DOING THE HUMANITIES (WITH BRUNO LATOUR)

Rita Felski

Given at the Recomposing the Humanities with Bruno Latour Conference

University of Virginia, September 18 2015

What exactly would be lost if we lost the humanities? Perhaps this question can serve as a
thought experiment for clarifying why the humanities matter. It puts things in a fresh perspective
by inviting us to imagine an experience of loss and to anticipate the reactions triggered by this
loss. Only in the grey early morning light, when a lover departs in a taxi for the last time, are we
suddenly made aware of the depth and intensity of our passion. So too, perhaps we can only
fully appreciate why the humanities are necessary by contemplating the prospect of their nonexistence.
A common answer is that the loss of the humanities would be the loss of critique. These
two terms have long been intertwined. The idea of critique has a long history that can be spun in
diverse ways; as a synonym for Socratic or Kantian modes of philosophical questioning, for
example, or to denote an adversarial and agonistic style of political argument. This latter use of
the term interests me especially, as one that has gained increased traction in the humanities in the
last half century. Critique, in this sense, typically includes the following elements: a spirit of
skeptical reflection or outright condemnation; an emphasis on its precarious position vis--vis
overbearing and oppressive social forces; the claim to be engaged in some kind of radical
intellectual and/or political work; and the assumption that whatever is not critical must therefore
be uncritical.

This association of the humanities with critique has recently been underscored by Terry
Eagleton in the pages of The Guardian and The Chronicle. Are the humanities about to
disappear? Eagleton wonders. He goes on: What we have witnessed in our own time is the
death of universities as centres of critique. Since Margaret Thatcher, the role of academia has
been to service the status quo, not challenge it in the name of justice, tradition, imagination,
human welfare, the free play of the mind or alternative visions of the future. The declining role
and influence of the humanities is thus tied, Eagleton declares, to the evisceration of critique.
Thanks to an increasingly instrumental and market-driven view of knowledge, underwritten by
ballooning bureaucracies that cast professors and students in the roles of managers and
consumers, the concerns of the humanities seem ever more peripheral and irrelevant.
We can share Eagletons concern about the sidelining of the humanities without, however,
fully endorsing his defense of them. Indeed, his own words might give us pause, for they do not
support his argument as well as he might think. Some of the ideas he invokesimagination,
perhaps; tradition, certainlyare hardly synonymous with critique; indeed, they have often been
seen as its antithesis. Critique may be too broad-brush a term to help us think through the
various practices of the humanities. Helen Small writes: the work of the humanities is
frequently descriptive, or appreciative, or imaginative, or provocative, or speculative, more than
it is critical. This seems exactly right. That intellectuals in the humanities so often invoke
critique as a guiding ethos and principle may speak to the stubborn persistence of an either/or
mindset: the fear that if one is not negating the status quo, one is therefore being co-opted by it.
The practices of academic life may turn out to be more messy, more ambiguous, and more
interesting. And it is here that I found Bruno Latours work very helpful in working through a
different set of ideas on why the humanities matter

Can we develop a defense of the humanities that is not anchored exclusively in the value
of critical thinking? Are there other attitudes, actions, orientations in play? To what extent are
humanists engaged in practices of making as well as unmaking, composing as well as
questioning, creating as well as subverting? And can we talk about the social ties of the
humanities in ways that avoid the dichotomy of heroic opposition or craven cooption? Perhaps
we need a multi-dimensional defense of the humanities; one that accumulates rationales rather
than limiting them or narrowing them down. Today I offer four terms: curating, conveying,
criticizing; composinghoping that the lure of alliteration will not overly compromise the force
of my argument! (I make no attempt to be comprehensive and welcome other suggestions about
what the humanities do and how we do the humanities)
Note that these terms are verbs rather than nouns; my emphasis is on actions and
practices rather than entities. In current defenses of the humanities, we often see the revival of
the two cultures split: the sciences deliver better bridges or cures for cancer: the humanities make
us ethical citizens, more empathic persons, or critical thinkers. The preserve of the sciences, in
short, is the material and natural world, whereas the humanities are seen as making us more
human Such a dichotomy and division of domains seems unfortunate, especially at a time when
the humanities are becoming increasingly concerned with ecological questions, climate change
and the future of the planet. Thinking about the humanities as a series of actions may thus prove
more helpful.
Curating
What does it mean to speak of curating the humanities? I mean by this term something broader
than simply mounting exhibitions in art galleries and museums. Curating, rather, involves a
process of caring forthe word has its origins in caritasof guarding, protecting, conserving,

caretaking, and looking after. We might think of the humanities as curators of a disappearing
past: guardians of fragile objects, artefacts undone by the blows of time, texts slipping into
oblivion. What often characterizes these historical remnants, as Stephen Greenblatt writes, is
their sheer precariousness, testifying to the fragility of cultures, the fall of sustaining
institutions, the destructive effects of warfare, neglect, and corrosive doubt. The wounded
and vulnerable artefacts of history depend on our caring for their survivalwithout which they
are in danger of vanishing, like endangered species, never to reappear.
This defense of curatorship may seem like a conservative definition of the humanities,
but this view would be mistaken. We need to disentangle the meanings of conserving and
question the assumption that caretakingtaking care of the past--is conservative in a political
sense. It is now CEOs, after all, who speak breathlessly of change-making, who sweep away the
old-fangled and worship the cutting edge. In short, the temporal schemes of modernismwhich
counterpose the sluggish, backward-looking time of the dominant culture to the rupture and
innovation of a marginal avant-gardehave lost their last shreds of analytical purchase. Of
course this association of innovation with corporate interests became all too evident here on
grounds when Teresa Sullivan was fired for not being committed to creative disruption-- an
increasingly favored term in the rhetoric of business and marketing.
In the face of this cult of consumer choice and technological innovation, it is important to
insist on an ethics of preservationon the value of the seemingly outmoded or the non-relevant.
Without the humanities, how many of us would loiter and linger amongst the voices of the past?
Who would ever come to feel, in their very bones, the bewildering strangeness of distant forms
of life? Among all the forms of knowledge in the university, writes Mark McGurl, it is the
humanities that are most invested in time-travel, in moving back and forth across time. We need

not only to conserve the texts of the past, he continues, but to conserve those institutionssuch
as universities and libraries-- that care for these past texts and that are increasingly under threat.
There is a need, in short, for an impassioned defense of institutional structuresstructures that
were often hailed as the enemy within a romantic-liberationist strain of literary studies but that
are crucial to conserving and care-taking.
In the opening pages of his Inquiry into Modes of Existence, Bruno speaks to this
question: instead of criticizing institutions, can we also learn to trust them? Actor-network-theory
has devoted much effort to describing the institutional networks that allow for the making of
knowledge. Against a modernist rhetoric of iconoclasm and emancipation from ties, it insists on
the inescapability of our attachments: we exist only because of our ties to countless co-actors.
Meanwhile, Brunos work is pitched against philosophies of history that privilege the new and
the now. Questioning the rhetoric of revolution and the vanguard, the new broom and the clean
slate, he underscores the depth of our entanglement with the past and the ubiquity of
transtemporal connections. Here we can find resources for another vision of the humanities: one
that takes seriously their role in conserving and taking care of the past.
These comments also resonate with an e-mail discussion that recently took place among
the English faculty about how to best respond to a planned digitization of UVAs library
collections and the removal of most of its physical books. Elizabeth Fowler circulated a
document that spoke eloquently about the need to curate and preserve the past. Beth Sutherland
invoked the library as a space of possibility and unexpected finds, of encounters not just between
texts and readers but of material objects with bodies and senses. (Here is another confirmation
that the humanities deal not just with spirit but with matter.) Jerry McGann noted that humanists
have no unique capacity for critical or ethical thinking, but that they are people of the book --

philologists with a vocation for "the knowledge of what is and has been known." Books, we
might say, are non-human actors whose conservation and preservation matters.
Conveying
One risk of the language of conserving and preserving, to be sure, is that of calling up pictures of
home-made marmalade or pickled beetroot, arrayed in silent rows in a darkened pantry. History
is never preserved in this way, sealed off behind glass, but can only be actualized in relation to
the concerns of the present.
It is here that conveying serves as a second key idea for the humanities. Conveying
means both to communicate and to transport. To point out that the humanities are conveyed is to
say that they are transmitted across time and space into new venues and unexpected arenas. And
in being transported, they are also translatedinto the concerns, agendas, and interests of diverse
audiences and publics. Translation is, of course, a key term in actor-network-theory, often
referred to a sociology of translation. Translation is not something imposed on the worldan act
of aggressive encroachment on pristine otherness-- but something that defines a world that is
always already composed of acts of mediation and transformation. In contrast to what Bruno
dubs double clickthe fantasy of effortless information transfersuch translation is never
faithful or complete. He writes: Everything is translated. . . We may be understood, that is,
surrounded, diverted, betrayed, displaced, transmitted, but we are never understood well. If a
message is transported, then it is transformed.
We are never understood well: a phrase to be kept in mind in the light of a growing
interest in extending academic networks. We are seeing, for example, a new attention to the
public humanities and the engaged humanitiesa realization that universities need to make
stronger alliances with interests and communities outside their walls. At Brown, for example,

students can now enroll in a masters program in the public humanities: a program that combines
intellectual content with practical skills such as techniques of recording, presenting and
interpreting, from oral history to museum collections and exhibits; ways of working with
communities and in organizations, from government to management to fundraising.
Now, there is, of course, much work in the humanities that cannot be easily measured in
terms of public utility or direct impact: that may indeed resist or challenge such criteria. Yet this
point also needs to be conveyed, along with a case for more complex, subtle, and specific forms
of accountability. Meanwhile, the call to demonstrate the value of the humanities cannot be
waved away as just a neo-liberal imposition or a grievous symptom of anti-intellectualism. Being
accountableaccounting for what we do and why it mattersis a task to be taken seriously: one
that is far from synonymous with attempts to transform institutions of learning into knowledge
factories. At a time when the traditional idea of Bildung as a form of self-cultivation for a
cultural elite has lost its credibility, we need other justifications for the costs of the humanities
and more eloquent accounts of its contributions. The cultural studies scholar Ien Ang puts it well
in her recent assessment of her field: We need, she writes, to engage in a world where we
have to communicate with others who are, to all intents and purposes, intellectual strangers
people who do not already share our approaches and assumptions. These intellectual strangers
are not just dim-witted bureaucrats or Fox News pundits, but diverse constituencies who may be
nonplussed or mystified by what we do. Scholars are often reluctant to engage this larger
audiencethanks, in part, to the influence of critical theories that pound home the ideological or
metaphysical dimensions of ordinary language. Against this trend, Ang argues for a scholarship
more willing to engage in positive interventions and recommendations, less quick to bridle at lay
interpretations or appropriations of academic discourse. In short, conveying what we do to

intellectual strangers means being willing to go down unexpected paths and into
uncomfortable places, to recognize that transportation always involves translation.
Let us consider, in this light, a third aspect of the humanities: criticizing. To call for
humanists to engage more actively in public life is not to suggest that our task is to rubberstamp
what currently exists. The so-called stakeholders of higher educationwhether we are thinking
of bureaucrats, politicians, tax payers, private donors, foundations, journalists and public
commentators, parents, or students themselveshave diverse expectations of what the
humanities should do. However, one widely endorsed and accepted function is that of criticizing,
disagreeing, objecting, and taking issue. This is not a role that is likely to disappear. .
Note, however, that I use the language of criticizing rather than critique. Criticizing, as I
define it here, includes the history of philosophical and political critique, but leaves room for
other forms and genres of disagreement. On the one hand, the humanities cannot jettison critique,
simply because critique has played a defining role in the history of the humanities. Students, in
my view, should not be allowed to graduate in a humanities discipline without some knowledge
of Kant and Marx, Foucault and feminism. In spite of its own critique of tradition, critique is
now part of traditionthe intellectual tradition of modernityand thus falls under the curatorial
function of the humanities. We cannot make sense of the last two centuries of thought without
some knowledge of the diverse histories of critique.
On the other hand, via the wider term criticizing, I want to suggest that there are other
ways of disagreeing than those signaled by the term critique. Critique, in fact, often insists on its
difference from mere criticism, understood as disagreement or objection, by underscoring its
superior vantage point and epistemology. In traditional ideology critique, this is a matter of
contrasting the illusions or delusions of others to the critics access to truth; in poststructuralist

critique, techniques of troubling and problematizing now signal the critics self-reflexive distance
from the nave or literal beliefs of others. In both cases, though, we see the methodological
asymmetry that characterizes critique. Ideas that scholars object to or disagree with are traced
back to hidden structures of which actors themselves remain unawareideological, psychic,
linguistic, social.

Critique itself, however, remains the ultimate horizonit is not an object to

be contextualized, but the ultimate context: a synonym for rigorous and radical thought. Hence
the deeply asymmetrical nature of the discourse of critique: I speak truth to power while you are
a pawn of neo-liberal interests.
I am not persuaded by these claims to epistemological superiority and believe we would
do better to jettison the concept of critiquewith its halo of rigor and radicalismand to admit
that we are engaged in objecting and disagreeing. Meanwhile, we would also benefit from
exploring styles of criticism more willing to combine disagreement with empathy, that are more
dialogic and less diagnostic. It is hardly sufficient, for example, to explain away attitudes one
does not agree with by invoking the nefarious force of ideologies and isms. This kind of analysis
which portrays ones opponents as being driven by hidden structures that only the critical
theorist can penetratespeaks about others rather than to them, in the discourse of the vanguard.
Criticism can only hope to engage othersrather than chastise or admonish others-- if it is also
willing to put itself in their shoes.. As Stefan Collini argues in his account of the humanities, we
need to extend imaginative sympathy to the agents we study. Depth of understanding involves
something which is more than merely a matter of deconstructive alertness; it involves a measure
of interpretative charity and at least the beginnings of a wide responsiveness. Criticism that
adopts such a stance is not only less dogmatic but also more likely to be heard by the
intellectual strangers invoked by Ang.

I come, finally, to my fourth term: compositionand as Stephen Muecke has already

spoken eloquently on this topic, I will only say a few words. In a Manifesto published in New
Literary History, Bruno turns to the idea of composition as an alternative to that of critique.
Critique, he notes, is good at deconstructing and demystifying, seeking to render things less real
rather than more realwhether because they are products of ideology, as Marxism would have
it, or because they are socially constructed and thus need to be defamiliarized. In short, it is
good at pulling out the rug from under ones feet, while failing to provide a place where one
might stand, however temporarily or tentatively.
The idea of composition, by contrast, speaks to the possibility of trying to compose a
common world, even if this world can only be built out of heterogeneous parts. It is about
making rather than unmaking, adding rather than subtracting, translating rather than separating.
Composition is a matter of both art and politics; theory and practice. The word has roots in art,
music, theater, dance, but also speaks to the creation of communities and political collectivities;
it directs our attention away from the uninteresting distinction between what is constructed and
not constructed to the key question whether something is well made or badly made. It is time to
compose, writes Bruno, in all the meanings of the word, including to compose with, to
compromise, to care, to move slowly, with caution and precaution.
Could this idea of composition inspire an alternative vision of the humanities? One that
that places less emphasis on de wordsdeconstructing, demystifing, debunkingand more on
re wordsreassembling, reframing, reinterpreting, remaking? That is less invested in the
iconoclasm of critique and more invested in forms of making and building? In a recent book, the
French scholar Yves Citton remarks that politicians are fond of invoking the knowledge
economy and the need to equip students for the information society. Let us do our best, says

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Citton, to replace such slogans with references to cultures of interpretationa term that
affords a stronger case for what the humanities offer. Interpretation, here, is not a matter of
recovering original meaning, but of mediating and translating, as texts are slotted into ever
changing frames. This view of interpretation as remaking dovetails nicely with Brunos
emphasis on composition, of forging links between things that were previously unconnected.
Interpretation becomes a co-production between actors that brings new things to light rather than
an endless rumination on a texts hidden meanings or representational failures. It serves as one
key element of the humanities
At the same time, the language of composition draws us closer to those in other fields
who are invested in making, building, constructing, whether out of joists and steel plates or
musical notes and physical gestures: engineers: painters; set designers; composers; novelists;
web-site builders; scientists; dancers. Such rapprochements should be welcomed, as forms of
conveyance that can bring unexpected fruits and unanticipated insights. For this reason, an oftcited adageit is the humanities that make us humanstrikes me as a misstep and a wrong path.
Sarah Churchwell, for example, writes: The humanities are where we locate our own lives, our
own meanings; they embrace thinking, curiosity, creation, psychology, emotion. We need the
advanced study of humanities so that we might, some day, become advanced humans.
Can we really claim, with a straight face, that the sociologist and the physicist are less
human than the philosopher or the literary critic? That their work does not include intense
curiosity, bursts of creativity, affect and emotion? And does it make sense to underscore the
exceptional status of humans at a time when our entanglement with, and dependence upon,
countless nonhuman actors has never been more evident? As Bruno remarks in his recent Tanner
lectures, the humanities and sciences need to find common ground, to create new alliances in the

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face of shared threats to academic institutions. What they share, he suggests is a puzzlement
about phenomena; while scientists start with the unfamiliar, humanists render things unfamiliar.
In both cases, the effect is to turn self-evident substances into complex constellations of actors.
Whether we work in libraries or laboratories, we are all, fundamentally, hair-splitters,
passionately concerned about distinctions invisible to others. And here Bruno gives us our
rallying call: hair splitters of all disciplines unite!
I have sketched out an account of the humanities that does not pivot on either the
presumed supremacy of the human or the primary value of critique. The humanities, I have
suggested, are about practices of curating as well as criticism, about preserving, conserving, and
caring for. Because they are conveyed and communicated to intellectual strangers, we should
expect, and even welcome, translation, mistranslation, and transformation. And rather than
embracing a perpetual ethos of deconstructing or dismantlinga persisting tendency in my own
field of literary studieswe might think more about making, building, and connecting. Perhaps
retooling our frameworksalong these lines might help us make a stronger and more eloquent case
for why the humanities matter.

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