Freedom: The Function of Criticism at All Times

Abstract

Let me list a few items each of which threatens not only the priority of criticism in the literary humanities but also its destruction and that of the humanities by its elimination or displacement. I will begin intramurally. We can argue about each of these items and the motives, forces, and consequences of each. My list is by no means complete and has no order of priority.

Since I teach at Pittsburgh, in an English department once chaired for more than a decade by a leading figure in composition and pedagogy studies, I will begin my list of threats to criticism with rhetoric and composition, disciplines that became pedagogy and related studies.¹ In many Research 1 universities, composition began in English departments and became its own subfield, in some part in rebellion against the old lit and comp method of teaching writing in relation to literature. Sometimes these composition subgroups left the English departments to become their own programs or Departments of Composition, Rhetoric, Pedagogy, or combination of the same. Job lines in literary history and criticism, once supported by teaching lit and comp, were lost to hirings in a new subfield, which of course predictably shattered into many sub-subfields. We are now left with composition, pedagogy studies, professional writing, and so on. At times, these fragmented fields (re)gather for professional, administrative, and financial reasons in new departments.²

Next on my list is the high theory moment, which shattered English departments and the other national language departments as well, especially German and the Romance language departments, often finding a home in comparative literature.³ Many theory specialists remained committed to literary criticism—we can take the Yale School as an example—although the work of many theoretically minded critics did not remain within the canons of national literatures and languages or language and literature at all.⁴ Some theorists and their acolytes displaced criticism altogether with changing grand narratives built on categories derivative of discourses and modes of knowledge close to literature and literary study but clearly independent of and assumed to be prior to literature itself. I am thinking of especially post-Lacanian psychoanalysis, post-Althusserian Marxism, and other discourses derived from extraliterary sources. We can take Fredric Jameson's work on postmodernism and late capital as one instance of an officially approved extraliterary theorizing. As time passed from the heyday of grand theory, competition split the field, and academics began to think of their specific ways of talking as doing theory germane to subareas of research. Merriam-Webster calls these ways of talking “jargons.”⁵ The jargons also expanded their reach. Narrative theory, for example, migrated from the study of the novel and attached itself to the study of other discourses and their expressions (Booth 1961; Scholes and Kellogg 1966).⁶ A famous Critical Inquiry conference and special issue on narrative enabled and exemplified this movement.⁷

In addition, and rightly so, postcolonial theory, gender theory, race theory, and other theories generated substantial bodies of work founded on crucial principles. For example, following Edward Said's work in both Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, scholars of especially modern Western literatures had to consider their role not only in representing the non-Western “other” but in constructing Western national cultural traditions inescapably intertwined with colonizing and imperializing practices. The great tradition of the English novel organizes an imperial society at home (Said 1978).⁸ We know from the writings of Hortense Spillers (2003: x) that scholars should not study nor critics engage with the worldliness of texts and experiences unless they in part “create” their objects by differentiating them against normative orders and constraints. Against resistance, these principles acquired limited institutional legitimacy precisely because they made claims within fields of oppositional or resistant intellectual practice. As is often the case in mainstream institutional formations, changing the grounds for disciplinary work always slows as the effort comes near established and self-justified positions.

We can see this in several ways and places. Susan Fraiman (1995: 807), for example, says, apropos Said's reading of Jane Austen, that her “own investment in the woman writer that feminist critics have variously and laboriously wrested from the fray” necessitates the claim that Said is “typing” Austen, a fact “symptomatic of a more general gender politics underlying his postcolonial project.”⁹ Fraiman's recuperation of Austen rests in a certain established consensus of bourgeois liberal feminism, oppositional and establishment at once. In the humanities, vested interests set aside fundamental principles when these require adjustment. The literary humanities seem especially unwilling to accept that the human sciences can make basic discoveries that must be sustained until overthrown by better argument. Special interests’ resistance to the idea that the humanities can produce irrefutable moral and methodological claims finds a parallel in institutional absorption of those discoveries into newly normative and iterative patterns of institutional investment. Career paths open in new models that require invention within the promises that synthetic approaches offer of high productivity within a fragmented field of study.

Distant reading and world literature are examples of such possibilities (Moretti 2013). World literature has achieved a mainstream institutional prominence. Harvard University created the Institute of World Literature, which in turn links to the recently created Journal of World Literature. The institute has organized conferences and four-week summer school sessions around the world to advance the mode of conceiving and studying global literature. Indeed, the institute says that it aims to fill a pedagogical gap in the marketplace of ideas and careers: “Many people are now interested in teaching courses in World Literature and in pursuing research within a global framework, but few programs in comparative or even World Literature have yet established ways to train scholars and teachers to do such work on a broad basis.”¹⁰

The Institute and journal take their titles from Goethe's remarks in 1827: “Ich überzeugt sei, es bilde sich eine allgemeine Weltliteratur, worin uns Deutschen eine ehrenvolle Rolle vorbehalten.”¹¹ Scholars have remarked that Goethe did not invent the notion of world literature, but his formulation compelled serious readers to consider possible imaginative constructions it might stimulate. Among others, in the twentieth century Erich Auerbach and Edward Said stand out for their differing developments of Goethe's term. In our context, in discussing the harm to criticism, Said's turn on Goethe matters more than Auerbach's, precisely because his is the trope whose betrayal matters most.

Said turned Welt into weltlich. As in his reading of Austen's Mansfield Park, Said transposed the materiality of circulating systems—the globality of literature and culture traveling through symbolic and commercial regimes—into the materiality of texts, that is, into a sense of books as the textured traces of historicality, intelligent imagination, and lived experience (Bové 2021: 283–332). Texts are weltlich in and through the work they do in social, cultural, and political systems. By this principle, Austen's neglect of Caribbean plantations normalizes the novel as an imperial institution. (One hopes readers concede that the novel of the great tradition can be an imperial institution and other things; that is the essence of worldliness.) In a final turn on the weltlich figure Welt, Said produced the constant presence of exile and humanity in making the world a place to live and love, conditions dependent on belonging nowhere to belong everywhere.

In Orientalism, Said acknowledged the existence of non-Orientalist scholarship belonging to the Geisteswissenschaften of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He emphasized that non-Orientalist modes of doing les sciences de l'homme were far more adequate to their responsibilities and far more sensitive and enlisted in a struggle to sustain their role in a society otherwise tending in yet more awful directions. For Said, Orientalist studies, especially by the twentieth century, were closely allied with the forces that put Western political society and humanity at risk. Because the state, the market, and nationalist popular will directed resources toward the research and teaching that cooperated with established interests, the more responsible modes of humanistic work struggled to sustain independent scholarly and critical freedom in the service of political liberty. These responsible scholars “were perforce more immediately responsive to the threats to humanistic culture of a self-aggrandizing, amoral technical specialization represented, in part at least, by the rise of fascism in Europe” (Said 1978: 258). Said's study of Orientalism resulted in two important conclusions essential to the successful function of the humanities in an authoritarian or proto-authoritarian political formation. The first of the conclusions is simple. Essential to the necessary function of the humanities is the intellectually independent critically engaged scholar critic. In the 1930s, for example, as in our own period, the independent scholar critic stood facing fascism and the technical, technological concentrations of power in the political economic order. Today, the analogies would be with scholars facing authoritarian illiberalism, in movements such as Fidesz in Hungary, Alternative für Deutschland, and the Tea Party and other partisan and familial rightist alignments in the United States. For Said, the paradigmatic scholar critic, among several in the interwar years, was Erich Auerbach. His writing program while an exile in Turkey was massive, loving, and worldly. Above all, he understood the real consequences of then current political vectors, and he had the long historical vision to understand the genealogical development from which that present arrangement emerged. It matters far less to Said that Auerbach attempted a synthesis of humanistic culture as it was ending than that Auerbach's was work of a certain kind. “The aim was a synthesis of Western culture in which the synthesis itself was matched in importance by the very gesture of doing it” (Said 1978: 258–59). What had Auerbach achieved? He had brought into history, as Hortense Spillers insists critics must do, an object created against the background of ruling consensus. “The discrete particular,” Said concluded, “was thus converted into a highly mediated symbol of the world-historical process.” Said's echo of Adorno here is purposive.¹² It leads to Said's second conclusion and completes the parallel between his time and ours.

Auerbach became a Romance rather than a German or classical philologist. This moved him away from the careers and funding available along the nationalist intellectual track. He also identified with “the humanistic tradition of involvement in a national culture or literature not one's own” (259). In effect, such independent humanistic scholarship stood against the patriarchy of national language within the politics and propaganda of authoritarian and racialized nationalism. It also stood outside the career paths offered and determined by larger forces in the political economy. The exiled Said sympathized with the Jewish Auerbach, who fled to Turkey and then to the United States. Just as significant, however, is Said's sympathy for the decision Auerbach took to exile himself, as it were, from a regime that would demand cooperation in exchange for employment, status, and funding.

Like Auerbach (1973: 11–78), Said valued Dante's adaptation of the classical and Christian tradition of figura to secular history. In turn, Said created a figure of Auerbach as a “discrete particular” of the threatened and dying form of literary humanistic studies, the disappearance of which Said noted and lamented as soon as the early 1980s. What then is the figure of Auerbach? We know the Auerbachian figure takes on the hardest tasks with the longest historical vision and an understanding of shaping forces, the consequences of which he imagines. Against these forces and within the long history, he does work of a kind not easily done and generally unsupported, work that until recently has remained a point of reference for critical scholarship. The Auerbach figure was above all independent of alluring prospects by first refusing the institutional temptations and finally and fundamentally by being a Jew, whose life chances were at risk and deeply circumscribed. Auerbach adapted his circumstances to a profound intellectual exile that began before his move to Turkey and that sustained and reflected his deepest humanistic values. Neither melancholy nor cynicism scarred his work. Auerbach concluded his programmatic essay, “Philology and ‘Weltliteratur,’” with the ethically foundational statement of how intellectuals should stand in relation to their world and their responsibilities: “Delicatus ille est adhuc cui patria dulcís est, fortis autem cui omne solum patria est, perfectus vero cui mundus totus exilium est” (Hugo of St. Victor, quoted in Auerbach 1969: 1–17). Hugo of St. Victor wrote these lines in his Didascalion, and Auerbach chose them to express the severe discipline critical scholarship requires, namely, to separate from one's home and one's inheritance, even though these offer the most precious seeming and enabling resources. Auerbach's ethics are layered but simple. The critical intellectual, the humanist philologist, must self-exile from nation because “our philological home is the earth” (Auerbach 1969: 17). The underlying motives are two: love of the world and its inhabitants and freedom to earn and express that love through creatively intelligent responsible and responsive work. Finding a home in mainstream institutions, disciplines, and practices—belonging communally to select groups of specialists or jargon speakers—these are ethical errors that Auerbach sensed and Said saw belonged to the emergence of technological orders tied to fascism and authoritarianism.

Said disentangled some consequences of Auerbach's situation and work, leaving us the two general conclusions I have mentioned. These consequences, these conclusions, which many may never know or might ignore and set aside, matter because the love for humanity and the struggle to be free of developing authoritarian and technological domination is constant. Like Auerbach, Said opposed nationalism, not only as an ideological position but as part of the ideological apparatus apparent in specialized areas of study. American studies experts, for example, can easily remain in love with their national tradition, even as its critics, because that tradition is an enabling career resource, a necessity for work and productivity. Similarly, narrow field or subfield specialization is a form of “homing” that can deny freedom needed to earn the love for humanity. The worldly complexity of humanity does not exist in nor can it be adequately found in a technologically defined deep well of specialization the borders of which are patrolled by the jargons and institutions that house them. “That's not in my field” emblematizes the willingness not to try to know, to come near, to produce the work that matches in importance the very worldly demands made by the historical moment and tendencies. The development of fields and subfields might appear to be an act of disentangling, generating more experts with deeper but narrower curiosity. Such a model is not, however, that model of the humanities, nor does it preserve the essential quality of the humanities, the responsibility lovingly to nurture the possibility of the human with the most enriched judgment. The standards and goals in this critical intellectual ethic are high and quite precisely not easily adopted by those at home in expert institutions: “The more one is able to leave one's cultural home, the more easily is one able to judge it, and the whole world as well, with the spiritual detachment and generosity necessary for true vision” (Said 1978: 259). Said concludes with a consequential postulate we ignore at our peril: “The more easily, too, does one assess oneself and alien cultures with the same combination of intimacy and distance.”

In his Auerbach, Said poses the highest goals and most estimable qualities of critical humanism and the secular humanist critic. The university and other institutions that once harbored humanistic scholarship should have done a better job of inculcating the personal and professional qualities required to meet this ethical ideal. Of course, not to be at home in any locality means not to be satisfied with a career in any available subfield, with professional success as a leader in composition, digital humanities, postcolonialism, or other MLA-listed work areas. The university's humanistic pedagogy should require both constant suspicion of established rhetorics and practices of recognized areas, “sites” where conversation goes on easily among those with similar concerns and jargons. Also, the university should have sought and inculcated the qualities needed to assess the personal and institutional practices in which the scholar works while studying the object of investigation. Where there is the most consensus and ease of conversation there should be the gravest ethical concern. Above all, the universities should have realized the continuing social and species value of humanistic ethics of the type figured in this Auerbach. It should always preserve the humanist capacity for judgment outside even the aesthetic sphere of artistic and cultural evaluation. It should above all have inculcated in itself and the members of its departments the need to cultivate persons with just the ethical and intellectual ambitions and standards of such figures as this Auerbach. We should remember that this Auerbach appears as a figure of such value to human and worldly life as it does because it emerged from the study of technologically driven political economies running in parallel with or in direct connection to forms of tyranny and authoritarianism.¹³ Not to preserve the independent place of critical humanistic work and qualities is to put at risk creativity, imagination, and freedom. Unfortunately, as I have hinted, the universities, often with the agreement of academics within the humanistic departments, abandoned these ethical standards with unfortunate political consequences. The intention of most was not to advance authoritarianism and in some case not even technological domination, although recent applications of data science to the formation of professionals inside what were English and other humanistic departments such as history proves the willingness of many colleagues to advance within the technophilic tracks funded by the state and Silicon Valley.

Digital humanities is not the only development harmful to criticism as such an ethically and intellectually high art. From fairly early on in the construction of “World Literature,” colleagues have worried about the institute's place at the metropolitan center of the American empire and what seems to have been its journal's decision to publish in the lingua franca of the global order, English. Jacob Emery (2014) noted that global English, represented in this case by the successful anthology Norton Anthology of World Literature, made redundant the founding insight of modern thinking about world literature, namely, the Saidian notion of worldliness as the given material fact: “Even though literature is already in the world by virtue of being written, the redundant modifier ‘World Literature’ adds value.” Rather than accept that literature is always weltlich, that is, secular and contrapuntal, carrying always the marks of human struggles for freedom from systemic and cultural constraints, “World Literature” turns to neoliberal adaptation for placement. “World Literature responds to the forces of globalization by identifying with them,” Emery concludes. Nothing less is lost than criticism as a secular worldly act. In its place comes the spectacular simulation of criticism formed by the conventional apparatus of mainstream political institutional formations.

”World Literature” studies find themselves at home in the imperial center, in the imperial language, and within the dominant neoliberal technological and political economic structure. “World Literature” always contained the potential to justify such imperial practices and notions. Goethe said that that Germans and the German language were especially apt to conduct the business of world literature.¹⁴ Unlike Auerbach, he did not suggest alienating the study and judgment of world literatures from his home or national language, from his (mistaken) notion of the special ethical position of the modern German. In the conversation with Eckermann, Goethe spoke of how the German could most easily adapt to “foreign idiosyncrasies” and how this and “the great supplement of our language make German translations particularly accurate and satisfying” (Yadav 2009). In other words, Goethe's speculations on world literature blatantly centered the German nation and language in his approach to the world of literary circulation. Today's critics would find this centering completely unsatisfactory, especially since it belongs to the European ethnographic tendency at the heart of Orientalism to map the world in relation to its privileged metropolitan centers. World literature studies replicates this condemned Goethean gesture with its easy centering of English. World literature studies neglects or refuses the difficult critical task of being not at home as an essential condition to love and to be human. The institutionalization of world literature repeated Goethe's program to bring the world's literatures together through the uniqueness of a metropolitan, ethically advanced language, substituting English for German. The Englishing of world literature within the metropole expands the original Weimar program and develops it in good part via the imperial institutions of US university instruction.¹⁵

The editors of The Journal of World Literature hold appointments in the United States, the PRC, Australia, Israel, and Belgium. Among their outstanding credentials are PhDs from Harvard, Yale, and Michigan and professorships in English and comparative literature. The journal's call does not rest on or emerge from the sort of principles engaged critical thinking about world literature has developed over the last century. Rather, the call represents its virtue in a pluralistic and diverse openness that would create a professional community whose identifying characteristics are not critical or “self-reflexive.” “The Journal of World Literature aspires to bring together scholars interested in developing the concept of World Literature, and to provide the most suitable environment for contributions from all the world's literary traditions. It creates a forum for re-visiting global literary heritages, discovering valuable works that have been undeservedly ignored, and introducing aspects of the transnational global dissemination of literature, with translation as a focus.”¹⁶ Emery (2014) notes that “the extraordinary thing” about world literature studies “is the ferment of scholarly activity it represents.” “Build a field and they will come” might be the best rubric for this truth.

Aamir Mufti has studied the imperial construction that is world literature and its persistent ramifications common even in oppositional tropes meant to break the metropolitan grasp inherent especially in the Englishing of world literature. Notions such as diversity or the local inhere within the world literature construct that not only fantasizes a seductive one world of literature but, as an extension of European politics, the plurality of national languages and literatures meant as the content of the world literature dream. Developing Said's insistence that the critic must be of the world but of no nation, Mufti explains how to consider seriously the critical secular force of “weltlich.” Mufti (2016) calls this force the “radicalization of philology.” He describes the proper subject for literary study resting on the basic principles necessary to guide work aiming to meet its humanistic responsibilities, which he explains:

Many literary humanists in their practice and in their institutional decisions have forgotten these responsibilities essential to the humanities, and so they move away from any identity with humanism if not the literary. They adopt the model of social and natural science, the pose of neutrality, of openness to the development of thinking about a field, without the judgment about the project that must constantly accompany work freighted, as in world literature, with consequences inherent in the modes by which our work replicates metropolitan modalities, themselves part of the long history of empire, technologization, and authoritarianism.

Of course, some will say that contemporary world literature studies rest upon continuing efforts at struggle in worldly terms—postcolonial studies, antiracialist movements, and gender studies. In several moments of great intellectual and cultural importance, and most often against considerable resistance, women and those whom the ruling classes call minorities gained vital positions in the academy, often successfully breaking open the established fields of study, introducing entire cultures, the archives of multiple intertwined histories and literatures, into institutions often ill-prepared and unwilling to welcome them. Sometimes, after long struggle, many excellent things have happened. The work done by Farah Jasmine Griffin is exemplary. She brought African American music and the spoken word together in particularly important books that played a role in the creation of the new Department of African American and Diaspora Studies at Columbia. Her work also influenced the Pulitzer decision to award the Music Prize for 2018 to Kendrick Lamar.¹⁷ So, with imaginative critical struggle within fragmentation and against resistance comes vital new work of social consequence and reconsolidation in important new institutions for research and criticism.

Along the way, some forces defined by other critical and creative ambitions damaged the authority of criticism in the literary humanities. The creation of women's studies programs, for example, in large public research universities such as Wisconsin, brought the social sciences into contest with the humanities. Academic critique of misogynistic politics requires bringing all possible methods to bear to reveal the workings of transactional oppression. A special issue of Signs, for example, titled “Gender and the Rise of the Global Right,” suggests how the humanities have marginalized themselves at times in this effort (Graff, Kapur, and Walters 2019). This special issue has a plurality of contributors from the social sciences. The few contributors with literary humanities backgrounds, that is, with advanced degrees in the study of language and literature or an academic appointment in such a field, more or less leave behind their literary critical knowledge and methods in their accounts of organizations, ideas, and memes that contribute to social injustice, such as the suppression of abortion rights (Mason 2019).¹⁸ Social science models entered into what had been literature departments, and with the end of the theory movement, social science methods escaped the reach of critical judgment once associated with the humanities.

What in English we call the humanities and in French les sciences humaines were in German the Geisteswissenschaften. These are not identical notions. In French, the human sciences would include all those disciplines that study the human—what in American universities we would often call social sciences, such as anthropology. However, the German research university, on which founders modeled the great American research universities, assigned the Geisteswissenschaften two tasks that American literary humanities especially have, or risk having, abandoned. The Geisteswissenschaften had two authorized tasks: to balance the research university's commitments to the natural sciences and to evaluate the nature, place, and function of all knowledge and knowledge production, including that of science. In other words, the originary function and long-standing aim of the humanities was to be both an alternative to the growth of science in the universities and a legitimate source for evaluating the scientific technological project. Scholars have studied the long history of natural, medical, and now technical or data sciences’ rise to dominance in the university (Rossiter 1992). Scientific dominance is so normal that critics no longer lament the fact but study science for its (only sometimes forced) sell out to capitalism (Day 2018). As in the case of Signs, methods and values have traveled from the social sciences toward the humanities rather than from the literary fields, with their traditional expertise in language, cultural forms, and historical human experience. The traditional ideal of studying art in language to develop humanistic sensibilities as well as technical capacities to read the culture and its politics has lost considerable hold, even when, as in the case of the essay on abortion rights in this special issue of Signs, an important aspect of the avowed topic is rhetoric. Moreover, the role Dilthey imagined for the humanities as the agent to examine and criticize the function of scientific and other methods of knowledge production and formation has given way before the apparent utility and profitability of natural, data, and social science (Bové 2014). All these disciplines have an at least implicit reason to defend their established interests by disregarding or repressing the critical humanities.

Two other developments threaten not only the priority but also the existence of criticism. One is Distant Reading, associated with Franco Moretti but now developed far beyond his original ideas, about which skeptics and defenders have said perhaps too much.¹⁹ Let us disentangle some of Distant Reading's goals and consequences. Perhaps its most fundamental aim is to replace the research and pedagogical methods that relied upon the immanent (or intimate) study of particular writings (now called texts) with models of apprehension that gather writings into large categorizable bodies of study beyond the reach of immanent reading. The result should be knowledge of a kind not available to close reading or theory. Knowledge, not experience, not Bildung, is aim and result. Forming the human in the experience with and of literary and artistic creations is not a goal; indeed, Distant Reading considers such a goal as impossible as the survival of humanistic culture after modernity. To legitimate this end of Europe account, Moretti's Distant Reading tells an antithetical, even Gnostic version of Said's story in Orientalism. Moretti admits that the great twentieth-century philologists such as Auerbach and his model, Han Robert Curtius, saw humanistic culture dissipating into paradoxically ever richer and more threatening fragments. We could tell a story over this of the crisis of European empires inducing the colloquial effect, the center will not hold. In Moretti's account, modernity destroyed the meaning and comfort provided by the totality of humanistic culture when it existed and could be known as such. Moretti imagines that Distant Reading could supplement that experience and by its technological and conceptual innovations—essentially the end of intimate reading—could regather the knowledge of and in that culture, but differently. Distant Reading could take on the fragmenting pluralities that were other to Western humanistic culture and reorganize the field as world literature in a globalized era. The results would replace the collapsed European unity with the richness of non-European worlds; the process and product would displace and supplement the end of Europe. In this way, Moretti belongs to a long tradition of European intellectuals who have used the crisis of Europe to rethink the world, often recentering the metropole in new ways (Bové 2021: 31). In other words again, Distant Reading would rework the ambitions and seek the satisfactions of empire.

What techniques would produce this knowledge and this new formation? First, concepts resting on world theory and then modes of divested reading that distribute what once would have been experience into outsourcing, the means to produce the data needed to give a new formation to Goethe's charge to do world literature. All efforts to meet Goethe's charge rest on a privileged subject, identity, and language. The available technology mediates the intent and result. Distant Reading, tied to world literature, would provide all the steps paralleling German in Goethe's command (Moretti 2013: 5–9, 41–45).

When Distant Reading meets its logical bedfellow, Silicon Valley technologies of data science, then it can become “Digital Humanities,” where the avowed new knowledge has to do with quantity and speed, with processing a larger number of texts (data) more quickly than humans unassisted can do, and often making the material visible, mapping it graphically or as in a game. The end results are many, we are told:

The union of digital humanities and Distant Reading stands out in Moretti's plan, and scholars should stress this in evaluating its consequences.²⁰ Phenomena such as the world literature initiative, Distant Reading, and their intersections with digital humanities provide new career possibilities when the state no longer invests in the literary humanities as it did during the Cold War (Kosar 2011).²¹ These new careers fill places in faculties not in addition to but as replacements for scholars formed in the practice of learning natural languages and reading books on paper. Furthermore, this displacement not only removes from society the specially trained scholars formed in relation to paper but also, by pedagogical and institutional adjustment, removes from the social world human beings whose lives, experience, and formation rest on the worldliness of history, traces of which disappear as these new constellations replace them with data and archives.

Critics should examine the origins of and sentiments in similar phrases used by world literature persons and digital humanists as terms of self-legitimation. Each is concerned with “heritage,” world literature with literary heritage and digital humanities with “cultural heritage,” especially as made into data sets. In 1972, UNESCO adopted, and most nation-states have signed, the Convention concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage (Haw 2013). Inherently, heritage is a matter of property in economy, tradition, practice, and law.²² A long history of the term is beyond the reach of this paper. A shorter examination of its use and effects within international neoliberal regimes could be modeled on Sarah Brouillette's disentanglement of UNESCO's involvement with literary culture. Her study exposes how “the critical discourses of World Literature” ground themselves “in the political economy of global literary institutions and markets” (Brouillette 2019: 2). She demystifies claims that UNESCO preserves unique treasures of human creativity or supports the creation and distribution of new literatures circulating among hungry readers. The cultural heritage model applied to books results in profitable “literary tourism and festival programming” while meeting at best the sentimental needs of liberal culture or the globalizing regulation of neoliberal control and distribution methods. The result, she argues, is not a story of triumph but “a story of decline.”

Digital humanists claim they produce new knowledge and study vastly more material than any reader can do. They can produce data sets where they are needed, and they can visualize or gamify objects and processes not previously available for knowledge in any but Cartesian and fragmentary ways.²³ That these claims appear virtuous is a consequence of money flowing in some directions and not others; this is an effect of competitive state policy and neoliberal assertions of the priority of data imitating the intelligence of the market.²⁴ We have seen that Said noticed a similar pattern in the interwar years of the twentieth century, namely the development of a nationally supported technocentric cultural economy parallel or linked to the development of an authoritarian politics (Simms 2019).²⁵ In choosing romance philology, Auerbach loosened his relation to this complex before fleeing to Turkey to protect his life from Nazi genocide. Said's reading of Auerbach establishes a figure for the humanities expressing and living the ethics required to judge and be other than the kinds of subject promoted by such a techno-statist project. Perhaps Hannah Arendt's (1963) influence acted on Said in this work on Auerbach. This philologist always stands against the banality of evil so normalized as to be invisible to many in the intelligentsia, those who sustained professional and bureaucratic careers up to and even past the moment when the disaster of Nazism glared up from its ground (Haffner 2002).

The new digital sciences dissolve not only the notion but the fact or possibility that the humanities might be the place for the critical judgment of knowledge production. As a dominant pedagogical model, they will also replace the education needed to form the humanists capable of exercising such judgment. The data scientists transform “books” or “art works” into things suitable for the machine. Digitalists identify the object of their processing as “cultural heritage data,” a gesture that adapts materials to the machine and platform. The gesture has provoked resistance from those who defend libraries (Darnton 2010). However, more important is the digitalists’ not so silent aggression against ways of speaking that exclude their methods or would, at best, reduce their methods to the service of humanists. The tool must have priority over the hand for the instrumentalists of history. In its final form, this technophilic constellation of Distant Reading, world literature, and digital humanities will remove the human subject from the encounter with what society used to call literature, which figure, lest we forget, embodies a long-lasting originary institution of human life and experience that has, until recently, been cultivated and nurtured as such because, as in the case of Dante, it could assign to proper hellish places those who offend against the human.²⁶ A final way to see this constellation would be as an aggression against memory, against the shared experiences of the work humans do upon themselves, as its results, means, and records rest in writing, reading, and criticizing. This is true even as the adaptation to the digital humanities alters the human relation to the question of the human. As Walter Benjamin (1999: 217) alerted us during the technophilic authoritarian interwar years, the human itself is at risk in such formations: “the physis that is being organized for it in technology can, through all its political and factual reality, be produced only in that image space to which profane illumination initiates us.” First, representatives of this constellation admit they would displace the basic and perhaps permanent discoveries of the humanities (Smithies 2014). If, as Benjamin suggests, technology mediates not only the relation between the human and the natural, it also mediates the relations among humans, the relation of the human to itself, and life itself to the question of the human, the necessity and possibility of thinking the human. Then, second, in so doing, this constellation, in canceling the intimate encounter between book and reader, removes from the experience of forming a humanist the insight into the record of human self-making of the kind that gives us an Auerbach or Mimesis. Losing that intimacy distanced by love obscures the central fact that humans have made themselves historical beings. Nurturing that fact offers freedom to the human as the species aspires to think and make itself. Freedom comes from a deep sense of historicality. The humanist knows that the world presented as reality has about it no necessity. Its contingency means it can yield to alternatives imagined by art and critics (Bové 2021).

Digitized Distant Reading accelerates the death of the reader. Roland Barthes's spectacular essay, “La mort de l'auteur,” often lazily lamented for killing off the writer, meditated profoundly on the temporal and economic relations between the person of the writer and the text, especially as these affect the act of reading. Barthes's (1968: 61–67) analysis changed the conception of literature and the function of the critical humanist by decentering the figure of the established causal subject-identity represented as the outside origin of writing. Barthes's (1968: 66) conclusion placed the reader at the core of literature: “Le vrai lieu de l’écriture, c'est la lecture.” Since Barthes's demonstration that experimental writing shifted the center of writing from the author to the reader, we can better situate Hortense Spiller's claim that readers must in part create their object. In the study of problems and texts excluded from the regular business of normalized academic humanities, Spillers insists that theorizing of race, gender, and writing requires the partial creation of an object against a censoring and resisting background. Such intense counter-reading devoted to the liberatory potential of critical creativity as Spillers displays it develops and legitimates the principal Barthes discovered. Spillers's work assumed the worldliness of texts as well as their sheer facticity. As Barthes would have put it, Spillers untangled the complicated interweavings of experience produced and recorded in language—all as part of the effort to free language in relation to the political project of freeing persons and traditions against the overwhelming resistance of exclusionary pressures (68).²⁷

The death of the author hypothesis had proven its value when Spillers, in the arduous task of criticism, disentangled the realities of a Black studies movement that had migrated to the academy. Spillers solidified a principle in work far from the scene of its original articulation. The reader became for Spillers (2003: xvi) the problem of “the speaking subject,” the figure that must be studied to understand the “dilemma” of Black intellectuals whose relation to the academy—as destination or not—threatened to mire “the African-American Studies ensemble” in “a retrogressive, male-centered, uncritical synthesis.” Because of Spillers's work, a new principle with ethical political force imposed a responsibility on humanists: the critical reader must engage with the culturally, politically, and racially important forms of human life in our society and literature. Criticism, now so much under attack, had to become and remain a space for antiracism and human freedom to nurture the question, What is the human?

Not long after the death of the author, however, a countermovement began, one that would displace Barthes's and Spillers's principles for criticism as essential elements of humanistic literary education. For digital humanities, Distant Reading, and their nexus in world literature, the reader became a superfluous obstruction to a new science that would map or graph measurable results from the massed archives of “cultural heritage,” a capacity beyond the limits imposed by individual finitude. To put it briefly, Distant Reading would eliminate the subject from literary study as how the knowledge of literature would be gained in a culture; consequently, it would eliminate the training that produced humanists and so would eliminate literary humanists themselves as a category of human potentiality, resigning them to the ash heap of history. In other words yet again, distance learning deskills literary scholars; its pedagogies displace the training required to create literary humanists; and computer language learning or coding replaces the acquisition and mastery of natural languages. As I have suggested, the goals of Distant Reading are of a kind like the aims of digital humanities. Each would reduce the trained judgment of the literary humanist to irrelevance and thereby establish the impunity of science and pseudo-scientific technical practices and theories to regulate the value and production of knowledge, indeed, to redefine the function of the humanities as a matter only of knowledge, wherein lies the traditional sign of positivism (Long and So 2019).²⁸ As a result, literary humanists would disappear from the university and so from the society. Have we considered the consequences of this canceling?

At least since Aristotle and then again since the passage from Renaissance humanism in the West to the Baroque crisis of allegoresis, the now often deconstructed human subject has been the mechanism for possessing, experiencing, valuing, and legitimating research into and sustaining the pedagogies of literature. The post-humanist technical modes for breaking down criticism, if we take Moretti's displacement of the subject into a technological field, come up against and would erase the significance of diverse artists whose difference from value of the digital constellation stands out in figures such as James Baldwin and Paul Preciado. These artists present their own subjectivities in various forms of creative struggle against repressive regimes. Literature itself, in these exemplary instances, embodies values antagonistic to those advanced by the anti-humanist constellation within the technophilic academy. Preciado's (2013: 11–12) remarkable Testo Junkie introduces itself as outside categories of writing, all of which it uses to make itself at once familiar and alien, intimate and distant. Read the book to imagine the violence of transforming its experimental and fictional record of a body transgressed by what it is not and then reimagine it reduced to data of cultural heritage. The second image sterilizes human existence, degrades its value, denies the free uniqueness of vision and experiment. Ironically, it would hide the evident, in this case, of the power and contradictory potentials of pharmacology in a biopolitics specific to neoliberalism and the complexities of willed gendering it constructs. In the simplest terms, the work of art asserts values other than and opposite to those that mock the humanist. This might well be because the pharmacological and technological cultures, while not the same, overlap considerably.

James Baldwin is one of the most important artists thinking the experience of race in America. The ruling qualities in his art, in his poetics, and in his politics are gravely at odds with the technophilic, professional, and American nationalist projects that are shifting critical humanism, the vehicle for imaginative and effective reception of his work from the American social world. Is the shift of those poetic possibilities not then a form of racism? Baldwin made “a moving point of the general unknowability of the artist, of the inescapable and perhaps inexplicable function of the artist active in a society or set of social groups” (Bové 2021: 254). He willingly accepted the term artist to describe his life and work. He embraced the term to assert the necessity of freedom, ethical integrity, and the identity of art “as essential to the universal human project.” Baldwin made as explicit as possible the values and responsibilities inherent in the humanistic projects that define the species’ best efforts: “The artist's struggle for his integrity,” Baldwin ([1963] 2011: 50–51) writes, “must be considered as a kind of metaphor for the struggle, which is universal and daily, of all human beings on the face of this globe to get to become human beings.” Baldwin's aspirational ethics require the working out of life as a process of nurturing and advancing the human. Moreover, not the technologist or meritocrat but the poet and the critic house the aspiration most fully. “Poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don't. Statesmen don't. Priests don't. Union leaders don't. Only poets.” Baldwin warned a racist, technophilic, and war making America of the dystopia that needlessly waited on its path: “when it ceases to produce poets, and, what is even more crucial, when it ceases in any way whatever to believe in the report that only poets can make” (51). Critical humanists are the kinds of persons who can hear, amplify, and disentangle those reports—in all their contradictory complexity. Technical devices for disrupting the humanities have an inherent problem in dealing with race, gender, and other locations of violent discrimination and criminal oppression, of cultural silencing, of an absence from the archives.²⁹ They replace the human relations of love, the movements of intimacy and distance, hindering the task Spillers lays out as essential, the responsibility to create the loved object against the dangerous processes of normalization (Hepworth and Church 2018).

Academic schools, departments, and disciplines in numerous ways make visible the disruption of traditional humanistic modes and their developments. Schools, doing the bidding of their administrative leaders, often “nudge” faculty toward the new forms of practice. Just as the National Endowment for the Humanities offers money for desired disruptive new fields, so academic leaders guide faculty with funds and other privileges toward the leaders’ goals for the discipline. In this, the leaders embrace and follow the technology of neoliberal management theorists and behavioral economics (Spiliakos 2017). In keeping with neoliberal control of the workplace comes control of the work done, of its objects and purposes. Departments dissolve as much from this motive as from enrollment challenges and the pluralization of concern. The word studies in departmental names is an example of such disruption. It is a noun titling many departments and fields. Columbia University proudly advertises the Department of French and Romance Philology as “one of the oldest and most distinguished French Departments in the United States.”³⁰ Other prestigious universities also have French departments—Yale for example. Yet others—Harvard, Princeton, Pittsburgh, and Michigan—have departments of French and Italian or locate the study of these languages in departments of Romance languages. However, several other universities and colleges have some variation of departments of French studies—UCLA, Bryn Mawr, Smith, Brown, Penn State, Rice, and many others. Almost all major universities and college still have English departments, but “English Studies” has begun to appear in renaming those units, suggesting the felt need to accommodate the fact that English departments now do many things—to solidify the truth that English is no longer the one or (few) more things it used to be. In the UK, English studies seems a bit more common than in the United States. Durham University though finds a parallel in Miami University; both have English studies departments. A brief look at faculty listings, course offerings, degree programs, and methods taught suggests that in many cases “studies” represents the disruption of a field into many subfields, preparing the way for sub-subfields.

Of course, these choices were not necessary but made with the consent of the governed in many cases who felt the pressure and allure of administrative and statist policies and promises as well as the felt need to get beyond the inherited limits of whatever had seemed natural for so long. Nonetheless, departments had some choices. They might have remained French departments, for example, or, by contrast, become Francophonie departments, redefining French away from the nation-state. Given the Oxford English Dictionary's decision to bring Indian words into the dictionary, others might have remade themselves as departments of Englishes rather than English studies (Salazar 2017). Why might this matter?³¹

The National Council of Teachers of English published a book called English Studies: An Introduction to the Discipline(s). In it, they speak of “the important qualities and functions of English studies’ constituent disciplines” and advertise it this way: “Faculty and students in both undergraduate and graduate courses will find the volume an invaluable overview of an increasingly fragmented field, as will department administrators who are responsible for evaluating the contributions of diverse faculty members but whose academic training may be specific to one discipline.”³² English is no longer a discipline. It is an institutional home for several constituent disciplines. My own department offers undergraduate degrees in literature, composition, writing, and film and media studies. Each of these offers various tracks with highly credentialed distinguished colleagues teaching in each. The graduate program offers PhDs in cultural and critical studies, which might include work in digital humanities or pedagogy or archive or public humanities specializations. Another PhD in film and media studies could also include similar elements as well as other tracks leading to a dissertation. We also offer an MA in various areas and one of the oldest MFA programs in poetry writing, creative nonfiction, fiction, life writing, journalism, and so on. Several theories divide study in any one of these subfields. Even the constituent units have constituents in part because of the proliferation of subfields within the larger institutional frame. These subfields are sometimes specific to subject matters, which remain available to methods recognized by the traditional departments. None of what I describe describes only one department but characterizes the active professional life of any number of distinguished departments in Research 1 universities. Fragmentation and renewal can lead to needed advances on lines of basic humanistic principles.

As Spillers told us in Black and White in Color, studying Black literature within English departments has achieved a hard-won place, and in some schools has acquired its own separate department or program; recognized need for institutional identity coordinates with uniqueness of subject and method. Moreover, of course, in this case, political reasons of a national kind press hard upon the university. Nevertheless, just as Columbia made an advance, Yale faced the mass resignation of faculty from its programs in ethnic studies to protest a failure of administrative support (Valentin 2019; Brown 2019).

The emergence of “studies” as an appendage eases the proliferation of subfields and their specific ways of speaking—often called “theories”—that separate participant speakers within the same department. As I said earlier, dictionaries call these local ways of speaking jargons. There can be no unified English department once colleagues stop speaking enough of the same language to understand or care about what happens among speakers in other subspecialties. In the extreme, departments house colleagues who do criticism and others who disbelieve in the very idea of doing so. Institutionally, academics speak of fragmentation in terms of hyperspecialization, of experts living and working in deep wells, uninformed by developments or traditions elsewhere. Moreover, institutional ethoi require tolerance of all the different subpractices, if, for example, there are such things as MLA sessions on the subfields. Anecdotally, many people would like to prove the dire fact of this situation by noting colleagues do not attend lectures and seminars from outside their subareas. Institutional thinkers about these questions differentiate between what they call strong and weak disciplines. Neuroscience is a strong discipline. English and comp lit are weak ones. The material consequences of that judgment are obvious. Conceptually, the difference is also clear. Some scholars worried about the political consequence of their fields’ weakness want to ameliorate the problem but first need to understand it.

The Center for African American Research and Policy (CAARP) promotes examination of the characteristics and political consequences of strong versus weak fields. In the biological sciences, they argue, the hard/soft divide is the classic difference between pure and applied. Importantly, however, this apparent division is a consequence of the adaptability of research areas to the markets, which itself follows from the degree to which a given field of biology studies human life. The market determines strong versus weak in this case but only because the life sciences already meet the most fundamental criterion. CAARP's research discovered that strong disciplines are not necessarily any more applied than they are necessarily pure, that is, they are unmotivated by market forces. Rather, strong disciplines, those with the highest level of efficacy and value, are “based on the level of paradigmatic development within a field” (Jones 2011). What does this mean? First, it means a field with a clear memory of agreed-upon bases for future work derived from basic principles established by previous researchers and theorists. Second, it means these bases are shared and cannot be abandoned without substantial research not only correcting them but also replacing them with other shared foundations. Third, it means that whatever happens in any subfield can and often does matter to all others practicing elsewhere, requiring shared understanding of the consequences for each subfield of the learning in other fields. No subarea is or should be immune to work in other areas, that is, no subfield should feel itself at home in a jargon of self-reflection or conversation. Finally, it means practitioners understand that the work of the field has consequences outside itself because it is as a unified intellectual project more likely to alter the forms and ideas of social institutions and interests.

This little description suggests the humanities and cultural studies fields are weak disciplines, whose current crises result in part from their own behavior and from the distaste of their enemies inside and outside the university. Of course, a full takeover of former humanities departments by digitalists would give those departments the sort of unity normal in stronger disciplines. I have tried to suggest the cost of such a disruptive takeover and the need for humanists to evaluate its consequences for society, the species, and the planet before embracing the seemingly more secure and seductive paths on offer. Strong and weak in this institutional sense give no points to intellectual projects of a cultural-political sort attached to the experience and social existence of persons whose interests reside in the recognition provided by the institutionalized writing done in relation to their experience. It does, however, suggest that if the field were stronger it would better achieve whatever unified goals it might desire, even as subfields’ specialists developed forms of research. (Colleagues might recover some strength if, rather than speaking into deep wells, their writing always included a clear statement of its cui bono: why does this work matter, to whom, and for what reason? Escaping the resonant tunnels not only shares knowledge but allows judgment to resonate. Each writer should state why the writing does indeed matter to its readers, even those outside the echoing conversations.) As I have already said, the history of literary humanism's highest achievements and ambitions show that criticism should be the customary practice and archive for a stronger field. But not everyone would agree, and disagreement comes from scholars who appear closer to the literary humanists that digital or distant studies persons might be.

Rita Felski's recent work, for example, is an attempt to unify literary studies into a single work area under slogans such as how to do things with texts or stop being suspicious. Felski's book, The Limits of Critique, appeared in 2015, and a coedited collection, Critique and Postcritique, appeared in 2017 (Felski 2015; Felski and Anker 2017). The Limits of Critique proposed various forms of affect—“attunement, identification, and affiliation”—as unifying sentiments, whose processes not only should be investigated across all subfields but should be taken as unifying the social subject in relation to which literary and other cultural consumables stand (Felski 2020). Once upon a time, one could make arguments believing, in good faith, they might have corrective value. Of course, the desire to have such arguments rested on the critical ethic, at times on suspicion, and often on the belief that errors exist for correction. In the crisis of 2008, Felski began her anticritical pedagogy by degrading art into the ordinariness of commodity consumption (Felski 2008). She argued that turning away from literature as an archive of “superiority” and toward the affective relations of people with books would relegitimate the humanities. I want to emphasize this moment as crucial in the harming of criticism. Were there time, this threshold would lead us into the age of fiscal crisis and austerity.

For now, we should address argument and error. The first chapter of Felski's 2008 book is called “Recognition,” which, given the long paradigmatic history of literary studies, should rest on Aristotle's work. In a strong discipline, new work claims its relation to established principles and discoveries. The risk otherwise is mere projection. For Felski, recognition means nothing more than a reader seeing herself reflected in a book. She offers as an example the trans author Stephen Gordon, who, on reading Kraft-Ebbing, reports his pleasure and surprise in learning that others had felt confounded in their identity. Felski's story has to do with only a presumably innocent Gordon recording directly and frankly a mirrorlike moment. Gordon's delight and pleasure becomes one of a set of “vignettes of recognition,” which together enable an aesthetics of self-discovery. She quotes Gadamer to legitimate clichés of experience such as Gordon's: “something that exists outside of me inspires a revised or altered sense of who I am” (Felski 2008: 24–25). The intellectual problems with this way of speaking are many. With the elimination of literature's specialness Felski also eliminates the critic, replacing the critic with the manipulator of texts, the figure who gives liberal commodity status to the poem or novel as nothing different from any other commodity any person might encounter in such a way as to feel. Felski licenses the seductive commodity's effect on the subject, making the “study of literature” as much part of commodity capitalism as advertising. Walter Benjamin had, of course, provided the definitive analysis of the seductive pleasure felt by consumers of mass-produced offerings. Writing of Benjamin's essay, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” Margaret Cohen (1989: 88) put the status of the commodity's control of desire in this way:

To replace criticism with willing submission to the commodity's control of affect and intellect is to sustain its phantasmagoria. The commodity as vampire lurks behind the unspoken seduction by narcissistic recognition in Felski's story of liberal self-development and liberation (Muschamp 2000).³³ She recommends we adopt this way of working in the humanities—or perhaps not, because with this way of work, they are no longer the humanities. Is this the intent?

The critic might be suspicious of this story, of this way of consuming art and literature like any other jewel box. The point of Felski's anticritical departure is simple: artworks are no different than other consumable objects or experiences that give pleasure. (The not incidental consequence is to eliminate the critic as gatekeeper in judging value.) Art joins all other objects and practices as helping devices along the way toward “self-fashioning”—a term popularized by the New Historicism and presumed to settle the aesthetic experience question (Alpers 1988). If English or literary study in general were a strong discipline—for example, as strong as economics in the age of Hayek—it would remember not only Benjamin but that recognition translates anagnorisis, which means the opposite of what Felski claims recognition means. The humanities do discover things that are reasonably certain and inheritable conclusions of thought. Aristotle's (1984: 2323, para. 1452a) Poetics has established that recognition is “a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between the persons destined by the poet for good or bad fortune.” Anagnorisis is the obverse of immediate familiarity. Gordon, Felski would have readers believe, recognizes himself in what she first read. The mechanism is self-seeing, a coming to the already known. Recognition in this sense is repetition, as the ana in anagnorisis means “again.” The ruling affect is empathy, the basis for commonality or continuity. Anagnorisis is about other things and rests on other qualities.

In Aristotle, in the moment of anagnorisis, there is a trope, a turning in experience from this to that. There is a shift from one concept or belief to another. The shift is an intellectual act aiming toward an identification with either good or evil, an act itself resting on the critical faculty of judgment. Aristotle did not assume that poetry was not special, because theater was a socially crucial and definitive political fact in Athens. While it might purge pity and fear among the born citizen men in the audience, criticism—that is, the work Aristotle himself did—was far different from taking a lead from or granting priority to the audience's nonanalytic responses to the particular materials before them. The work of specific tragedies—not “the tragic”—purged pity and fear (Hays 2020). There was something important about the art form, which itself required careful intellectual analysis because it was itself the highest example of intelligent imagination at work. Aristotle had analyzed tragedy and poetics with a theory of imitation as an anthropological quality of the human species’ being. Aristotle began from the observation of children learning by imitation, from delight in imitation, and in viewing successful imitation. Yet, in 2008—nearly twenty-five hundred years later!—Felski (2008: 24) proposes as the basis of an anticritical orientation this liberal claim about Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray: “if we, as readers, are made aware of a more general impressionability and susceptibility to imitation through Dorian's response, has an act of recognition not nevertheless taken place?” Aristotle was a serious thinker. Imitation provided pleasure to children who saw imitation, but imitation done properly, which is to say in the highest forms that became art, such as the Greek tragedy, would provide the species with important experience and formation. Aristotle stresses that not all persons can take the same gifts away from art's offerings. Philosophers, Aristotle's name for the most curious and capable people, would benefit from and delight most in the best imitative arts. They would learn the most, find places where thought could expand, where demands for discrimination were required, and where the qualities that made a being human could be best developed. We should recall that among those qualities were the principal goals of justice, freedom, and ecological responsibility—this last most important for a biologist of the nonhuman.

At the foundation of the study of literature, then, there is criticism (Bové 2021: 135–85). Although I am not happy at Aristotle's attempt to bring poetry within the critical purview of philosophy, I recognize, with some discomfort, how effectively and almost inescapably he set a basis for criticism as an essential human quality, secondary only to the primary capacity to imitate, to become human in mimesis. “Imitation is natural . . . from childhood. . . . It is also natural for all to delight in works of imitation” (Aristotle 1984: 2318, para. 1448b). The proof of these claims “is shown by experience: though the objects themselves may be painful to see, we delight to view the most realistic representations of them in art.” There is yet more and stronger evidence for our delight: “to be learning something is the greatest of pleasures not only to the philosopher but also to the rest of humankind.” Needless to say, Felski does not discuss Aristotle on the question of recognition, raising his name only once to cite Paul Ricoeur's important but obvious point that for Aristotle mimesis is creative, not iterative.

Felski and her ephebes move on from discussing the uses of literature to the critique of critique, to a sometimes more general objection to criticism, to sometimes preserving of the word criticism for the new modes of doing things with texts. In 2015, the political Right took control of the Danish Government and made draconian cuts to the country's national system of tertiary and graduate education, especially in the humanities.³⁴ In 2016, that government appointed Felski a Bohr Fellow for five years with funding of over US $4 million. Let me stress that I am not making a personal remark here. Rather I find it interesting that a government made up of neoliberal right-of-center and far-right parties, intent on cutting tertiary education in the humanities, chooses to fund such research agendas as “how to do things with texts.” Let us say the government did not find this work threatening to its own desires. Of course, possibly the award flew in the face of the government.

A general question underlies my references to Felski. Do academic projects replicate or extend modes of cultural and economic motives in the general society, even when the academic workers think of themselves as oppositional or resistant? Does the academy too easily adopt and reiterate new products offered internally that help publication and careers? Does it iterate and normalize those products without sufficient worry, that is, without critical review of the sources and consequences of these new modes? Does the profession proceed as if internal work has no extramural relevance or allegiances? Is it indifferent to the possible extramural origins, such as Silicon Valley or state conflict with geopolitical competitors, that enable and motivate internal rebranding and reconfigurations?

Jill Lepore's (2020) If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future led the author to caution the public about universities’ embrace of “data science.” She has two primary concerns. First is the waste of resources associated with intellectual faddism. “On a lot of campuses, the word ‘data’ mashed together with the word ‘science’ has a sort of alchemical magic. It mints gold! . . . But there is a lot of dross, and it's where you'd go if you were, not to put too fine a point on it, a huckster. Meanwhile, other parts of colleges and university are starving, and the culture as a whole is in a state of seemingly bottomless anguish” (Goldstein 2020). Second “data science” has close family connections, especially through funding sources, with distressingly damaging people, corporations, and technologies that have harmed persons and society. Simulmatics Corporation developed and implemented predictive analytics that “lurks behind the screen of every device.” The corporation failed but, as Lepore (2020: 5) shows, it “helped invent the data-mad and near-totalitarian twenty-first century,” in which machines and social forces “obsessed with the future” leave us in a state where we are “unable to improve it.” Lepore laments that universities have not done the moral critical work necessary to understand and judge the effects of money and its sources on the wave of data science. She gives the wonderful example of Harvard University awarding an honorary degree to Mark Zuckerberg. “This is the person,” she says, “whose company has all but destroyed journalism and utterly undermined our system of political representation. In whose name are we endorsing this stuff?” (Goldstein 2020)

Lepore gives us some context for what has happened to the critical fields. The movement toward digital humanities exemplifies the problem. It would displace the critical judgment necessary for the moral review of data science, its sources, and its effects. The recent book Distant Horizons is a microexample of the larger crisis. Ted Underwood set out to distinguish fiction from nonfiction, using only internal evidence, by delegating the task to an algorithm. “This is where,” he writes, “the technical innovations of the last forty years start to matter” (Underwood 2019: 18). The word innovation appears several times throughout the book, when the author identifies digital capacities to answer new questions or when defending machine mining of language and literature from more traditional critics. Underwood took a PhD in English at Cornell, taught at Colby College, rose to become professor of English at the University of Illinois in 2014, and in 2016 moved his tenure to become professor of information sciences at the same university. Underwood rhetorizes his concern for the traditional forms of literary study, explains his affection for literature and respect for his former colleagues, and moves to solve problems against many of their objections. “It is true,” he writes, “that numbers tend to become more useful at large scales of inquiry. But this book's emphasis on the very largest historical patterns has been shaped by the temporary rhetorical obstacles that confront a controversial innovation” (167). He also builds his work on Moretti's theory of Distant Reading. What do we have here? A technical solution to a motif legitimated in the language of innovation. The book does not contain an evaluative reflection on what it means to adapt powerfully normative technologies and memes of the ruling class. It does not concern itself with the place of these elements in an unjust society or their desire to displace humanists from the academy and society. The book does not speculate on the consequences of disruptive innovation for the field of literary studies the author left behind or on the broader implications for the social order of the delegitimation and displacement of those work forms replaced by the new technologists’ followers.³⁵ I looked for theoretical and historical reflection on the deeper consequences of this work, and I found none.

This book would legitimate its innovatory successes in terms of knowledge. Knowledge is a particularly important and problematic term. I do not mean obvious and tiring things about the perspectival nature of knowledge but the idea that knowledge is an inherent good over and against, for example, experience, confusion, truth, or imagination. The author tells us that numbers are no more objective than words and that statistical models are just tentative interpretations of evidence (Underwood 2019: xviii ). His rhetoric aims to convince his readers that his machine works in the same terms he believes traditional scholars think and work. The utter absurdity of this parallelism never appears in the discussion.

Consider the ancient opposition between knowledge and experience, which we began to touch in Aristotle. Were we speaking in classical Greek or modern German we would have an easier time of this, but in English, we must explain the issue. Let me begin at the end, as it were. Forming a critical humanist through the studies traditionally associated with languages, literature, and history depends on the experiential qualities of education. “Knowledge” lies in a textbook or at the end of a bibliographical search. For example, we can know what Derrida says of Plato, but we do not experience Derrida's encounter with Plato without our own encounters with both, each independently and the two together, with whatever other knowledges and forms of experience we come to understand are necessary to come close to their encounter to judge it or to enable an interested imaginative effort to transport their work to another place of our own making. We cannot become humanists without these critical encounters with other poems and their actions that form us as humanists. Underwood tells us that we can judge the value of his knowledge by examining the code underlying his work. If we find a coding error, then we can reject the knowledge he produces. Of course, we can always argue about what the results “mean,” which tells us, presumably, that the knowledge has no meaning. We have a term for believing in such knowledge/meaning dichotomies, which mimic the truth/value dichotomy, and that term is positivism.

At least for some time in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the world Mr. Putin calls the home of obsolete Western liberalism, universities struggled to defend and promote humanistic forms of educated judgment to exercise some critical control over the power of authorized knowledge formations (Marcus 2019). The Germans theorized the Geisteswissenschaften for this reason, and the French what they call les sciences humaines. Recent discussions of the Anthropocene, which were preceded by important postcolonial and gender questionings of the anthropos, cast shadows over the ideological human subject at the center of some of these German and French forms. Nonetheless, those shadows only intensify the question, What is the human? which especially technophilic theorists seem to occlude except in technophoric utopianism. Underwood's Moretti-derived title, Distant Horizons, belongs to an age that believes in the singularity and expresses itself as snark and trolling; it is an age beyond irony and satire. Digital humanities makes a claim to broad horizons and long historical views, time made space to be covered quickly. Yet, nowhere in the book does the word colonial appear (Earhart 2016).³⁶ I searched the digital copy for empire, and the only results—proving the trustworthiness of algorithms—were for the word empirical. Gender appears a lot because the algorithm reads grammatical gender. This book serves the interests of a right-wing politics. It removes the various experiences of historical humanistic inquiry from our fields of knowledge and, more important, hides our species’ ontological capacities to aspire. No discussion of the colonial, of imperialism, or lived gender matters; no discussion of freedom, ethics, and imagination; only knowledge produced in a way that the machine determines, as distant horizons, matter or appear, and these because they supposedly are beyond the vision of a mere human eye.

At one beginning of Western literary criticism and theory in the Eastern Mediterranean millennia ago—and this is the only horizon within which I speak now—Aristotle, in The Poetics, lays out a theory of mimesis, which is also a theory of poiesis, of poetic creation in art and the social world. He adds to this complex theory, which is already something of a philosophical anthropology, a theory of curiosity, of a desire for creative investigation into the products of poiesis. These investigations involve analysis, careful study, and above all judgment. Moreover, in and through all of this, Aristotle asks the basic question, What is the human? He draws upon observation. Following his usual method of regression to a source, he observes that children learn by and take delight in imitation. The latter is not copying but inventive replication and variation, the beginning of transport and tradition.³⁷ The process evolves into ritual, religion, and most importantly art and the making of political society. For our purposes, the most important Aristotelian contribution to the study of literature lies in the discovery that the impulse to art and politics is both creative and critical (Bové 2021: 135–85). Moreover, and this is vital to the largest argument and is a claim essential to the literary humanities since at least the fifteenth century in the West, the human is not itself without these mimetic, poetic, and critical capacities, to which we owe the obligations of nurture and renewal (Bové 2008: 48–50). We understand that the tactics of power in forms of biopolitics, technophilia, the concentration of capital, and denial of education can substantially alter the very being of the anthropos so that whatever consciousness it might have had of its own creative and critical capacities can disappear from its socialized species being. This is one of the conditions for populations to support and desire death-dealing. However, does not the recovery or cultivation of such consciousness hinge upon a repudiation of the anticriticism position? Does it not require an interrogation of the technophilics, whose use of the biosphere as a free commons for the generation and consumption of electricity and rare earth resources is highly irresponsible and dystopic (Pearce 2018)?³⁸ Does it not also rest upon an experiential and value-laden sense of the relational destruction inherent in the human/nonhuman deception? In other words, does Aristotle's investigation into the work of intellectual curiosity, with its aims in judgment as well as knowledge, give a critical foundation to forms of self-formation that might find themselves productively, actively, and creatively at home in various of les sciences humaines? Another way to put this might be to ask how the human mind should best work even in a project aspiring to post-human notions and outcomes. Is the experience of human production for critical as well as pleasurable purposes not essential to the formations of judgment around such new knowledges as statistical biology, active space poetics, and so on? In addition, does the embodied mind not train itself in the relations it exposes and alters, through actions or passions it judges most fit to its responsibilities, even if those are speciescidal, that is, the self-murdering of the species and much of the planet (Friedman 2019)?

All of this is to say that the movement against the critical humanities within the university has been a long-intended rightist political ambition, one that has led the many into serving the politicians of austerity with the models they demand—such as making the humanities entrepreneurial. Curiously, now that neoliberal stress on the entrepreneur has lost cache under authoritarian nationalist politics, a politics that, as in Russia and the PRC, lease out wealth from the state, humanist bureaucrats are attempting to catch up to a neoliberal phase no longer central to political economy (Condee 2019). Propaganda and power are not the same thing of course. In the strongest sense, the Right's relation to wealth and populations requires domination to the exclusion of competing centers of power and prefers amnesia to historical memory. The authoritarian Right destroys independent institutions to concentrate political power in the hands of tyrants. The neoliberal Right gathers wealth and so power within the hands of a few gigantic corporations and unimaginatively and unimaginably rich billionaires. These groups and persons control and dispose immense resources outside democratic control. Policy follows money that sets the infrastructure to control work. Denying independence of action to public and political institutions is the antidemocratic aim of this right. Neoliberal management styles, with their concentration of power in deciding groups, self-buttressed by a belief in data, reclaim resources that once were dispersed to persons, groups, and small institutions to allow for freedom of action and decision. The growth of university bureaucracy during austerity accompanies the loss of faculty power in decision making. Decisionism obliges proletarians to accept direction or welcome nudges (Wallace-Wells 2010; Sunstein 2014).

These systems prefer above all the elimination of critical intelligence, of the values of experience and encounter, of adversarial creation. They have also sadly found within the academy agents of their own purposes, and the politics of austerity has helped divide an intellectual cadre, especially along generational lines, in ways that serve its own interest. We could talk more of hyperspecialization, of the career anxiety and speed up in educational formation that makes earlier career scholars especially unable to spend time in the more expansive work of becoming in the broadest sense a humanist critic rather than a mere local specialist. But for now, we can note the extramural pressures that force change or provide opportunities for change upon the university and the humanists that it once sheltered and nurtured.

Notes

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