social fact. You know — by meeting them.

Jake, look at the link. The number of English B.A.’s was stable from 1990 to 2000, and is up 10% since 2000.

“Bloix 06.24.09 at 7:39 pm
Jake, look at the link. The number of English B.A.’s was stable from 1990 to 2000, and is up 10% since 2000.”

If the population has grown by 20%, and the number of English BA’s was stagnant for half of that period, and only registered 10% growth for the second half, that means that the amount of English B.A.’s has still been shrinking as a proportion of the population.

After listening a while, an exasperated physics major said something along the lines of: “If you all call the color that people see at around 475nm ‘blue’ what practical difference does it make if you see it the way I see ‘red’?”

Whereupon he was presented with a color wheel that mysteriously wrapped around from 750 nm to 380 nm, and disappeared in a puff of logic.

Berube: “Give me an example of something that humans know objectively, independently of their sense impressions, beliefs, etc.)”

What are

-aversion and repulsion

-future, present, and past

-alive and dead

Berube:

“And then, when you’ve done all that, can you give me an explanation of what this appeal to “objective knowledge” is doing in an essay that insists that criticism “will be personal, because art is personal. It will not be definitive; it will not be universally valid”? Because I could use an objective explanation of what’s going on here.

The difference between objectivity and subjectivity is itself an example of objective knowledge. As in:

-Everyone sees and hears the several claps of thunder: the thunder is objective. Only the 4 year old in the group was afraid: the reaction was subjective.

If objective knowledge doesn’t exist, then subjective knowledge is impossible to distinguish from opposite forms of knowledge. Art criticism can not be personal.

@29: Moreover, whether the observers are agreeing or disagreeing in their observations is usually independent of the identity of the meta-observer; in other words, whether a given observation is objective or subjective is usually itself objectively ascertainable.

One of the pitfalls of this definition, though, is the danger of false objectivity through insufficiently heterogeneous observers. This, I think, is one area where Theory has real value: it can reveal shared assumptions that the observers in question may mistake for “objective” features of the thing observed.

Chris @31

“Theory has real value: it can reveal shared assumptions that the observers in question may mistake for “objective” features of the thing observed.”

I would modify “reveal” to “posit”. I also assume that this is not an original or unique accomplishment of 2oth century literary criticism or philosophy. Didn’t Gramci or Marx posit that seemingly objective social relationships and norms were merely historical (and political)? Isn’t the fact that we can discuss these ideas in plain English divorce it from “Theory”?

Maybe someone with philosophical chops could explain whether classical materialist philosophers derived a deep skepticism toward the objective existence of law or political hierarchies, for existence.

peter,

I used a specific construction to avoid unnecessary philosophical depth.

All cognitively functional human beings know, as real things (objects) wanting and not wanting. The experience of repulsion and aversion are universal, regardless of the particular objects desired or not desired.

Your aboriginal Australian example makes my point; as you relate it, their story relies on the concepts of past, present, and future.

Finally, “…all of us who live have experience of being alive” and recognize it as such, as distinct from being dead, which we know we are not (like Granpa, or tonight’s dinner).

@Chris: “However, it’s not clear to me that Theory, let alone lit-crit, does want to make truth claims, credible or otherwise. (It seems to me that Theory isn’t really supposed to be clear, to me or anyone else, which explains part of this.)”

caution: really long, only read if you are tremendously bored

Well while I cannot speak for “Theory” I can write a few words about Derrida. But to understand or know anything about Derrida, one must go back or take a detour to Plato, specifically the texts of Theaetetus and the Cratylus. It is in the Theaetetus that Plato acknowledges in a famous passage that if one should summon all the great poets and all the great philosophers (Heraclitus, Protogoras, Homer, Epicharmus [and one other I believe, which I cant remember]) which he (or, more accurately, his English translator) names the Generals of Becoming, they would all agree on the notion that there is no (objective) truth or knowledge and that the world is in constant flux (im wildly paraphrasing here). It is in fact philosophic tradition to be aligned with such a notion, and Plato is here philosophically radical in his arguments _for_ truth and objective knowledge.

Enter Nietzsche (a wonderful blend and repositing of epistemic incredulity and classical aristocratic morality) and then Derrida, and what you have is not radical, abstruse philosophy but philosophy as it usually is.

Now after a proper detour to appease the deceased Derrida, I might write a few words about his technique.

When one compares the method of philosophers such as Descates’ “all is to be doubted” or Nietzsche’s approach (I approach problems like a cold bath: quickly in and quickly out), Derrida is one of the most careful and meticulous of the whole lot, and is likely only excelled in his care by Plato’s lacerating dialectics. (This is a scholarly virtue in my opinion, not so much a philosophical one however.) Derrida spends a great deal of effort to plainly explain his “method” most notably in Of Grammatology, but also in Margins of Philosophy. Much of the work in “differance” and in “dissemination” and grammatology deal with the issue of translating one word so that its variegated sense is not hopelessly lost in translation, or is a scholastic rumination of the problem posed by such language–so he is actually seeking a strategy to better understand or comprehend texts (for example, the word pharmakon, from dissemination, means both remedy and poison, and “supplement” from grammatology, means both replace and substitute).

Deconstruction is not some angst ridden hate of science or some esoteric philosophical tool to bring down Western Civilisation at the hands of postcolonial gender studies diversity kidz, but a highly sophisticated scholarly tool. Derrida’s deconstruction is focused on “interpretating interpretations” and _creating_ new interpretations of philosophical texts by organizing readings around a blindspot within the text; so instead of conducting a traditional english phd critique of a work, derrida will choose to examine binary oppositions that already exist within the text and conduct a critique from such a corner or crease in the text, which _produces_ an interesting interpretation of a philosophical, literary, or scholarly work. Nothing pernicious. Regarding his excessive style, I call it hyperscholarship—it is hypertechnical. But most scholarship is quite full of jargon. Truly, Plato, Dante, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Ovid etc are equally abstruse (and much more baleful than Derrida) since they simply wrap their ideas in literary honey to soften up the philosophic wine for the uninitiated. One can get confused and foolishly toil away in philosophy and poetry, ultimately ending up wasting a life and not being able to produce or grasp a single profound thought or statement, while Derrida boldly deters the wannabe-z.

Derrida certainly questions the notion and valorization of clarity (a project begun with Nietzsche, not Derrida) but if one is familiar with the texts that Derrida is reading or conducting an “affirmative interpretation” or “critical production” of, Derrida is hugely quotidian. Ironically, Derrida’s statements have the most (comic) value when he is more gnomic and esoteric than when one is familiar with not only his deconstructions, but the texts which are being deconstructed. As a scholar, Derrida is a tremendous success; as a philosopher, he is an utter failure. What Derrida is best for, is bewildering degoutant bourgeois and hidebound anglo-philosophers who are shocked by statements like “one word can mean more than one thing and can mean many different (and even infinite) things based on context” (this statement comprises AT LEAST 60% of Derrida’s work.)

Said another way, to Homer, Nietzsche, Plato, and Shakespeare Derrida is not shocking at all but stating the obvious; to Husserl and Analytical Philosophers (really should just be called scholars of philosophical journalists) he is RADICAL AND RUINING THE CLEAN THINKING OF “ZUUMFG IM SO DURNK RITE NOW TWITTER” college y00th.

Regarding “truth statements” please remember that Callicles told Socrates, “You dont always say when you mean, either, Socrates.” =)

Philosophy has long flirted with lies, in fact, to be a true philosopher, one must also be a sophist. This is really not all that radical though, just shocking to “scholars” holed up doing mundane journalism on some problem between Kant and Hegel or the like.

Desire and aversion are not things that we know about an objective world. There is no agreement at all among human beings about what it means to be alive and to be dead, or even what kinds of creatures or entities can partake of those states of being. Many human beings have concluded that time is a trick of perception, and not an attribute of the objective world at all.

b9n10t

Beniot?

Bloix:

What cognitively functional human being, do you know, lives without desire and aversion? There exist, I believe (but do no know) homologous brain structures that are uniformly implicated in differentiating afferent nervous signal as pleasurable and painful (the pons of the brain stem, if I recall, but I’d have to look it up).

I’m not saying what it “means” to be alive. Every culture distinguishes living from dead, and know that they are alive and that Grandpa is dead. As for what it means, or a “superstructure” of beliefs that envelope this objective knowledge, that’s different from what I’m saying.

Time may be a trick of perception, but it is a universal trick.

There’s no hard line between the intellectual and the esthetic.

And the problem with theory, in the humanities, philosophy, linguistics, etc and economics of the sort that disdains empiricism is just that: it disdains empiricism.
The arts are empirical. They are an objective description of one’s own desires .
That’s why the best works of art are those that describe actions, responses, emotions and desires that the reader might never think to have, but that in the reading or viewing he now understands. Art is the opposite of preaching to the converted. It’s communicating to the other… if largely the other within one’s own group.

“When an acquaintance greets me on the street by lifting his hat, what I see from a formal point of view is nothing but the change of certain details within a configuration forming part of the general pattern of color, lines and volumes which constitutes my world of vision. When I identify, as I automatically do, this configuration as an object (gentleman), and the change of detail as an event (hatlifting), I have already overstepped the limits of purely formal perception and entered a first sphere of subject matter or meaning. The meaning thus perceived is of an elementary and easily understandable nature. and we shall call it the factual meaning; it is apprehended by simply identifying certain visible forms with certain objects known to me from practical experience and by identifying the change in their relations with certain action or events

Now the objects and events thus identified will naturally produce a certain reaction within myself. From the way my acquaintance performs his action I may be able to sense whether he is in a good or bad humor and whether his feelings towards me are indifferent, friendly or hostile. These psychological nuances will invest the gestures of my acquaintance with a further meaning which we shall call expressional. It differs from the factual one in that it is apprehended. not by simple identification, but by “empathy. To understand it, I need a certain sensitivity, but this sensitivity is still part of my practical experience that is, of my everyday familiarity with objects and events. Therefore both the factual and the expressional meaning may be classified together: they constitute the class of primary or natural meanings…

And finally: besides constituting a natural event in space and time, naturally indicating moods or feelings, besides conveying a conventional greeting the action of my acquaintance can reveal to an experienced observer all that goes to make up his “personality.” This personality is conditioned by his being a man of the twentieth century, by his national. social and educational background by the previous history of his life and by his present surroundings but it is also distinguished by an individual manner of viewing things and reacting to the world which, if rationalized, would have to be called a philosophy. In the isolated action of a polite greeting all these factors do not manifest themselves comprehensively, but nevertheless symptomatically. We could not construct a mental portrait of the man on the bets of this single action. but only by coordinating a large number of similar observations and by interpreting them in connection with our general information as to his period. nationality, class. intellectual traditions and so forth. Yet all the qualities which this mental portrait would show explicitly are implicitly inherent in every single action; so that. conversely every single action can be interpreted in the light of those qualities.”
Erwin Panofsky Studies in Iconology

From the post: “But as for “objective knowledge”—my stars! What is this thing called “objective knowledge”? Can you explain it for me? Can you give me an example of it? (And don’t give me an example of a brute fact, like “carbon is the sixth element in the periodic table.” Give me an example of something that humans know objectively, independently of their sense impressions, beliefs, etc.”

OK, I’m going to ask a snarky question about this, but I’m serious, because I’ve seen the demand laid down in more or less these precise terms in several places over the years and it just seems to me odd and off. To a (realism-inclined) philosopher there are objective facts (carbon is the sixth element in the periodic table is a good candidate, but it’s a bit confusing because it’s clearly a social fact. The statement of the fact itself directly references a human construction. Maybe 2 + 2 = 4 does, too, but not as obviously. But let it pass.) And there is knowledge of objective facts. That is, justified true belief about what the facts are. There is obviously no such thing as knowledge that is independent of all belief, because knowledge just is a belief. So why would a realist ever think you could have knowledge without belief?

Like I said: I suspect there is some story about where this ‘realism demands the separation of knowledge and belief’ story is coming from. Something in Rorty? Derrida? Fish? (I know I’ve seen this demand from Knapp and Michaels.) I suspect it is properly targeted at a specific, unusually strong brand of realism. Something more Platonic or Hegelian, according to which knowledge – to be knowledge at all – must be absolute and omni-comprehensive. You don’t know anything until you know everything and have, what’s more, pulled yourself by your own ponytail out of the muck of being an agent whose personal view is not the View From Nowhere. But it should be obvious that you can believe in the possiblity of objective knowledge without buying all THAT.

But that’s why making strong claims about “objective knowledge” is such an unfortunate argumentative strategy, since while what you have in mind is the epistemological status of autism, everyone else has in mind the epistemological status of carbon. What Theory is good for is pointing out the mechanisms by which people occlude the distinction between the two cases.

I’m making a claim about how certain arguments tend to go. Someone will have in mind some specific way in which the notion of “objective truth” is used as propaganda, and say something dismissive about the whole concept. Everyone else will immediately think of some counterexample that’s either a concrete experience, or something out of science or mathematics. For example, in this thread, people have brought up examples like thunderclaps, the color blue, or the periodic table. Cracking open your copy of Discipline and Punish will do very little to illuminate the meaning of “blue”.

That’s a long-winded way of saying that I don’t understand your question. What strong assumptions am I implicitly making?

I guess I’m just wondering why someone would mistake carbon for autism, and why we would need Theory to sort it out. But, at any rate, your point seems to be that ‘objective truth’ gets used in lots of ways. I’m willing to sign on with that much at least. I can restate my concern in these terms: ‘objective truth’ no doubt has multifarious employments, including pernicious ones. But why is Michael so sure it doesn’t have some perfectly innocuous or positive uses? (It can’t just be that there are also pernicious uses. Every remotely philosophical term has picked up lots of those along the way.)

To be quite concrete about it. The usage that strikes Michael as hopeless in the passage strikes me as perfectly fine. “Theory, which tends toward dogmatism, hermeticism, hero worship and the suppression of doctrinal deviation—not exactly the highest of mental virtues—rejects the possibility of objective knowledge.” I think it’s basically right that (a lot of) Theory tends to reject the possibility of objective knowledge, for certain plausibly central values of ‘objective knowledge’. Now we would need to spell out what that means, but let’s just say it’s sorta kinda Protagorean. ‘Man is the measure of all things’. There is something fundamental subjective (distorting, ideological, perspectival) about all beliefs, hence it is wrong to regard man as the sort of creature who ever REALLY knows anything, or knows it objectively. What we call ‘knowledge’ is really something less than realists have supposed they could attain, objectivity-wise.

Now there are three ways D. could be wrong to make this claim. 1) It isn’t true that Theory tends to take this line. 2) Theory does tend to take this line but, pace D., Theory is obviously right to do so. 3) Theory does tend to take this line but, pace D., it isn’t obviously wrong to do so. That is, D. is too quick to dismiss the whole class of anti-realist/Protagorean/subjectivist philosophical views, on behalf of the more realist views. I guess I could sign on to 3. But, in context, D. doesn’t seem to me to be being so intolerably quick about it all. And it sounds to me as though Michael wants to say 2). I don’t buy that at all, so I’m wondering whether he does.

Let me slightly abbreviate my concern: what D. seems to be saying is that the problem with Theory is that it finds a certain class of anti-realist/perspectivist/Protagorean philosophies to be obviously correct, to the point of not really considering alternatives. This is what he means when he complains about ‘dogmatism’ about Theory (I suspect). It sounds to me as though Michael wants to bite the bullet and say: yes, the alternatives are obviously hopeless, as emblematized by the hopelessness of ‘objective knowledge’, so we are right not to consider them. D. is just philosophically benighted on this point. But I’m not actually sure that’s Michael’s point. So I’ll wait for him to say whether it is.

Once more on common sense, @30. I don’t mean to uphold the supremacy of common sense, or pronounce on its reliability, or make any claims about its epistemological value; I’m just trying to reconstruct a complaint that Deresiewicz has against Theory, and here’s how I see it going: both scientists and Theorists sometimes make prima facie implausible claims, but the scientists can do something Theorists can’t—anchor the reasoning that leads to those claims in common sense or observation. The idea is that, given some scientific claim, the scientist can explain to the curious layperson the warrant for holding that claim true, ultimately grounding out at things like “look what happened when we fired those electrons just now.”

Simplistic picture of scientific justification, yes. But it’s a way of picturing how science is connected to observation, and commonsense claims like “observation of middle-sized objects is generally reliable.” The way I reconstruct Deresiewicz, he thinks no such connection obtains w/Theory. The claim that this lack of connection is a bad thing doesn’t depend on the epistemological sanctity of common sense; it only assumes that some connection to common sense is better than none.

@22, Marcel: “Deresiewicz has obviously spent no (as in absolute zero) time around economics departments or economists.” Economics and economists in general is long past paying any heed to someone who could actually write like John Kenneth Galbraith. This is a discipline that is simply oblivious, among many things, to the idea of good writing. Much less the actual production of said. Deresiewicz’s point is surely that only in an English department would you see serious theorizing defending bad writing and attacking good writing (oppressive and offensive, you know).

Need I mention that Karl Popper has a famous book called _Objective Knowledge_? Here is a definition he gives “Thus we may count among these characteristic products especially what is called ‘human knowledge’; where we take the word ‘knowledge’ in the objective or impersonal sense, in which it may be said to be contained in a book; or stored in a library; or taught in a university.”

At any rate, I agree with most of the post – literary Darwinism doesn’t look to promising, etc. An – if anything, MB’s ignorance about certain parts of philosophy suggest that it was philosophy, not Theory, that is separated from the rest of the Humanities (echoing M. Lamont, etc.).

Oh, dear. I think the problem with “objective knowledge” is that it tends to generate a notion of “subjective knowledge”, as a privative deficient case. As in literature being “justified” by appeal to “subjectivity”. Shouldn’t “we” be beyond the dichotomy between subject and object by now? As if anything that couldn’t be captured in “objective” terms is thereby downgraded as merely “subjective”, as a privative condition, poor thing, which should thereby be allowed, due to dubious pity, “free” reign. Er, might it not be that the “subjective” is actually more “objectively” and substantively embedded in the socio-cultural institution of the “real” than that? And coincidentally, more subject to “objective” and estranged study than all that? Why should it be assumed that literary works would be reducible to subjective intentions, whether cognitive or expressive, which would be a controlling locus of interpretation, rather than operating trans-personally, as a socio-cultural “institution”, yielding “objective” expression, (regardless of whether that is attributed to “content” or “form”, which distinction itself misses the worldly “origin”, which would give rise to such works and their “otherness”)? But then also why would we need a form of “theory” to actually read and interpret literary works, in the first instance, rather than attending to such works themselves? Is it because such works must be adjudged cognitive “objects” or disintegrate and disappear from academic inquiry altogether? They must obviously have no other import, else the boundaries constitutive academic inquiry would disappear altogether.

As to “objective knowledge” itself, it’s not that the term is meaningless or anathema, but rather that there can be no securement of any referential claim “prior” to the framework in which such a cognitive claim can arise and be “justified”, (which, to revert to an older idiom, would render it possible “transcendentally”). It’s not as if there is no reality “out there” to be referred to, (though “reality” is itself a socio-cultural generalization of the realness of the real, which itself is not the entire dimension of what is to be sought for by inquiry or practice). It’s that, though within any cross-secting framework, then might be criteria for differentiating between the “true” and the “false” or the sheerly meaningless, or the just or the unjust, etc., there is no way of identifying any given, inherited or not, such framework with the real itself (or the true or the just, etc. ). Which does not per se disqualify any such framework, but which does raise the question, given the dependency of any such validity claim upon such a framework, of whether such a framework in which meaningful claims can be raised is itself subject to being adjudged “true or false”, “meaningful or meaningless”, and what the criteria for such extra-worldly judgments would be. If such criteria for judging frameworks as “true or false” are available, that invites an “infinite regress” objection, whereas, if there are no such appeals against such given criteria, that invites an infinite relativism objection. But in either case, “we” are dealing with a trans-personal socio-cultural “institution”, which can call into question its “own” estrangement.

“Oh, dear. I think the problem with “objective knowledge” is that it tends to generate a notion of “subjective knowledge”, as a privative deficient case.”

But suppose someone thinks there’s such a thing as objectivity and subjectivity, in some sense – quite apart from whether either is judged superior or inferior. (After all, some folks have thought the subjective stuff was better.) Are you saying the problem with the term is that it allows these thoughts to be expressed and explored. But couldn’t it be that some of these thoughts are worth thinking?

“Shouldn’t “we” be beyond the dichotomy between subject and object by now?”

Damn. Must have missed the memo. But I hope you are not going to tell me that the memo contained that thing in your second paragraph, which looks to me simply mistaken. (Not the philosophy as a whole. Yours is a familiar sort of anti-realist posture and quite possibly it has its good points.) But the idea that the use of the term ‘objective knowledge’ inherently requires some sort of dubious ‘outside the framework’ thingummy is totally unargued. (Unless you’ve got an argument.) Why does this term in particular necessarily get it’s foot stuck in some kind of infinite regress mud? More than, say, ‘cat’ or ‘electron’?

I’m just trying to reconstruct a complaint that Deresiewicz has against Theory, and here’s how I see it going: both scientists and Theorists sometimes make prima facie implausible claims, but the scientists can do something Theorists can’t—-anchor the reasoning that leads to those claims in common sense or observation.

But you get a problem here of what you mean by Theory, and treating it as an undifferentiated block isn’t useful. For example, as a gender historian I work with ideas of social construction, and it’s deeply counter-intuitive that biological sex is socially constructed. And yet if you look at examples of how medical science treats intersex people, then it is the case that labelling someone with biological sex is not always consistently done, as Judith Butler among others has pointed out.

Hey, magistra, all the better. The use of ‘Theory’ to label One Undifferentiated Block in this thread is due to Deresiewicz—I’m just picking it up from him—and examples like yours show either that he’s wrong to think of Theory as one kind of thing, or that he’s wrong to think of it as a frictionless wheel.

“In studying literature and the humanities, people try to come to terms with some of the most imaginative and intellectually challenging texts humans have written,”

See, this is not an interesting or convincing answer. “Imaginative” and “challenging” are just words that signify approval. They don’t have any more content than “groovy” or “tight.”

Here is an answer.

We human beings experience the world through a limited sensory apparatus. And this sensory information that we receive inspires emotions in us. I see the smile on the face of my son as he wins a race and I am filled with joy, pride, and heartache.

Our sensory apparatus is pretty good at what it does, but it’s not perfect. It can easily be fooled. It has evolved to detect and distinguish between faces, and so it finds faces wherever it turns – in the moon, for example. It is able to read emotions very accurately depending on slight alterations in the muscles of those faces, and so it finds emotions in the faces of pandas and lizards.

We have learned this sensory apparatus can be fooled, and so we have become able to fool it intentionally. That is what art is – it is the manipulation of the material world in order to give rise to sensory impressions, for the purpose of inspiring emotional responses.

There are different levels of sophistication in the artifice used to create the emotional response. The Walmart happy face triggers an emotional response to a simulacrum of a smile, as does the Mona Lisa.

In literature we’ve discovered a way to stimulate sensory impressions thatpermits the creation of elaborate and extended artificial impressions, in a manner that simulates the patterns of human social life in certain ways and also has its own very different patterns and characteristics . These extended simulacrums of human experience are sought out by many people for the pleasure they give, and therefore they are worthy of study.

These are worthy of attention on many levels.

We can accept the stimulation as a given, ignore the characteristics of literature as such, and concentrate on the impressions and emotions that are created. We read Austin to understand English society in the Georgian period.

We can accept the stimulation as a given, and treat the novel as a way to extend our perceptions past the bounds of our own experience – even past the bounds of all actual experience. We read Austin to experience a fantasy of the lives of wealthy, witty people who are more interesting than we are and take more pleasure in life than we do.

We can study the methods used by the artist to create the impressions and emotions. We read Austin to understand the development of the techniques of the novel.

We can explore the patterns imposed on this method of artificial stimulation by the literary form itself, which therefore repeat in infinite variations among novelists.

We can compare the virtuousity of various authors and group and rank them according to their ability in producing convincing sensory impressions.

We can study how different readers react differently to the same stimulus – how Shakespeare is understood differently down the generations.

Etc.

Not all these require English departments. We don’t need professors in order to experience Austin as fantasy or moral exemplar. But some of the other aspects of literature do require professional attention.

but the scientists can do something Theorists can’t—-anchor the reasoning that leads to those claims in common sense or observation.

I always find it amusing, if slightly scary, when people argue as if the Vienna Circle had succeeded with its program and most of the work in the philosophy of science and language of the past century hadn’t consisted of trying to show the futility of such claims to objectivity. Furthermore, the literary theorists are connected to common sense and observation, the anchor being the text that is discussed and the judgment of the readers of both the original text and the theory that is supposed to make some sense of it. Of course, one can use any text to anchor any theory, but, as Eco has shown, there are de facto rather stringent limits to freewheeling interpretation and most theorists and readers are keenly aware of this.

Amusing factoid: “Belletristik” is used in German as the word to categorize “fiction”.

BTW It’s odd that Deresiewicz uses a discussion of evolutionary psychology in literature to take a swipe at Theory as denying objective truth, . . .

Not so odd. His basic position is “a plague on both your houses, theory and literary Darwinism.” So he’s got to stand someplace else. That someplace else seems to be a commonsense notion of objective knowledge plus literary study as it was in, say, 1950.

As far as I can tell, Deresiewicz is not much of a (lowercase) theorist.

Note that the literary Darwinists see Theory as the Great Satan of literary study and they make a big deal out of Theory as denying objective truth and biology in favor of social constructivism. Having done that, they can then offer uninteresting practical criticism as Deep Truth (on this, see my longish critique of literary Darwinism).

novakant:

… as Eco has shown, there are de facto rather stringent limits to freewheeling interpretation and most theorists and readers are keenly aware of this.

Where does Eco argue this?

Articulating that idea doesn’t mean that I’m committed to moribund positivist doctrine.

I didn’t read all the comments, but if it’s not your position, take it as a criticism of Deresiewicz. This misunderstanding could also serve as a good example for the limits of interpretation, since I misinterpreted your intention.

why would the failure of the Vienna Circle project show that scientists can’t anchor their claims in common sense and observation?

Because there is no straight line between the physical world, “observation” and “language” that would guarantee objectivity or validate truth claims. That doesn’t mean that there’s no connection at all, so if by “anchoring” you mean that there is some feedback between these realms, fair enough, but then that equally applies to literary theory in most cases. Also, common sense won’t get you very far in the sciences, since scientists tend to think of the “medium sized objects” that surround us as a bunch of particles whizzing around, which is rather counter intuitive to most people’s view of the world.

To provide some anecdotal data: while I was studying philosophy, I hung out with some PhD candidates in chemistry and whenever I was exasperated by what I perceived back then as the frivolity of relativism and holism, I tried to get them to validate some claims to objective truth for me – but to no avail. The only thing I got from them was some talk about predictability under controlled conditions that makes scientific models useful for very limited purposes. They refused to entertain any claims to objectivity and thought talk about “truth” was unscientific and useless. Granted, these guys were very intelligent and open-minded and one might get different answers from other scientists.

Where does Eco argue this?

It’s been ages since I’ve read this, but Eco claims in some of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Limits-Interpretation-Advances-Semiotics/dp/0253208696"these essays, that while unlimited semiosis is certainly a feature of language, it’s not a good model to base a theory of interpretation on, as there are pragmatic limits to the latter.

last try:

http://www.amazon.com/Limits-Interpretation-Advances-Semiotics/dp/0253208696

novakant “‘why would the failure of the Vienna Circle project show that scientists can’t anchor their claims in common sense and observation?’

Because there is no straight line between the physical world, “observation” and “language” that would guarantee objectivity or validate truth claims.”

But why would you assume that someone who merely said scientists anchor their claims in common sense and observation was asserting the contrary?

novakant: Thanks.

Michael: Continuing on. To a first approximation, literary Darwinism (LitD) is literary studies c. 1950 (lit1950) PLUS evolutionary psychology (EP).* And as I’ve suggested, Deresiewicz (Dewz) seems to be advocating lit1950 PLUS commonsense objectivity (obj). So we’ve got:

LitD = lit1950 + EP

Dewz = lit1950 + obj

In an effort to further differentiate his position from litD Deresiewicz adds in a term for belletristic good writing (gudwrit), to give us:

LitD = lit1950 + EP – gudwrit

Dewz = lit1950 + obj + gudwrit

*The best way to see this is to look to their practical criticism (e.g. Joseph Carroll on Pride and Prejudice (downloadable PDF)), which reads like fairly traditional humanist criticism where the terms of folk psychology have been swapped for terms from evolutionary psychology – which is more or less an observation Steven Pinker made in a review of The Literary Animal (downloadable PDF) that he published in Philosophy and Literature (the house organ of literary Darwinism). Pinker’s review is well worth reading as it is a very diplomatic exercise; roughly speaking, he says it’s a good first effort but there are problems.

So, when you romp through Brian Boyd, Michael, pay close attention to what he does with the Odyssey and with Horton Hears a Who, which make up the second half of the book. How much does his practical criticism criticism owe to the (often interesting) psychology in the first half of the book and how much of it is standard-issue lit crit before Hopkins 1966?

Since homosexuality is socially constructed, that shows that the whole idea of objective truth is problematic.

Why would the fact that people were wrong about the nature of homosexuality (assuming they were), show that “the whole idea of objective truth is problematic”? That certainly doesn’t follow. (In most cases being able to get something wrong implies that there’s something to get right, too, after all.) Like John, I think that any action here is going to depend attributing to one side a set of views about realism and foundationalism that, at best, are minority views today. (There also seems to be a pretty fair amount of mixing epistemology and ontology here- always a dangerous business.)

“Hmm, because otherwise the metaphor of “anchoring” something in something else doesn’t make much sense and is useless for contrasting science with “theory”.”

Sorry, I just don’t see the problem here. I guess I’m thinking like J.L. Austin when he said that, should the correspondence theory of truth come to terrible grief and destruction, ‘this statement corresponds to the facts’ would go on being ok English, not some sort of metaphysical error. (Do you disagree?) Likewise, ‘science anchors us to the world’ isn’t a theory, let alone a bad theory. It’s at best a placeholder awaiting an account of whatever it is that science does. It is hardly likely that science will turn out NOT to be connected up with the world in some sense.

There is a larger question here – which is getting a bit heated up – about whether Theorists are empirically-minded. I guess I take it to be fairly obvious that the things that Theorists say, that matter most to them, couldn’t be empirically proven. They are allegedly conceptual truths about the nature of thought and concepts, or philosophical insights. Foucault and Butler and co. have empirical stuff they are talking about, and it’s important to them. But I don’t really think it would be right to say that the empirical stuff is the (sufficient, or even close to sufficient) evidence for what they say. Mostly. (I find this fairly evident but I don’t ask you to take it from me.)

Walt @92: Perfect.

mds @94:

“Yes, the theories must impinge in some way upon the “real world,” and offer explanations for observed phenomena, but honestly, Theory seems to do that a little bit too.”

Wait a second. But the entire difference between scientific truth claims and others is that the scientific explanations must be observationally or experimentally verifiable. The untested explanation is never an end in itself in science.

magistra @ 76:

“my general point was to show that Theory is often originally based on empirical observations”

I’m skeptical that this is true : the “based” and the “often” part, likewise “beholden” -Adam’s phrase @ 74). “Based” and “beholden” would mean, for me, that the Theory in question attempts to say something about the empirical finding (such as creating a theory of how the brain labels), not the social construction of meaning about the finding.

Mainly, my point was that think you need to use a different term than “biological sex”. That is exactly what isn’t socially constructed, nor If you had just said “sex” or “gender”, I agree 100%.

Novokant @ 83

“Because there is no straight line between the physical world, “observation” and “language” that would guarantee objectivity or validate truth claims.”

Yes, but there is a straight line between the physical world and language (no quotes). This allows us to communicate.

But the entire difference between scientific truth claims and others is that the scientific explanations must be observationally or experimentally verifiable. The untested explanation is never an end in itself in science.

(1) Much of the motivation for M-theory seems to have come from the concern over “Just how many different string theories are there, anyway?” Which, given that superstring theory was already rather tenuously connected to falsifiability, strikes me as especially disturbing. Then again, perhaps this merely indicates that some of these theoretical pursuits aren’t really science, a thought which many of my scientific colleagues would heartily endorse.

(2) Are you asserting that all explanations in Theory (no M) are untested ones? Or just that falsifiability is entirely irrelevant to Theory?

You can be all radical, without ever having to mount a coherent challenge against anything, and without saying anything that those hegemonic powermongers (who really are there, I quite agree) might be in the slightest bit concerned about.

So… there’s no point to diagnosing something unless you personally are able to fix it? I’ll send a memo to the medical school.

It’s mre a question of whether your sch medical shcool claims there’s no such thing as

John, nobody is denying that we are interacting with “the world”, yet that doesn’t mean that I have to subscribe to naive realism or the correspondence theory of truth. And if people like Kant, Hegel or Quine etc. etc., as well as a lot of actual scientists, don’t subscribe to such viewpoints either, then I find it hard to believe that there just isn’t a problem here. I’m afraid you will have to confront people like these on the level they’re arguing at and can’t just brush all of this aside with some common sense intuitions. Personally I would be interested in what you actually mean by objectivity and truth, both because I generally find these notions either implausible or useless and so that I won’t have to argue against strawmen.

A lot of the problem in any discussion of this is that it really is attacks on strawmen all the way down on both sides. In history, a caricatured outline might go like this. Late C19 historians developed positivist history because they wanted to be like scientists. Historians stuck to positivist history in practice on into the second half of the twentieth century, even when their actual theory of history got more sophisticated from listening to philosophers and scientists. This positivistic practice got increasingly challenged in the 1950s and onwards firstly by radical historians and then by those influenced by the ‘linguistic turn’. The reaction to such views has in turn come from a variety of historians who

a) don’t like being told that straight white male conservative historians might be biased

and/or b) worry that if you say there is no historical truth that’ll provide ammunition for Holocaust deniers

and/or c) think that Keith Jenkins and Alun Munslow couldn’t write a decent historical article in a month of Sundays, so why listen to them?

These competing views on historical truth then get further simplified in magazine articles to become either Brave Scholars versus Trendy Relativists or Establishment Stooges versus Brave Activists. Most historians in the sludgy middle, meanwhile (we can know something about the past, but imperfectly) just get on with trying to do history, with more or less theory to taste.

Close. It would be a question of whether the school of medicine were so crazy as to claim there’s no single context-free definition of “healthy.”

And then (I’ll drop the dubiously useful analogy) to get so carried away with the sheer iconoclastic (or ‘scary’!) novelty of it all as to make obvious blunders like confusing inquiry into what ‘objective reality’ means with the ordinary business of discovering what is (objectively) real or unreal.

@97 “Yes, but there is a straight line between the physical world and language (no quotes). This allows us to communicate.”

That amounts to the perfect example of an unarguable and nonsensical assertion. Shit happens!

@69 & @70:

The point of my comment @67 was not to question or deny the possibility or meaningfulness of the term “objective knowledge”, but rather to deny the reflex generated by the notion that objective knowledge is the sole legitimate object or aim of inquiry, which is that there would somehow be unique and particular “subjective knowledge”, which is at once irreducible and impalpable, which would constitute the “object” and justification of the “humanities”. Of course, our language readily affords us with the capacity to make cognitive validity claims with referential import, though that of itself doesn’t establish validity. But there is no possibility of reference outside of any frame-of-reference, which relies on a framework of meanings and concepts involved in “the kind of understanding which makes connections.” All worldly knowledge, experience, activity and intentional agency is mediated through our meanings and concepts, (which does not mean sheerly reducible to or indifferent from them), and there is no way to somehow strip off our frameworks of meanings and concepts from the world and compare them, thus separated, to the “thing” itself. We are always involved in the warp and woof of a form-of-life as a background condition, and there is no way to step outside of that form-of-life, Platonically, transcendentally, or dialectically, to judge that form-of-life as a whole. (Which is not to say that parts or aspects of it can not be judged or criticized from within it, or other forms-of-life judged in terms of our standards, though without the full existential consequentiality of that other). Hence I simply pointed out the aporia: if nothing can be judged true or false (or just or good or any other dimension of validity) without first being meaningful, then can our meanings and concepts themselves be adjudicated true or false? Indeed, we do falsify and revise our validity claims, but that is a fairly complicated process that does not proceed through sheer appeals to reference and independently of the underlying activity of interpretive understanding, but involves further differentiations within our form-of-life and “justification” in terms of the needfulness thereof. But the fact of the matter is that we always encounter reality through horizons of possibility and skeins of implication, and there is nothing merely “subjective” about that fact of the matter, but rather that fact of the matter bears inquiry, (especially when and where possibilities and implications break down). (It is a reasonable intuition that reals are particulars, but we do not simply group together such particulars and form meanings through generalizing them, if only because the referential identification of particulars already requires the operation of meanings).

But, at any rate, my objection was directed at the notion of “subjective knowledge”. The notion of a “subject” is a term from traditional epistemology and means a ground of knowledge, traditionally identified with individual consciousness. The “memo” was sent in “Being and Time”, though PI would do just as well, since part of the purport of both works is the critical dissolution of traditional epistemology. Both subject and object are already comprised in or “constituted” by language and consciousness alone is not sufficient to account for our actual cognitive practices, which don’t actually appeal to or require such a foundation in a “subject”. But then the term “subject” just loses functional meaning, becoming just a synonym of “existent human being” or “self”. The notion then that there would be some sort of purely subjective knowledge, as knowledge of something so particular that it would be devoid of any real or objective effects, but also absolutely essential to “constituting” any knowledge of the real just lapses into incoherence, and certainly won’t do for specifying the domain of the “humanities” or their “justification”.

But then Gadamer wrote is fat book nearly 50 years ago partly to explicate that “justification” for the humanities as independent of natural sciences, partly by explicating and criticizing how the humanities had become entangled in imitating the methodologism of the natural sciences, thereby seemingly de-legitimating their own modes of inquiry. The title was chosen at the last moment, with the working title moved to the subtitle, presumably because it was not just pithy, but echoed Goethe. But given the thrust of the work it should have been “Truth or Method”. IMO part of the problem is that American academics began importing that weird form of French formalistic scientism called “structuralism” and then followed up the “internal” critiques of it forming what Anglo-Saxons only call “post-structuralism”. (Though I never understood how “structuralism” quite got going in the first place. Yes, a critique of phenomenological intentionality. But then abusing a rather thin linguistics to form a notion of “signifying structures” that operate as an “autonomous language”? Language operating without the interpretive understanding of its agents? I would think “we” operate language at least as much as it operates us. As best I can figure, “structuralism” amounts to an incompetently formulated attempt at general systems theory). This then leads to the highly presuppositioned and recondite institution of “Theory” in literature departments and endless entanglements and disputes over its status and legitimacy.

But I’m going to be a bit old-fashioned here. I’ve never understood why, in the first instance, one needs a form of theory to read and interpret literary works. Yes, as a second order matter, inquiring academically into the status and “nature” of literary works in general, the construction of a theoretical framework might be useful and interesting. But no theory can substitute for the actual work of interpretive reading, nor externally validate it. (At any rate, deconstructing the rhetorical nature of essentially rhetorical works seems a bit too easy, carrying coals to Newcstle). And it’s the works themselves that count, as having an independent, transpersonal “existence” beyond the intentions of both their authors and readers. Because it’s such works or artefacts involved in the socio-cultural institution of reality, which we can’t get out of, that comprise the domain of the “humanities”. And their “justification” is simply the necessity of interpretation, that is, the fundamental or basic role of the underlying activity of interpretive understanding, at once unavoidable and unstoppable, in comprising human existence in the world. This is not to say that interpretation is or should be ad hoc, licentious, without recourse to recurrent structures, without appeal to background assumptions of secured understandings, and without regard to considerations of validity or evaluations of better or worse interpretations. But it is to say that there is no scientific or theoretical substitute for the work of such interpretive understanding, and to commit such a category mistake is to do damage to the self-understanding of human beings in the world. Which is not to say that the “justification” of humanistic inquiry is that it enriches the self and its appreciation of the world. That would be just the old subjectivistic aestheticism, “humanism”, in the pejorative sense of an individual cultivation of the glorious personality. It doesn’t matter whether interpretation is “enriching” or “impoverished”; what counts is whether it enhances the understanding of existence in the world.

For example, to inquire into how the Parthenon was constructed is a question about ancient engineering, and adopting the objectifying stance of causal theory and gathering thereby the relevant empirical facts is appropriate. But inquiring into the role that the Parthenon played in the political religion of ancient Attica involves a much different stance with different relevant facts. To insist on an objectifying causal explanation in the latter case, say ,in terms of a reductive and impoverished account of a Darwinian struggle for existence, would be to entirely miss the mark, to deny and “abolish” the very matter “given” to be understood. Which is to say, interpretive understanding itself plays a role in assessing the legitimacy and scope of causal explanations in natural science, since, er, natural science is itself a socio-cultural institution.

Similarly, if one is a modern medieval historian, understanding the etiology and epidemiology of the plague is an important part of the story. Also understanding how mass depopulation would alter the distribution of rents, raise per capita yields and thus affect the conditions of bonded labor would be relevant considerations. But such causal factors are applied to understanding how the people understood and reacted to the course of events in terms of the socio-cultural institutions of their day, else one is not doing historiography, whether empirically or not. Since history concerns particular, unrepeatable courses of events, and “there can be no science of the particular” (Aristotle), there’s no question of empirical facts or causal explanations yielding to general methodology or universal theory of a scientific sort, (though it’s hard to see how such inquiry could be got going without some sort of comparative method, if only the implicit one between then and now). But then the role of the struggles of past agents, however conditioned and structurally constrained, in potentiating (or revising) present structures and understandings of the world is the very point of the exercise of historical inquiry. Which is counter-scientific, if not at all anti-scientific, in limiting any sweepingly “universal” claims for the theoretical mastery of the present.

“Personally I would be interested in what you actually mean by objectivity and truth, both because I generally find these notions either implausible or useless and so that I won’t have to argue against strawmen.”

I normally agree with what you say novkant, but this sentence just made my head hurt.

What does ‘implausible’ mean if you are outside the world of truth claims? And even more so ‘useless’? What does ‘implausible’ mean that can get away from something like “provoking disbelief that the thing in question is objectively true”?

As for the rest of the ongoing argument, I guess for me, I find much of Theory in literature to be an enormous distraction from the work of understanding and enjoying (or being challenged by) actual texts. It is more often than not a way of avoiding engagement with the text itself and instead using it as an object for political statements and prounouncements. At its best Theory might be ok as a branch of historical or applied sociology, but it sucks at the things that actually draw readers to literature. It rarely acts as a liason with the text, or an attempt to get to know the text better, but rather as more of a rape of the text–an attempt to force it to submit purely to your own uses.

“Since history concerns particular, unrepeatable courses of events, and “there can be no science of the particular” (Aristotle), there’s no question of empirical facts or causal explanations yielding to general methodology or universal theory of a scientific sort,”

Really. So for you, evolution is just a theory?

novakant, “yet that doesn’t mean that I have to subscribe to naive realism or the correspondence theory of truth.”

But no one is asking you to subscribe to naive realism or the correspondence theory of truth. (Are they?) So why are responding as if you must have been asked to do this thing?

john halasz: “The “memo” was sent in “Being and Time”, though PI would do just as well, since part of the purport of both works is the critical dissolution of traditional epistemology.”

Ah, I got both of THOSE memos, of course. I don’t really buy the first, largely on Wittgensteinian grounds. And I reject your reading of the PI on what I take to be later Wittgensteinian grounds as well. Probably we’ll just have to leave it at that for today.

Dave M., I pretty much agree (as you know). The key is realizing that a certain sort of constructivist anti-realism (john halasz is a good example) does not actual get around the old problems with realism but reproduces them by means of a new metaphysical theory that is no worse (maybe) but no better. Meet the new boss, same as the old. But I hasten to add that this is a more subtle error than putting it this way suggests. It’s an easy trap to fall into, and it’s easy to misread Wittgenstein as a proponent of the sort of metaphysical anti-realism john favors, and many smart people have done so. (Again, I don’t expect john to take it from me.)

That’s fair enough, novakant. I am actually in the process of writing a follow-up to Michael’s post in which I try to address these points more positively. (His comment thread is really not a proper house for my positive philosophy.) In the meantime, my concern is that there is a too-hasty tendency to write off a whole swathe of positions – a swathe that includes naive realism, which can take its lumps for all I care, but also some sophisticated alternatives to naive realism AND to the sort of thing I think you and Michael B. and john halasz think (not that I know for sure you think exactly the same thing). I think you are too quick off the mark in complaining about terms like ‘objective knowledge’, which don’t necessarily express a wrong theory or even any theory at all.

mds- my point is that there are such things as historical sciences – evolution, geology, cosmology – that productively apply the scientific method to unrepeatable sequences of events. The argument that there cannot, now or ever, be a science of history solely because history is composed of unique events is simply wrong.