My approach to the set of fields known as the Humanities is rather different from that of most people I know. I hesitate to assert the universal validity of my approach because it is, basically, a desire for everyone else to become more like me.
The single most important principle, for me, is receptivity, which I define as an openness to hearing what the greatest products of the human intelligence are telling us, the capacity to respond to a large but not infinite number of works of art, music, literature, philosophy. I define intelligence in the largest possible sense, as the apprehension of the world through the senses and the intellect itself. By "telling us" I don't mean any sort of reductionist idea of a paraphrasable message. This is the quality that I try to cultivate in myself above all others, in my chosen profession. I don't really care whether someone else agrees with me exactly on what counts as the greatest products of human culture. In fact, I would argue that the person with with most inclusive sense of what that might entail would have the highest degree of receptivity. I'm thinking of people like David Shapiro, John Cage or Federico García Lorca. Receptivity is not indiscriminate or mindlessly eclectic. In other words, it is not a claim to an openness that has not really been achieved, or an uncaring acceptance of everything. In practice, no one individual will really achieve receptivity except in a very limited sphere. I often find myself closed off to anything new, unable to respond to things I am unaccustomed to. At other times the channels are marvelously open. Imagine walking down the same corridor every day, and then one day suddenly a new door is open, one that you never saw before.
Now it seems to me that the standard mentality in the humanities is to value two things: the ability to make an argument that conforms to academic conventions, and the need for such an argument to have a "pay off" or alibi, in other words, a justification that appeals to something other than the inherent value of the products of the human intelligence. Gerald Graff, for example, argues in the 2009 Profession ("Why How We Read Trumps What We Read"), that the value of texts about what we develop our arguments do not matter very much. He develops a rather trivial argument about a trivial text (a text he views as trivial) in order to demonstrate this. For me, all this shows is that the form of an academic argument is easy to replicate and parody. Surely the value of the humanities lies in its "raw materials," not in our own academic formalisms. The search for the alibi also shows a deep insecurity about the value of what we are doing. More about that later, maybe. For know I will only say that I hold the humanities in more esteem that the appeasement of other deities.
In my own work I do develop arguments, of course. I am not advocating a merely "appreciative" criticism, but one that makes substantive points about how and why these works matter. Usually, a particular article I might write will use only a portion of my total response to the work itself, in the service of some narrower argument relevant for the occasion. One thing I have been trying to do for years is to use more of what I know--maybe 20% instead of 5%. This is the real challenge of the humanities: if only a small percentage of our response actually makes it into print, it is no use pointing to the larger percentage of the iceberg that remains underwater. There is no ready-made "translation" from receptivity to meaningful scholarly work. Maybe some are deeply responsive and never bother to articulate what they've learned. What the Humanist should do is visit these places and report back to the rest of us. That in itself can be a great product of the human intelligence.
I should make it clear that I disagree, too, with approaches that advocate the "love of literature" in an anti-intellectual way. To really love literature is to love how it rewrites your subjectivity, how it kicks your ass with its transformative power. I don't really want a criticism that is less academic and more like the plain folks read, but a criticism that is up to the level of our potential receptivity to literature itself. That might very well be a criticism that is more academic, more theoretical, rather than less so.
Of course, I don't expect anyone to agree with me, because I distrust my own impulse to want to make other people think as I do. Receptivity cannot be forced on others as a critical program.
I've not read Graff's article, Jonathan, but it sounds similar into a notion I've mulled over every now and then. It seems to me that if your critical method is highly "theorized" that method itself is an engine for generating the meanings you find in texts. So the value of the text doesn't matter much as long as it's got the appropriate hooks to which the theory engine can attach itself. Once that's done you just turn the crank and collect the sausage.
Yes, that's exactly right. You and I are not the only people to have that thought, though I've never heard it called sausage-making.
Dear Jonathan,
Thanks indeed for this thought-provoking post. Some years ago as a sophomore at Brown University I wound up in Thalia Field's English seminar "John Cage: Ambient Cultural Silence." The course's title still strikes me as cringe-worthy but everything else about it hit the mark for me. Cage was placed at the center of a massive network of what your post makes me want to call "theories of receptivity," from H.D. Thoreau to D.T. Suzuki to Marshall McLuhan. It also put Cage in the middle of his own artistic milieu, a milieu whose many artworks the class was asked both to study and to act out in various ways. I suddenly found myself, quite against my natural inclinations, contorting in Merce Cunningham dance exercises, trekking to the John Hay library to look up a first edition Jargon Society publication of Charles Olson's "Projective Verse" (because with my limited research skills I didn't know how easily found it was in his collected essays), composing my own Mac Low-esque aleatory poems, and the like.
I look back on "Ambient Cultural Silence" as the hinge moment in my own aesthetic education, because it challenged me to explore the importance of "receptivity" and to test my own limits with respect to it. There is a bit of a paradox in learning "receptivity" through Cage. Cage heroically stuck by the (Kantian?) shibboleth "there is no accounting for taste," and yet a good course on Cage can't help but do a little taste-making of its own. Maybe that's part of your caginess (oops, sorry) about advancing your critical program more assertively? Nevertheless, I am yet to come across any course or conversation that has taken the concept you describe as "receptivity" more seriously or enacted it more radically. So thanks again, Thalia Field.
The only aspect of your post toward which I'm a little unreceptive is the word "receptivity" itself. I picture someone twisting himself up like a set of bunny ears atop a television. Or, as the OED reminds us (albeit after the definition "ability or readiness to receive or take in") , "Zool. The quality or condition of a female animal, esp. a mammal, of being willing to mate; the state of being in oestrus." I don't think the humanistic quality you describe has much to do with being in heat.
Anyway, there has been a recent bombardment of "crisis in the humanities" blogposts on Arcade (alongside a number of lectures here at Stanford from prominent faculty members that worry over the demise of the humanities), and as the rockets rain down I have been asking myself whether my most significant humanistic values are truly "endangered" or not. I suppose I merely want to nod to you in assent: "receptivity"-- by some other name-- would be the value I'd be keenest to safeguard.
Thanks for that. I'm not sure what else to call it and am open, receptive, to suggestions. I too get impatient with the crisis of the humanities rhetoric because I feel it's the humanists who create the crisis by propagating models that devalue what is most valuable. Did someone like Cage ever worry about 'the future of the humanities'?
Courtesy of Nina Paley, I give you Mimi & Eunice:
Followed by:
Jonathan Mayhew’s recent post elicited a number of sympathetic thoughts from me. Most of these cluster around the distinction brought to a head by the title of Graff’s article: “how” versus “what.” Imagine a slightly modified version of that title: “Why How We Write Trumps What We Write About.” Why indeed? A few answers suggest themselves. Not only is there no ready-made translation from readerly receptivity to scholarly productivity, as Mayhew notes, but the former may often actually impede the latter. Attentiveness to the particular features of the artifacts we write about cannot but constrain the range of responses that can claim to be pertinent and illuminating. By contrast, the kinds of questions we ask, the types of authority we assume, the methods, terms and registers we use keep changing in response to novel pressures and trends. It would seem that concerning ourselves with our toolbox, even at the expanse of attention to our objects (or indeed at the cost of rejecting the very hierarchy between “primary” objects of intrinsic worth and “secondary” tools of passing utility), puts us on a better footing within an institutional framework that demands productivity. If questions concerning the inherent value of the artifacts we write about and the “rightness” of our claims about them have less constraining force, well, that leaves us all the freer to make new claims in response to new disciplinary situations.
However, I’d like to think that the pressure to produce is not the key factor responsible for the order of priorities epitomized in the title of Graff’s essay. After all, his thesis concerns teaching, not scholarly writing (and I should note that, while I take issue with the general claim, I agree that a brilliant analysis of the National Inquirer may be more pedagogically fruitful than a mediocre interpretation of The Magic Mountain). Taught from day one to suspect ideology in the guise of a canon, we tend to abdicate the authority to engage in value ranking; and eager to avoid epistemological naivité and blindfolded arrogance, we are reluctant to dispute a reading as willful, beside the point or simply wrong. When internalized to unthinking routine and dogmatic expectation, however, this kind of modesty can turn into a more subtle form of arrogance. Genuine acknowledgment of the perspectivalism of our value judgments and readings does not undermine their authority for us; and, since such acknowledgment precludes every non-perspectival distinction between those who can and those who cannot share in our perspective, it actually lends support to the practice of articulating our judgments in the face of competing ones. In our reluctance to assert our authority to do just this, we end up tacitly denying the authority of our objects.
One of the issues lurking in the background here is, I suspect, the old difficulty of reconciling the object’s claim upon us with the demands of self-reflexivity—or, otherwise put, reconciling criticism with critique. Traditionally conceived as a practice of evaluative discrimination, the very idea of criticism implies answerability to the work under consideration (what we read). By contrast, the modern project of critique demands that, before making any such claims about objects, we must first establish the secure reach and the limits of our faculties, concepts, and methods (how we read). The need for critique in the latter sense is foundational to the ideal of disciplinarity on which the modern university is premissed. This is why humanities scholars are so preoccupied with the institutional, political, and economic conditions of possibility of their practices—endlessly so, because these enabling conditions are perpetually changing and made particularly elusive by the absence of neat boundaries between our discursive tools and our discursive objects. Criticism as opposed to critique, i.e. criticism that hazards unabashedly evaluative and normative claims in response to the rich particularity of literary works has for the most part been edged out of academia and relegated to small journals, book reviews and blogs.
Because the notion that the integrity of a discipline must be grounded in critique is of Kantian provenance, it might help make sense of the situation just described to revisit Hegel’s polemic against Kant, arcane though this topic might seem. Kant held that human knowledge requires the working together of sensible receptivity and intellectual activity. Without the former, our conceptual thoughts would be empty. That is, they would be logically consistent but they would fail to be answerable to something “out there” other than thought. Mayhew’s plea sounds consonant with this Kantian emphasis placed on the indispensable role played by receptivity in our rapport with objects.
Against Kant, Hegel contends that we cannot consistently think something external to thought, and so it is a mistake to believe that being in touch with something real requires a mysterious receptive faculty. Every theoretical claim about a mind-independent realm “out there” is undercut by “the dialectic of the boundary”: we cannot meaningfully say that there exists such a realm outside thought without implicitly denying its putative externality. For Hegel, thought is condemned to unboundedness because in reflecting on its limits it transcends them—and it can do so because it is defined by the paradoxical power to differentiate, out of itself, the objective realm that it is “about.” Objects are thus not “given” to thought from someplace outside, by means of a receptivity distinct from thought. For we have no notion of what we take to be our object, nor of how it is presented to us, except in terms authorized by our own thinking. This insistence on the all-consuming mediating power of intellectual activity is bound to make Mayhew’s appeal to receptivity seem questionable from the viewpoint of today’s unwittingly Hegelian, constructivist dogma. Such appeals on behalf of receptivity betray the naïve assumption, or so Hegelians would charge, that our interpretive activity can be anchored in some pre-interpretive openness to the material.
I believe that Hegel was wrong in repudiating receptivity. On this point I am with Gadamer, who contends that Hegel’s argument, while formally unassailable, nonetheless fails to refute the basic experience of finitude registering in the Kantian talk of receptivity. That experience discloses an important insight about the human standpoint, even if every attempt at articulating it in discursive terms lands us in performative contradiction. To assert that receptivity is a precondition for experience is not tantamount to indulging in a daydream of unmediated contact with the real.
Moreover, there’s another side to Hegel’s critique of Kant, which I do find convincing. This line of thought is intricately related to the dialectic of the boundary deployed against Kantian receptivity, yet it actually implies the restoration of receptivity on another level. It is methodological rather than substantive—though its upshot is precisely the primacy of substance over method. I am thinking of Hegel’s scornful remarks about the Kantian obsession with philosophical critique, understood as the mind’s examination of its own limits. In short, Hegel claims that epistemological skeptics’ mistrust of knowledge must itself be mistrusted. Kantians who forever postpone substantive philosophical issues in order first to secure the critical foundations of philosophy are, Hegel writes, like priests who busy themselves building labyrinthine vestibules to a temple instead of stepping right inside. Elsewhere, he compares the critical philosopher to someone who, before stepping into the water, first wants to learn to swim on the shore.
This is a rather uncharitable caricature of Kantian critique, betraying as it does Hegel’s eagerness to distance himself from a predecessor to whom he is deeply indebted. But this should not obscure Hegel’s insight. What we need if we want to achieve the desired grounding of our judgments is, according to Hegel, not empty self-reflection of the navel-gazing variety. Rather, we must expose our assumptions to the risk of refutation at the hands of the particular thing we are dealing with, engage with that material and even “immerse ourselves” in it, in the hope that the experience of doing so will guide a progressive self-correction of our standpoint. I take it that something along these lines is what Jonathan Mayhew has in mind when he writes about how literature “rewrites your subjectivity, how it kicks your ass with its transformative power.” If we want to get clearer about our job as humanists, we should worry a little less about how we read, how we write and how we talk and we should become a little more willing to immerse ourselves in the works we care about most—even, or especially, if we are not armored with a fully developed professional self-definition that might protect us from the kicks in the butt administered by Tolstoy or Baudelaire or Kafka.
In reflecting upon how we read, talk, and write we merely seem to be doing what is expected of conscientious citizens of the modern university: we subordinate our answerability to the object before us to the allegedly more basic responsibility of critical self-reflection. Yet when reflection on our position and practices becomes more important than our objects, it runs the risk of becoming sterile. What I mean by sterility here is that disciplinary self-reflection becomes captive to intra-professional questions and questions that belong squarely in the domain of institutional politics. These considerations do matter, but they seem narrow in comparison to the broader concerns that resonate in significant works, concerns for which our affinity is not primarily a matter of professional or institutional affiliation. A surfeit of critical self-reflection sidelining "what" questions in favor of "how" questions can have the ironic outcome that, in our very eagerness to legitimize our work in terms dictated by the world, we make it less interesting to people outside the profession.
Of course it would be wrong to make light of methodological dilemmas, professional considerations and institutional pressures. How to respond to them is a question for serious discussion. Prevailing vocabularies and conversations, paradigm changes, social trends and fads, not to mention enrollments, administrative structures and budgets place very real constraints on what we can do and how we can do it. What none of these circumstances can give us is a robust sense of caring for what we read and the conviction that others ought to care for it as well. Looking for this kind of positive orientation, we can only turn to the works that speak to us most powerfully—if, that is, their voice is not drowned out by our disputations about the discipline, to which I tried to contribute here at the risk of merely increasing the background noise.
To what extend might reception of a particular text necessitate rejection of others? If it does, I imagine we can try to minimize that rejection. But if our goal in reading is to maximize the range of texts that we experience positively, to what extend might we risk experiencing all texts superficially?
Certainly, I can't imagine that reading should ever be mechanical (like 'sausage making') , but we do need old experiences to understand, contextualize new experiences - to provide 'hooks' or footholds. Read A then read X and its one thing. Read B then read X and its another thing. Live your particular life then read X and its still another thing. Change the order in which you do these things and X becomes something else. To me, that seems inevitable.
It seems that I can be receptive only to the extend that reading is an acquisition. To the extend that reading is itself an act of creation it seems that I have to choose: My materials and how I put them together. I don't know what I am if not a network of biases. Certainly, I want this network to make me large and generous in my approach to the world, but I also want it to make me complex and effective.
Thank you for the thoughtful and thought provoking post.
I think ultimately receptivity increases the entire range of texts with no implication of superficiality. In the short term it might seem that an engagement with a particular kind of text makes other texts seem less compelling; and, of course, not every reader will be open to everything. My own preferences go to the two extremes of baroque complexity (Lezama Lima) and extreme simplicity (anonymous cancioneros from the middle ages), while shying away from a lot of things in the middle range. One thing I do is return frequently to texts I know in some sense are worthy, but to which I feel especially resistant. That is the opposite of a superficial approach. For example, I could make a list of five things I really like about Robert Duncan, a poet to whom I'm very resistant. All of a sudden, just by making that list, I could begin to hear certain things in him that I was deaf to before.
Now, with just that short response, I think I have a much better sense of what you mean by receptivity, and now I love the idea. It is something very active; it is about building a mental infrastructure to prepare myself for the act of reading. Is that right? Maybe, if I believe incorporating author X is worthwhile, I can read the writers X read, or later writers who I know to be responding to X's writing. Or try to understand better the cultural and personal context in which X wrote. Or take long walks to think about the internal structure of X's work.
That's great, but now it seems receptivity requires much time and energy. How do I decide which authors are worthy? This may sound silly, but it's a question I worry about: Do I take a poll amongst people whose opinions I respect? But the people whose opinions I respect are probably already like me in some way. Do I tackle whoever seems most challenging? But often who seems simple on an initial reading reveals many complexities on a second or third reading, and conversely, writers can certainly be difficult without leading anywhere. Any thoughts on how to make these choices?
Yes, it does require time and energy. There's no one way to decide what to read, but usually I've followed particular critics and authors and read backwards. For example, I've long admired Marjorie Perloff, so reading every author that she's written about is one approach I've followed. Or once I saw a list of authors favored by Frank O'Hara and I read backward from that, leading me to authors like Flann O'Brien. Listen to your own internal compass too. If you suddenly get a strong urge to read Emerson, or Borges, that impulse cannot possibly be wrong. You might be embarrassed about not having read some canonical author, so that embarrassment might be a spur.
Really, there are no dead ends, so you don't have to feel you've wasted time with something that seemed complex and didn't yield the desired results. When this happens, you'll have gained at the very least some reading "chops" that will help you elsewhere. That's happened to me with Jorie Graham, for example.
Usually I've felt strongly compelled to read what I am reading, with a sense of some urgency. Sometimes I don't know why I felt compelled to read something until afterwards. I had an intuition I should be reading something, but didn't know why until much later.
It's difficult just seeing what's there and somehow taking note of it. Critical methods direct your attention to certain things, certain things only. Seeing around those methods, seeing past them, that can be difficult. I'd say that mere description is tough, but these objects are so complex that I'm not sure there's any such thing as MERE description.
I'm currently working on a long post about two episodes in Disney's Fantasia, The Nutcracker's Suite and The Sorcerer's Apprentice. The object of the post is a simple one, that both episodes exhibit a ring structure, A B C C' B' A' in the first case and A B C B' A' in the second. Seeing that was not at all obvious. Here's a methodological note I'm likely to append to the post:
While the analysis is relatively straightforward, it was an analytic process and took time, thought, and attention to appropriate to detail. The ring structure didn’t declare itself to me immediately upon viewing, and I’d viewed both episodes many times before undertaking this investigation. I had to look for the structure, and I had to know how to do that. That’s not rocket science. It’s rather simple: View the film, make notes, review your notes. Of course, your notes have to contain the right information and that may not be obvious before the fact. So I had to view, make notes, review them, view again, more notes, and so forth.
One issue is the fact that films unfold in time, making it difficult to compare the last moments with the opening moments, the before-the-last moments with the after-the-opening moments, and so forth, keeping all that in order. You have to make notes so as to see in all at once. The other issue is the simple complexity of these objects, these moving images with sound. Of the many properties they have, which are relevant to the ultimate descriptive purpose? Which properties do you abstract from the whole? Thus, though my basic goal in this exercise is a descriptive one, I had to undertake both abstraction (properties from the whole) and analysis (examine the film and my notes on it) in order to arrive at the final descriptive result.
EDIT: And here's the post:
http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/two_rings_in_fantasia_nutcracke...
Hi, Jonathan. Like this. My only comment is to suggest that this quality, or faculty, while it can be developed & trained, is never completely controllable or predictable. I am still mystified & perplexed by the intensity of my own response - of 30 years ago - to certain texts. In fact often it seems to be their mystery which draws us in. Their effect on our emotions (or motivations) in depth.
You're right. Its uncontrollable quality makes it all the more interesting. You can foster it in yourself or others, but not control or predict its effects.