Arts of Living: Reinventing the Humanities for the Twenty-first Century

7 World without End

145 7 World without End Criticism or Creation in the Humanities? When people outside the university think of the humanities, they still commonly imagine them as a creative enterprise. They remember “great artists” like Leonardo, Shakespeare, and Beethoven as visionaries who enlarged the range of human experience . More and more, however, people working in the humanities see their own tradition in a somewhat different light, not as essentially creative but as critical. Eighty years ago, when professors, sometimes even in the sciences, might be novelists and poets on the side, it was still possible to conceive of scholarship as an interpretive act: like the artist or the poet, the scholar was obliged to assemble or combine things in original ways. But now, the paradigm of knowledge as interpretive , which had its sources in the culture of the fine arts, has given way to the quasi-scientific paradigm of knowledge as criticism. If, as I maintain in the previous chapter, we have become the prisoners of theory, then we have also become prisoners of a critical role that is as sterile as it is spellbinding. The way out of our confusion, I’m convinced, begins with a something like a counterspell, a disenchantment of the practice of critique itself. Far from offering a cure to our infirmities, critique is actually the illness. Just now I described the current humanities as quasi-scientific because they have set out to discover laws of meaning comparable to the laws of physics or chemistry. For many academics, “criticism” properly describes the rigorous study of the codes, signs, and signifying systems that they regard as the atoms or molecules of cultural life. While it is true that some critics working in this tradition have challenged the objectivity of science itself by “unmasking” its allegiance to particular values and traditions, we might understand this practice of unmasking as an effort to beat the sciences at their own game. After all, when a critic of science finds a masculine bias in articles describing the “penetration” of a “passive” egg by a “mobile” sperm, the critic’s discovery lays claim—at least tacitly—to the same status held by the argument that water is really H2O.1 Both of these arguments , the one for H2O and the one for a male bias in research on reproduction, offer accounts that the reader is supposed to understand as more rigorous if not also more real than the thinking of the average person: ostensibly, the sexist bias is really there. 146 World without End The rigorous character of criticism in our time has freed it from the charge that the whole enterprise is little more than opinion, egoism, or propaganda passed off as genuine knowledge. In the humanities’ long rivalry with the sciences, they appear to have gained a second wind, almost a second life. Yet criticism differs from the sciences in at least two crucial and quite damaging respects. First, by its very nature, criticism is reactive, having to content itself with evaluation after the fact, while ceding to others the fashioning of fresh ideas and the building of new institutions . Second, criticism remains firmly tied to a much older view of “contemplation” as distinct from, and superior to, real-world activity.2 We might say that criticism is like a science that leaves experiments to others, turning its vast erudition and energy to a skeptical reading of the lab reports. Perhaps the most telling example of this reactive and world-evading tendency is the case of deconstruction. Thirty years after Derrida’s work first made its appearance in the English-speaking world—and with a little help from Woody Allen— people who have never heard of “grammatology” now speak about “deconstructing ” whatever or whomever they happen not to like. Of course, Derrida took pains to distinguish de-construction from merely destructive criticism.3 As he describes it, deconstruction presupposes that in every conflict, the two sides or “binaries” actually create and sustain one another. There are, in short, no “clean hands,” no positions finally detachable from counterpositions. The point, then, is not to avoid “error” but to see both members of the binary from some alternative perspective. Instead of destroying a belief, the deconstructionist transvalues it by giving that belief a new place in a network of relations and meanings, often with an eye to past inequality and injustice. But as Derrida’s own voluminous output demonstrates, the real-world consequences of deconstruction are rather hard...