New Literary History

In this diverse collection of responses and essays, whose richness and variety suggest something of the range of concerns gathered under the rubric of the humanities, one issue emerges that might structure future debates. Indeed, the real subject of all these essays is the future itself, and not just of the humanities; but the immediate issue is the question of the human and the relations between that question and the discourses of the humanities.

The question might be framed by comparing Susan Stewart's eloquent, even aphoristic, "Thoughts on the Role of the Humanities in Contemporary Life" with Jonathan Culler's sharply angled "In Need of a Name?" Stewart describes our primary task as an ongoing "anthropomorphization of ourselves," a cultivation and exercise of those distinctly human attributes that define the species and determine our place in the order of things, yet cannot be captured by scientific reason. The discourses of the arts and the humanities are, she says, among the most reflective and culturally visible sites where this task is being undertaken. Culler, by contrast, argues that an emphasis on the human "risks leading us astray," because the very concept represents a retrograde ideological mystification that not only delegitimates some of the most exciting work done in the past, such as that of Foucault, but also bars our path to the future. We need, Culler says, a "new name" to describe what it is that humanists do, a fresh term that does not drag an ideology along in its train, a term whose coldness and clarity puts the humanities on an equal footing with natural and social science.

I think Stewart's emphasis is more productive than Culler's because it does not surrender the principle of the distinctness of either the human or the humanities. I regard this principle as indispensable, for reasons usefully indicated not just by Stewart but also by Brian Stock, Mark Edmundson, Rey Chow, and even Monika Fludernik, who for some reason thinks I am calling for a "public relations stunt" to promote the humanities.

For some other reason equally mysterious to me, Culler believes that my identification of "the human" as one of the primary emphases of the [End Page 105] humanities rests on an account of intention that is manifestly limited and misleading. When I say that "the underlying aim of humanistic study is always to construct, through the materials provided by the text, an understanding of a human intention, an account of how and why this particular text came to be the way it is, the conditions under which the text emerged," Culler infers that I must be thinking of recovering the conscious intentions of the author, and thus of rediscovering, under the guise of criticism, the self-mastering, self-identical subject of classical liberal thought. One of our leading experts in structuralist and poststructuralist thought, Culler understands that much of the best work in the humanities has taken the form of a critique of the intentions of the author as unreliable guides to "what is actually happening in history, in discourse, in the psyche." Any emphasis on the reconstruction of intentions represents, Culler says, "more a strategic device to keep a humanistic ideology alive than [a well-founded concept] in a critical or explanatory account." As Culler knows, and even notes, the account of intentionality I am working with here fully accommodates history, discourse, and the psyche. In fact, I state explicitly that conscious intentions are "remarkably difficult to establish, and even harder to sort out," and often altogether irrelevant," and argue instead that intention should rather be understood as a name for all those forces by which human action is determined insofar as those forces come into focus in the form of a created work. Still, Culler thinks that the very term humanities is tainted by its connection with a particular ideology of the human, one that fetishizes conscious intentions as the primary determinant of the text.

Not that this makes any difference, but I was not actually intending to present an account of the authorial subject, but was rather laying out certain premises that defined work in the humanities, as opposed to work...