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Monday, January 07, 2008
Fish on the Value of the Humanities
Fish’s current blog entry mounts a defense of the humanities. Here’s his concluding paragraph:
To the question “of what use are the humanities?”, the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said – even when it takes the form of Kronman’s inspiring cadences – diminishes the object of its supposed praise.
He’s attracted 181 comments as of 1:35 PM Eastern time; the number seems to rise by the minute. I’ve not read them.
Comments
I’ve never understood what it means for X to be “it’s own good.” In arts/humanities discussions, it always seems like shorthand for “no moral or political efficacy.”
It’s like the old chestnut about X is its own reward. No. If X is its own reward, it’s not a reward. A reward is, by definition, something good that follows as a result of some deed.
In each case, X is being justified, even if, as Fish believes, the point of the argument is that X doesn’t need justification. But being “a good” *is* a justification. What these arguments are really saying is that X cannot be converted into other currency: the point of literature is not outside literature but in the reader’s interaction with the literature.
The real tell comes in the sentence before the passage Bill quotes: “And if they don’t bring about effects in the world they cannot be justified except in relation to the pleasure they give to those who enjoy them.”
Well, now, giving pleasure is different than not bringing about effects in the world. Being pleased is certainly an effect. What Fish is really saying is simply, “The purpose of the humanities is to give the student or teacher pleasure, not to change her beliefs.”
So X is not its own good, its own reward. The good, the reward, is still there; justification is still present. It’s just that the good, the reward, is a private matter between a man and a book.
Well, you know, Luther, right around the corner they’re arguing about Zizek and the social and the subject (considered as some kind of ontological black hole of negativity) and I’m thinking that that conversation must somehow have some bearing on this matter. It may be that pleasure is subjective and happens person by person, but it’s not at all clear to me that Fish’s grand (& traditional) conclusion follows from that. Is it of any significance at all that lots of people receive pleasure from the same titles, whether texts or movies or songs, whatever? It seems to me that must somehow be factored in, and Fish’s world doesn’t seem to have a way of doing that. That, it seems to me, is what happens when your foundational account of the human is based on some version of a black hole of negativity.
Gives new meaning to that old chestnut, nattering nabobs of negativism.
Sounds like Deleuze and shit.
To the average reader, this will sound a little like the emperor’s apologist saying “Clothes? Of course the emperor has no clothes. The imperial body is regalia enough!”
It’s always seemed to me quite easy to justify literature as a field of study. It’s *weird* that humans tell stories, use language in more than immediately tool-like ways, make pictures with words, test out arguments on stages in public, etc. And as Bill points out, it’s not surprising that humans often share responses to certain stories, certain uses of language. So studying how humans use language in these ways seems as important as any aspect of human life to study.
I agree with Fish that we need not justify the study of literature on the basis of moral education. But I’m not sure that the pleasure of a poem is any more “in-itself” than the moral message of a poem. Once we agree simply that humans cannot help but be reflexive, then we acknowledge that the study of ourselves—our art, our behavior, our past actions, our group antics—is a, literally, necessary study. (That’s the real weirdness of it all: that we think about ourselves, and that we cannot help but think about ourselves. It’s what defines us, holds us together, and separates us from everything else.)
That is to say, I don’t think it’s some privilege that humans study literature. I think it’s inevitable. The family dinner table or the bar is one place we study stories; colleges just happen to be one other place.
Minor side-track: why is it that people always refer to the pleasure of poetry? Many poems are not written to give pleasure; they are either written to stimulate other emotional responses such as anger, annoyance, or grief, or they attempt to cause some sort of intellectual response that is different than the pleasure one is supposed to feel when contemplating an aesthetic object. Of course all of these things could be called “pleasure”, but that seems to stretch the meaning of the word.
It’s a mystery, Rich, it’s a mystery. Consider the meaning of the word stretched. More seriously, students of music have raised the question of just why sad music is so, well, pleasurable. I don’t think we’ve got a good answer to that question.
Which brings me to another issue: Was Fish defending the humanities, was he defending literature and music and dance and movies, etc. or was he waffling and defending both without really specifying? He quotes Sydney’s well-known “The Defense of Poesy,” for example, which is a defense of, well, poesy, not the humanities as academic disciplines. His whole self-evident justification line is, after all, a traditional way of talking about the arts, not the humanistic study of the arts, which is a different thing.
Now, at the undergraduate level, the point of courses in literature is surely to get undergraduates to read literary texts, first of all, and secondarily to think about them in interesting ways. I assume that Fish’s argument is primarily in defense of such courses. Graduate-level course-work and professional research, that’s a bit different. Fish’s line there might be that that’s what you have to do in order to have people qualified to teach the undergraduate courses. I’m not sure I’d buy that.
As someone who has written quite a few poems, I’d say that there is a terminological confusion in the use of the word “pleasure.” People substitute “pleasure” for the word “love,” which is just too embarrassing. All poetry is written out of love, even the poetry of hatred.
I do wonder, does Fish’s final explanation come across to anyone as lazy? While Sydney’s Defense of Poesy is certainly one of the more famous defenses of humanistic study, it isn’t the one most germane to our present situation. As a generation raised in the aftermath of deconstructuralism, our relationship to the “auctoritas” is significantly altered from where it was during the Renaissance. As both readers and as critics involved in humanistic study, do we not gain and refine certain skills that are worthy? Even marketable?
I think that Joseph Duemer sort of has it, but not quite. In some societies, present and past, poets may write because it pays. (I see that Joseph D. has written something about this at his linked blog, which looks pretty good.) I remember reading something by Empson that speculates that poets write in order to work out some kind of inner conflict, that only someone with some kind of problem to work through would bother to spend the effort needed to make a good poem, given that it doesn’t pay. That’s not really love.
If we’re looking at it from the writer’s point of view, I’d say that poetry is written to make an effect. I don’t think that anyone writes in order to be boring, except possibly as an ironic joke in which the point is to make the effect of being boring. Similarly, readers read not necessarily for pleasure, or for aesthetic appreciation, but because they want to be affected.
“To the question “of what use are the humanities?”, the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject."
One might term that the “let ‘em eat cake” aesthetic-meme. Literature, according to the Fishians, has value precisely because it does not function, and cannot be quantified, nor does it refer to any definite state of affairs. Neither history nor sociology (certainly not logic), Lit. seems then to reduce to a type of syntactical musick (alas most of it--even Shackaspeare---a bit closer to the Beatles than to Bach)
Rich, thank you for responding. You may be right about writing to have an effect & maybe that’s what I meant by “love.” Perhaps “commitment” would be another word to throw into the mix here.
An anecdote, however, in response to your comment that “I don’t think that anyone writes in order to be boring, except possibly as an ironic joke. . .”: I was at a conference in November & attended a session in which a Berkeley grad student read a paper that was mostly a discussion of his own (apparently endless) poem based on the human genome. At one point he admitted that, because of the repetitive nature of the procedures he’d adopted, writing it “was kind of boring.” And ultimately I don’t think his irony went very deep, if it was there at all. The poem, apparently, is scheduled for publication somewhere. I can look up the details if anyone is interested. Right. That’s what I thought.
Huh, interesting. Maybe this poet thought that although writing it was boring, reading it wouldn’t be. Or, more likely, the poet was interested in the sort of intellectual effect that occurs when you know that an object of conceptual art exists. After all, we are discussing this poem, although at third hand.
Poetry as a conceptual rather than a mimetic art has certainly been dominant in recent decades. Charles Bernstein, I think, marks this as “the turn toward language.” (My knowledge of the idea comes filtered through Ron Silliman, however.) The work of the Language poets & their kin seems intended to rub the personal out of poetry & to make it a conceptual exercise. I understand the audacity of it—taking one thing that poetry has always had (concern for its own saying) and focusing on that to the exclusion of everything else—but ultimately much of this work doesn’t open any new worlds of perception for me & leaves me cold. That is, it does not seem to be written “out of love.” Quite intentionally, perhaps, in an attempt to overthrow that old Romantic obsession with the poet’s state of mind.
For this issue, “use” can have many meanings. In which case, the question may have many answers.