This series includes entries by members of our scholarly community on the War in Gaza. CI has a long history of theorizing questions related to settlement, racism, colonialism, postcolonialism, and antisemitism in Palestine/Israel and elsewhere in the world. Over the years we have published articles by Edward Said, Aamir Mufti, Lila Abu Lughod, Ann Laura Stoler and other scholars on these themes. Our commentators might not agree with one another, but we offer this platform as a call against the culture of academic silencing, bullying, and doxxing and as a way of informing ourselves, and others, about the conflict, its contexts, and its meanings.
The twenty-eighth Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change – or COP28 for short – recently took place in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. The negotiations that go on at these COP meetings tell us something about the bind that humanity increasingly finds itself in. On the one hand, there is the fact of an energy-intensive civilization that growing numbers of humans are getting used and attached to. We only have to remember the ever-increasing number of gadgets – from the electric toothbrush to the electric car – we plug in every day to see how the consumption of energy dominates all aspects of our lives, from self-care to the delivery of goods and services that sustain us. Even the two contemporary wars are reminiscent of this: the firepower of a nation lies in its capacity to unleash huge bursts of energy in the shape of bombs and missiles that can destroy lives and built structures in a matter of minutes; and human lives become tragic if hospitals have to run without electricity and water, that is to say, without access to energy. The consumption of energy is at the core of what we have come to regard as civilization. Humans want to migrate from societies in which per capita energy consumption is low to those where these figures are much higher. This demand for more and more energy fuels all dreams of equity of human material affluence.
On the other hand, there is the question of where we source this energy from. Over the last four or so decades, governments and their publics have increasingly become aware – thanks to the work of many dedicated scientists – that deriving all or most of the energy we need from fossil fuel sources can, by the process of emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, drive up the surface temperature of the planet to a point where the earth may become inhospitable or extremely unpleasant for life, particularly human life. Pushed to an extreme, the process can threaten human existence.
So, in the absence of a global-governance regime, the COP processes are the best we have for managing this conundrum where, if we want to have our “energy cake” and “eat” it too, humans will have to transition to a sustainable state of atmospheric warming, given that the options of returning by choice to preindustrial lifestyles or pursuing degrowth seem out of the question. Based on both scientific and political advice, COP16 at Cancun in 2010 resolved that nations should aim to keep the average warming below 1.50C over the preindustrial average and substitute that target for the previously preferred figure of 20C. Close to two hundred nations signed on to this formula at COP21 held in Paris in 2015 whereby they undertook to decarbonize their economies according to nationally determined levels to reach this goal.
COP28 therefore took place in a perceived atmosphere of “climate emergency.” The planet is hurtling towards a warming level of well beyond 1.50C, and the COP processes have clearly failed to arrest this trend. As Birol says, currently “we are not on track to meet the Paris agreement of keeping global warming well below 20C.” Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel are on a record high, reports the Global Carbon Project at Exeter. The bulk of the emissions come from a small number of countries. Between them, China, the US, India, EU27, Russia, Brazil represented more than 63 percent of fossil fuel consumption and 62 percent of greenhouse gas emissions last year. It is also true that the use of coal, the most offending fossil fuel, is not going to be given up anytime soon. China and India have more coalmines in the pipeline. For coal still remains the fossil fuel par excellence in terms of the “cheap” and plentiful amount of energy one can harvest per unit compared to other sources.
A positive and welcome development at COP28 was the establishment of the global “loss and damages” funds to compensate for the unavoidable losses that climate change will cause to people least responsible for it. However, a “climate emergency” also means that no options are off the table, including the technological ones of carbon capture and sequestration from the air and in the process of mining fossil fuel. As the emergency becomes even more dire, we will probably hear soon about more experimental technologies like those being developed to engineer the climate of the whole planet.
Slow, entangled, and uncertain, COP processes reflect a fundamental reality. Humans share this one planet, but human politics remain divided and scaled, from local to global levels inside and between nations. National politicians are primarily driven by their diverse domestic constituencies. Even the technologies on offer for addressing planetary problems index the inequities and power imbalances of the world. But an implicit agreement binds the world’s democratic and authoritarian-minded leaders together. Their domestic constituencies aspire for more, and not less, energy so that the amenities and conveniences of modernization could be accessed by increasingly larger sections of a human population that is still growing. How politics will reconcile these understandable and just (in human terms) aspirations with the knowledge of the environmental degradations that an unbridled pursuit of modernization has already caused and will continue to cause in the foreseeable future is anybody’s guess.
Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History and South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago and a Critical Inquiry consulting editor. He is a frequent contributor to the journal and the author of, most recently, One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax (2023).
On 31 October 2023, as Israel’s horrific bombing campaign on the occupied Gaza Strip entered its fourth week and as its ground incursion into northern Gaza entered its fourth day, a music video was released. The video’s thumbnail picture depicted a red map of historic Palestine with dark skies and smoke billowing behind it. The map was overlain with the word Raj`in (we are returning) in white Arabic script; below it stood silhouetted figures. I started to see the picture every time I opened YouTube. Eventually, I clicked, not sure what to expect.
Rajieen | راجعين
What I saw and heard was a rousing, eight-minute Arabic anthem that reflected discourses of the present moment while also containing refrains from the past. These discourses do not view Palestine primarily as a humanitarian cause but rather as an anti-colonial one.
Produced by Jordanian producer Nasir al-Bashir, “Rajieen,” as it is commonly transliterated, is a collaboration of twenty-five Arab performing artists, each a star in their own right. Palestinian-Jordanian singers Issam al-Najjar and Zayne are joined by artists from Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Kuwait, all of whom bring a range of musical styles.
Marketed as an updated version of the 1988 pan-Arab hit, “The Arab Dream,” this latest song has struck a chord. Seven weeks after its launch, “Rajieen” has been viewed, in whole or in part, millions of times across various social media platforms and through private messaging apps.
Much of the track is dedicated to memorializing the tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza being slaughtered by Israel’s genocidal war machine. By 20 December, the recorded number of Palestinian deaths in Gaza stood at over 20,000, with nearly 8,000 of them children.
The children of Gaza—comprising about half of the area’s 2.3 million residents—feature prominently in the song; images of Gaza’s children flash regularly across the screen. Egyptian rapper Afroto asks: “What crime did the murdered child commit, who dreamt of only a modest future? And what of the child who survived, only to lose their family?”
But “Rajieen” is not a lamentation. The more I listened to the track, the more I heard echoes of the defiant, anti-colonial Arab discourses that animated much of the twentieth century. Those discourses have consistently upheld the principle of Arab national independence, rejecting Zionism’s exclusionary claims over Palestine as well as the 1917 Balfour declaration that committed the British government to supporting the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine while denying Palestinian Arabs’ national claims.
Early in the track, Tunisian rapper Balti asks, “How can we declare peace when Balfour’s declaration stands?” By naming the Balfour declaration as the opening salvo in this “hundred years’ war on Palestine,” the track affirms the anti-colonial paradigm that has long animated Arab liberatory discourse on Palestine. It also rejects the dominant Western paradigm that seeks to absolve itself of its imperialist sins by positing Israelis and Palestinians as engaged in an interminable ethno-national “conflict.” The song returns the problem of Palestine firmly to its settler-colonial roots.
The “we” in that line is also a declaration that Palestinian political agency lies with the people themselves, not with the Arab governments or the Western-dominated international order. Seventy-five years after 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes during the 1948 Nakba, fifty-six years after Israel’s military occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip, and thirty years after the Oslo Accords revealed the two-state solution to be a chimera, the track affirms that Palestinian refugees and their descendants do not seek permission from hostile imperial powers to return home. Al-Najjar leads the chorus:
The key to my home remains in my heart
And I’m returning with my children in my arms
Even if the whole world stands against me
I am returning, O my country
I am returning.
The refrain is significant. As Asmahan Qarjouli explains in her comparative analysis of “Rajieen” and “The Arab Dream,” unlike the earlier song’s longing hope that Arab governments unify to end the Israeli occupation, “Rajieen” insists that it is the Arab youth themselves who are “united as custodians of the Palestinian cause despite their sense of powerlessness. And that there is no defeat or division, firm in their belief of return.”
By formulating their return through both the singular present progressive tense (“I am returning”) and the plural present progressive tense (“we are returning”), the lyrics also return us to the Arab liberatory discourses of the mid-twentieth century. As I show in Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World (2017), Palestinian cultural producers in the 1950s and ‘60s utilized the principles of politically committed literature (adab al-iltizam) to articulate and popularize anti-colonial discourses that located political agency within individuals, not governments.
Free verse poetry – with its short, rhythmic lines – played a key role in this struggle. Poets would declaim their poems at festivals in front of large crowds; their direct, intimate verses connected them viscerally to the audience, who quickly memorized the poems and shared them with others. The interplay between the “I” and the “we” helped foster a sense of collective spirit, while the poems’ explicit anti-colonial message engendered political mobilization. By eschewing the apolitical aesthetic commonly found in European and North American literary productions at this time, such resistance poetry played a key role in helping spread leftist, anti-colonial consciousness, not only among Palestinians, but among Arabs more broadly.
And what were the contours of this Arab anti-colonial consciousness? As Laure Guiguis explains, the major ideological movements of the period – Marxism, communism, socialism, Baathism, Nasserism, pan-Arab (qawmi) nationalism, nation-state (watani) patriotism, and Third Worldism – all coalesced around a “transregional and even transnational, though diversified, universe of meaning and values,” that was “structured by debates on the best ways to lead the Arab/Palestinian revolution and achieve economic, social, and political emancipation” from Western hegemony.
The transnational aspect of this consciousness also linked Palestine to activists across the Global South at a time when they, too, were fighting to rid themselves of Western colonial and imperial domination. As Palestinian poet Hanna Abu Hanna declared in 1962, “My struggle embraces every struggle / and encompasses the world from pole to pole.”
Some cynics say that such anti-colonial discourse carries little weight in the face of Western military and economic hegemony. But this view ignores the power of discursive frameworks to grant legitimacy to (or withhold legitimacy from) those in power. Imperial regimes have expended much energy on waging discursive battles aimed at legitimizing their rule, from France’s “mission civilisatrice” and Britain’s “White man’s burden” to the US’ “rules-based international order.”
Those discourses have often been animated by racist tropes that depicted non-White populations as incapable of ruling over themselves and untethered to the land targeted for conquest. Proponents of Zionism have likewise deployed anti-Arab racist tropes to try to legitimize the Zionist conquest of land inhabited overwhelmingly by Palestinian Arabs. Following the 1948 Nakba, they mobilized these racist tropes to deny Zionist culpability for the mass expulsions of Palestinian Arabs from their homeland.
Palestinians have long waged a discursive battle against this “Nakba denialism.” Even after the Israeli state destroyed Palestinian villages and replaced their names with Hebrew ones, second- and third-generation Palestinian refugees continue to refer to them by their Arabic names. And they continue to insist upon return.
Today, with some Jewish extremists seeking to destroy the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and replace it with a Jewish temple, many Muslims see protecting the Aqsa Mosque as part of this anti-colonial struggle. In “Rajieen,” Libyan singer Fuad Gritli insists, “Al-Aqsa is ours / Even if my enemy erases its name.” Egyptian Trap artist Marwan Moussa vows, “I’m returning again to my land / Al-Aqsa is where I will hold my next prayer.” At a time when Muslims and Christians are frequently barred from accessing their holy sites in Jerusalem and subjected to attacks by Israeli police and Jewish settlers, the “return” here is also a promise of religious emancipation.
Yet “Rajieen” knows that the present moment is about much more than a contested holy site, important though it may be. In the last minute of the track, we see images of the massive, worldwide protests that have been held over the last two months, include that of young American Jews who took over New York’s Grand Central Station on 28 October, demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. As we watch images of these protests flashing across the screen, we hear the refrain, “If I lose my voice, your voices won’t leave,” repeated eight times. It’s a trust that one group of youth is bestowing upon another.
Ultimately, the artists of “Rajieen” insist on returning the Palestine cause to its pan-Arab, anticolonial roots. At the end of the song, as the camera pans across the twenty-five young artists, a phrase appears: “We do not just stand in solidarity with the cause; we are its custodians.” It is a generational call, as young people around the world – and in the US – mobilize in the streets and battle censorship online to champion the Palestinian cause.
If this is truly the anthem of this generation, then despite the war’s horrifying, gut-wrenching toll on Palestinians lives, their liberation and return may indeed be closer than ever before.
Below are early critical reflections from within on the recent upheaval in Israel/Palestine highlighting the disastrous consequences of Hamas’s “boomerang” insurgency, which triggered mass destruction and the deepening of Israel’s apartheid. Articulation of a joint nonviolent struggle is urgently needed for decolonization and justice in our torn land.
The Black Sabbath
The black sabbath of 7 October in southern Israel will be remembered as one of the gravest national shocks ever. Even seven weeks later, the Negev region, from where I write, is engulfed in a state of collective mourning. Hamas’s surprising invasion unleashed mass terrorist killing and horrific, inhumane crimes of extreme cruelty on an unprecedented scale. 7 October was by far the largest day massacre in the history of the century-long conflict, with Hamas murdering and killing over twelve hundred Israelis. This was accompanied by injuring, burning, looting, abusing, and torturing thousands of defenseless civilians. Moreover, over two hundred Israelis, including elderly, women, and young children were kidnapped as hostages against all norms of warfare or human rights. The indiscriminate bombing of Israeli cities by Hamas and Hizballah has continued unabated since 7 October. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis are still displaced.
How can our conceptual optics account for this unprecedented series of brutally violent events? I offer here the optic of a boomerang insurgency, being a doomed attempt to violently rise against an oppressive regime using terrorist methods with little regard to the immense power and intentions of that regime. Boomerang insurgencies are often driven by a messianic belief in complete (religious or national) redemption with scant attention to the huge cost imposed on their own civilian populations.
Such boomerang (some may say suicidal) insurgencies have a long history among rebelling colonized or oppressed nations. We can recall the violent campaigns by groups such as the Chechens in southern Russia, the Kurds in eastern Turkey, and the Tamils in northeastern Sri Lanka—all using terrorist and suicide bombing as key tools in their arsenal.
These insurgencies have typically spawned severe reactions from ruling states using their own version of terrorism, inflicting massive casualties on civilian populations and destroying the just struggle for equality, resources, and/or sovereignty. In all three cases, following a period of armed insurgency, Chechen, Kurdish, and Tamil national movements suffered fatal blows and have not recovered for decades after their suicidal revolts.
Notably, this has often not been the case. Nonviolent campaigns for liberation also have a long history, with legendary leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, or Nelson Mandela. Organizations such as the African National Congress (ANC), Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Zapatistas, or the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) became more effective once they laid down their arms or stopped using terroristic methods.
Failed boomerang insurgencies are also well-known by both Jews and Palestinians. Jews recall two rebellions against the mighty Roman empire that led to the ransacking of Jerusalem and the destruction of Jewish nationalism for millennia. The Palestinians, too, recall the Great Revolt of the 1930s that was crushed by the mighty British army, sending Palestinian leadership into exile. The effect of this seriously weakened the Palestinians and contributed to the disaster of the 1948 Nakba.
Deepening Apartheid
The background to Hamas’s insurgency is essential: the story does not start on 7 October. Israel was created in 1948 as an ethnocratic state committed to Jewish supremacy. Palestinians still live under the ongoing consequences of the Nakba—the 1948 ethnic cleansing of large parts of Palestine—and over fifty-six years of military rule, settler colonialism, and blockade in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. They suffer ongoing settler colonization and massive land grabs that saw most Palestinian lands nationalized and settled by Jews. More specifically in Gaza, following the disengagement—Israel’s partial retreat—and the violent 2007 takeover by Hamas, Israel imposed a sixteen-year suffocating siege, lasting until 7 October.
Over the last two decades, mainly under the hawkish leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, the colonial Israeli regime has de facto annexed the West Bank. In addition, Israel has forced a sharp separation between the West Bank and Gaza and given Hamas’s leadership implicit backing. This prevented the emergence of a united Palestinian leadership. Coupled with discriminatory laws and policies against Palestinian citizens, Israel has established, step-by-step, a de facto apartheid regime bolstering Jewish supremacy and Palestinian fragmentation between River and Sea. This was exemplified in the opening sentence of the “basic principles” of the current Israeli government:
Hamas is not monolithic and enjoys substantial support among Palestinians. It has used a range of social, political, and terrorist tactics over the years. Nonetheless, it has consistently denied Israel’s right to exist and violently opposed any peace or reconciliation. Accordingly, Hamas’s 1988 Charter declared:
Needless to say, destructive violence is consistently employed by Israel. As an occupying and colonizing force, Israel’s main policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians have been framed by a pervasive use of force. It has persistently denied Palestinians basic individual and collective human rights, most notably the right of self-determination and return. Such violence is also highly destructive to the nature, stability and morality of Israeli society as well. Hence, the current asymmetric dialectics of violence rests on long dark histories, and can be likened to a deadly dance, born from the clash of active settler colonialism with Jihadist Islam.
Decolonization
The disaster of 7 October and its horrific boomerang consequences are plain to see. It is hence high time to reflect on the strategy of a violent insurgency with its deadly boomerang effect. The task for Palestinian, Jewish, and international circles supporting peace and Palestinian rights is to rebuild a renewed (preferably joint) Palestinian-Israeli nonviolent decolonization agenda. Such a campaign will resist Israeli apartheid and apply a range of civil, economic, political, and international forces to dismantle the apparatus of supremacy and occupation.
Renewed mobilization will combine political, popular, and moral strategies, and attempt to organize wide circles of support in a way armed resistance and terror are bound to fail. Several movements have already begun this task, including A Land for All, Combatants for Peace, and Standing Together—all joint Palestinian-Jewish movements with small yet growing followings. The task of rebuilding nonviolent campaigns is urgent, so that the dark clouds of 7 October do not cast a paralyzing shadow over the moral and political task of attaining the legitimate rights of all people residing in our dear, torn, and sorry land.
The spirit of that struggle was well articulated by late poet Mahmood Darwish:
Thank you again for the renewed invitation, and I find myself, again, asking you to please accept my apologies – if anything, my rage has been increasingly overwhelming, disorienting, smothering, and I really can’t find the words. And a good voice inside my head keeps warning me: whatever I write about Gaza right now will probably be used against me* and prevent me from entering Israel again in the foreseeable future, to see my relatives and loved ones. That, on top of the paralyzing realization that whatever I write will not save a single Gazan child. I know, we need to always speak out and never let go, even though we know deep down that it’s a “lost cause,” as Edward Said has taught us, but at times the cause seems so lost that words can’t help us find it, and get hold of it again.
I’ll let you know if this state of mind gives me some respite soon.
My best,
a.
* Everything we write
will be used against us
or against those we love.
These are the terms,
take them or leave them.
Poetry never stood a chance
of standing outside history . . .
– Adrienne Rich, “North American Time”
***
5 December 2023
The following is probably the last poem I’ve ever written in Hebrew, some forty years ago, in the wake of the Sabra and Shatila massacre at the outskirts of Beirut, in September 1982. Standing inside the same history, it came back to haunt me in recent weeks, this time in my English translation, as I watch the unfolding genocide in Gaza.
Requiem
Please hold on, until I’m ready. It’ll take some time, some precious
time, and you must be cold out there, no doubt, where you stand.
But both of us, how should I say, must wear the shroud
of patience, I mean especially I. What’d you say?
What’d you say, I say. Never mind. Our hearing
will become acute, as we turn keen ears to
each other’s mutters and moans, as mute time goes by. Sleep I will not give,
nor a single slumber, to mine eyes. As simple as that; no grudge.
For I’ll always stand guard. Cross my heart, I will. Always
on my guard, and never budge. It’ll take some time, as I said, precious time.
But everything, as you know, must come to an end;
and you, how should I say, will stay put, down the road –
a creditor who’s found a spot to collect his debt.
Who’s found a plot, waiting for the dead to rise.
The dead – that would be me. Me, I said. Never mind – you too are hard
to hear sometimes, through all the shrouds. Comes as no surprise. But please,
hush and hold tight. Don’t give up, repeat: don’t give up, if you can.
What’d you say? Don’t you rush. I’ll be right there with you. Here you are.
Late a bit, I have to say, but you must admit – quite a feat for a dead man.
Shatila, Rosh Hashanah, 1982… … and now Gaza, Hanukkah, 2023.
A Palestinian writer and translator of Arabic, Hebrew and English, Antón Shammás is Professor Emeritus of Middle East Literature in the Departments of Comparative Literature and Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of the Critical Inquiry article “Torture into Affidavit, Dispossession into Poetry: On Translating Palestinian Pain” (2017).
I was born and raised in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, where my father, two siblings, and their families still live (or rather lived until 7 October). When I think about the attack, I think about it as occurring at night, not only because of the darkness of what happened, but because for the last twenty-five years, I have lived in the US. So for me, it started at 11:30 pm with the initial report by my family members that they entered their home-shelter, hearing shootings all around. (my beloved sister-in-law was murdered, the rest of my family survived).
I never went to bed that night, and at the end of the following day, trying to make sense of that which the mind still cannot grasp, one thought kept running in my head, and that was that I finally gained access to the depth of the words of the poets whose poetics have been at the center of my research for many years. Working on Hebrew literature while living in the US, I had always thought that I had an intimate understanding of the poet Avot Yeshurun’s (1904–1992) phrase, “the secret of the Torah of longing,” which he used to describe the pain of longing for his loved ones. But it turned out that I didn’t. Mine was the longing for a place and a community that I could still visit, something that these poets could not do. Having emigrated to Palestine before WWII, they learned of the destruction of their home communities in Europe and the murder of their entire families when they were already in a safe heaven.
I didn’t yet understand the longing for one’s own memories and the pain that such memories could bring. How can one recall the landscape of her childhood when it is tainted by the blood of family members, dear friends, and their own children or grandchildren? I used to tell my friends there that they live where my memories are, and now they, too, do not live (there) any longer. To be sure, I do not mean that what had been done to my childhood community is a Shoah—a word that some of the writers I work on, including Yeshurun, avoided (they used the traditional word Hurban—destruction—instead). But for me, 7 October is the closest I could get to what this generation of writers experienced when they learned of the loss of the world of their childhood and of the atrocities that had been done to their family members and loved ones.
The poet whom I was thinking about when I first realized that Kfar Aza, as I knew it, is gone was Uri Zvi Grinberg (1896–1986), a Yiddish and later Hebrew modernist whose 1951 monumental poetic response to the Holocaust gained a canonic place in the Jewish literary canon. But now that Gazan civilians are killed by the hundreds each day, it is Yeshurun to whom I return. Ever since that horrible night, I have not been able to get back to my new manuscript on Grinberg. Both poets wrote about their loved ones, the agony of losing them, and the world they lived in. Both poets expressed their longing for that world and bore a sense of guilt for leaving their family behind. The two poets lamented the destruction of their home community, but Grinberg’s lamentation is imbued with anger and an urge to take revenge, while Yeshurun never calls for revenge and focuses on the life that was lost rather than the circumstances of their death and those who were responsible for it. Yeshurun blames himself for leaving because he focuses on the pain of longing and his own actions (or lack thereof, such as not answering his mother’s letters) when his family and childhood community were still among the living. In the few poems in which he refers to a collective guilt, it is a collective guilt of an entire generation of young people who, like Yeshurun, left their families and communities in Europe and immigrated to a new land, leaving behind their Jewish tradition, language (that is, Yiddish), and culture:
I left a country, I left a language, I left a people,
I left a city. I left Perlmutters-Jews. I left their language.
I left my father, I left my mother and I left my brothers and my sister.
And I went to the Tel Avivian soil of the Land of Israel, and I took a Tel-Avivian Hebrew.
(December 12, 1988).
Moreover, while for Grinberg, Jewish suffering led to his Zionist and later radical right-wing, semi-fascist ideology that called for shedding blood for the sake of a Hebrew national redemption in the land of Israel, Yeshurun also identified with the pain of the Palestinian victims of the Nakba. He refused to ignore the agony of losing one’s land, home, and community. He viewed instead the loss of his family and the destruction of his hometown as a moral legacy to forever remember this pain and, therefore, never inflict it on others:
וְאַבָּא-אִמָּא, מִן מִלְקוֹחַ
– אֵש-אֵל-רַבְרַבָּא מִלְקָח –
.צִוּוּנוּ יַהְנְדֶס לֹא לִשְכֹּח
.וְעַל פּוֹילִין לֹא לִשְכַּח
[And father-mother
Ordered us from the fire
Not to forget [our] Jewishness
Not to forget [what happened] in Poland. ]
(“Pesach al Kukhim,” 1952).
In his idiosyncratic language (to which a translation cannot do justice), Yeshurun uses the word Yandes, in the Yiddish dialect of his parents, which means Judaism or Jewishness, and embodies a deep moral commitment to do no harm onto others.[1] The notion that his Jewishness obliged him to remember the Holocaust is not exceptional, of course. But for Yeshurun, this memory of the atrocities is important not for the sake of revenge or for preventing them from reoccurring to Jews, but for precluding them from reoccurring to any people, to anyone. Perhaps most important is the moral injunction that he finds in his Jewishness to never become the perpetrators ourselves. In other words, as Jews, we are obliged to never do to others that which had been done to us. It is the legacy of Jewish suffering that calls for empathy for the suffering of others and for moral responsibility to never be on the side that inflicts this pain. Yeshurun, like Grinberg, speaks in the name of the murdered Jews, but while Grinberg cites them as calling for revenge, Yeshurun invokes his poetics to remind his fellow Jews that for traditional Jews, what it means to be a Jew is very different than what is done in their names. Many of the people who were murdered on 7 October were not observant Jews, and their world was very far from the world of traditional Jewish communities. Living right next to Gaza, many of them were peace activists who were not blind to the pain of the Gazans, and in that sense, they had more Yandes—Jewishness—in them than religious nationalists who call for the murder of Palestinian children, women, and the elderly, because they were born on the wrong side of the border. The dead that I lament call us to maintain our Yandes and not kill young children in their names.
There is another reason this call is relevant to me today here in America. In the academic circles of which I am a part, some leftist scholars and intellectuals refuse to see the perpetrators of the 7 October attack for what they are. They cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the humanity and, therefore, the pain and suffering of the innocent victims of the atrocities committed by Hamas. My hope is that both they, as well as those who call to wipe Gaza from the face of the earth, will find in themselves their Yandes-Jewishness, in Yeshurun’s sense of the word, namely, guided by the moral injunction to see the pain of innocent others as they see their own.
Neta Stahl is associate professor of Modern Hebrew Literature and director of the Stulman Program in Jewish Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
[1] For a meticulous discussion of the meaning of Yandes in Yeshurun’s work, see Amos Noy, “Those Who Pass Over,” Te’oriah ve-Bikoret 41 (Summer 2013): 199–221.
In the hours and days following the hideous massacres of 7 October, I did not want to think about history; I simply wanted to find out who was amongst the dead and how they died and then to mourn and to cry. But we do need to at least try to understand how we got to this place, although I don’t believe that historians can provide an exact point zero when and where these crises began nor convey an iota of the pains of a parent who has lost a child.
The Historical Before
Writing history depends on your starting point, and each of these starting points can lead to a different narrative. I start with World War I, when Gaza, which was under Muslim rule since 643, was occupied by the British. Although the entirety of Palestine, and indeed the Middle East, suffered tremendously during the years of the war, Gaza faced massive British attacks beginning on 26 March 1917, with relentless bombardment from air and sea, which devastated the city. The destroyed city and its hinterlands were rebuilt during the years of the British occupation of Palestine in the form of a mandate from the League of Nations, which ended in 1948.[1]
The 1948 War, known in Palestinian history as the Nakba, changed Gaza. As Israel was fighting regular armies from Egypt in the South, Egypt assumed control of a territory known as the Gaza Strip, a small territory 41 km long and 6 to 12 km wide, which included the city of Gaza and neighboring communities such as Beit Hanun, Beit Lahiya, Jebaliya, Dir al-Balakh, Khan Yunis. More importantly, many of the refugees ethnically cleansed from Southern Israel arrived in Gaza, doubling its original population, when 130,000 homeless refugees settled in tents in haphazardly built camps. The Gazans were now isolated from their Palestinian brethren under Israeli and Jordanian control and lived under Egyptian military rule, which severely limited movement outside of the strip. At the same time, the Palestinians in the strip resisted attempts to transfer them to the Sinai; in March 1955 both communists and Muslim Brothers protested such a plan in a series of mass demonstrations.
The third occupation of Gaza occurred in October 1956 by Israel as part of a joint campaign of Israel, the UK, and France to defeat Egypt, whose regime at the time led an anticolonial, Pan-Arab, and Pan African regional movement. Israel had to evacuate the region a few months later due to international pressure, but the war cost Palestinian lives; 275 Palestinians were killed in the protests of Khan Yunis and Rafah, for example.
The fourth, and longest, occupation of Gaza occurred in June 1967, again by Israel, as part of its June 1967 War, during which Israel also occupied the West Bank, the Sinai, and the Golan Heights. From this period onwards, the Gaza Strip’s supply of electricity, water, and basic services were dependent on Israel. The economics of Israel and Gaza Strip became intertwined, with Gazans working as low wage laborers in Israel. Moreover, Israeli illegal settlements were built in the southern region of the strip, which later became known as Gush Katif. The idea, developed by Itzhak Rabin and Yigal Alon, was to split the southern part of the strip from the city of Gaza by populating it with Jews.
Already in the 1950s, Palestinians in the Gaza strip, and those in Jordan and Lebanon, crossed the borders with Israel, attempting to return to fields and homes. Individuals also attacked Israeli civilian and military targets; these individuals were known as fedayeen, namely, individuals engaged in a battle to liberate Palestine who were willing to sacrifice their life for this cause. After Israel’s massive victory in 1967, Palestinians strongly believed that they, rather than Arab states, should take hold of their own fate, which led to the rise of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO, founded in 1964), and several similarly radical organizations; these organizations embraced the ideology of armed struggle, the theory according to which Palestine will be liberated by force. Consequently, they targeted both Israeli soldiers and civilians, who were deemed legitimate targets as part of the Zionist settlement project. Categorized as terrorist organizations in most of the Western world, they forged connections with other groups in the New Left and the Global South. In this period, the slogan “from the river to the sea” came into being, which initially meant the liberation of all of Palestine, allowing only the Jews who lived there before the Zionist settlement project to remain, though the question of whom should remain after decolonization changed over the years. The endgame was envisioned as a secular Palestinian state and, according to some organizations, a liberation of the entire region from its corrupt pro-Western regimes.
The Gaza Strip is surrounded by the Gaza Envelop—that is, Israeli communities—like the Kibbutzim, Nirim, Kfar Azza, Beri, and the city of Sderot. These communities were meant to create facts on the ground before 1948, allowing the future Jewish state to grab more territory; after 1948, the new villages and kibbutzim were meant to protect the border with Egypt. Some of the Ashkenazi (European Jewish) members of the Envelope’s settlements were themselves, or were the descendants of, Jews who escaped Europe in the 1930s and the 1940s. At this point, when states closed their borders to Jews fleeing Nazism, these Jews could either stay in Europe and die, or, if lucky, settle in Palestine. They chose the latter. Other Ashkenazim are, or are descendants of, Holocaust survivors. The people of the city of Sderot, in contrast, are mostly North African. After the creation of the state of Israel, Jewish communities in Arab states found themselves as pawns between the Israeli state who wanted them for its own ideological and demographic concerns, and for Arab states whose ultranationalist elites considered every Jew a Zionist. They could not withhold under these pressures, and many chose to immigrate to Israel. Arab states confiscated their property, and they suffered discrimination in Israel because they were not European Jews. The city of Sderot included first Iranian and Kurdish Jews and then many Moroccan Jews. In the 1990s, Soviet and Ethiopian Jews joined Sderot. The communities by the border suffered tremendously from the attacks of the Fidayeen, and the speech that Moshe Dayan gave in the funeral of a young man killed, mutilated, and dragged to the border became one of the cornerstones of Israeli martyrology.
In 1987, the first Intifada, mostly a series of grassroot protests against Israeli rule in the West Bank and Gaza, broke out. It started in the Gaza strip, in a refugee camp, after four Palestinian workers were killed by an Israeli truck driver. During the Intifada, HAMAS, a new organization that emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood, was founded. Its ideology was different than that of the secular Palestinian organizations. Hamas, whose acronym stands for “the Islamic resistance movement,” appropriated a term essential to the secular organizations, resistance, but redefined it in religious terms. Its goal was to establish a Palestinian Muslim state; its resistance to Zionism and to relinquishing any Palestinian territory to Israel was based on religious principles that a holy territory—Palestine—cannot be given up to non-Muslims. Its charter modeled its approach to Jews not only as settlers but also based that approach on Quranic verses and prophetic traditions about Jewish resistance to the Prophet Muhammad, and it also referred to Zionists as Nazis. While PLO intellectuals theorized about settler colonialism and armed struggle, then, Hamas turned to a religious language.
Gaza strip’s leadership changed once more in Israel’s peace deal with the PLO in 1993, known as the Oslo Agreement, when the PLO was given partial control of some of the strip’s territory. The PLO was now morphed into the Palestinian Authority (PA), an entity that was to run the West Bank and Gaza in coordination with, and under strict supervision of, Israel. I visited Gaza as part of peace groups twice in the 1990s, meeting with educators and community leaders, when some dared to be hopeful that they would be able to build a new city and a new life. What I remember most were the women who worked with children, suffering from ongoing trauma, having witnessed soldiers raiding their homes. Leaving Gaza, I saw elderly men, old enough to be my father, rushing through the Israeli crossing point, trying to catch a bus after a long day of work in Israel. Their hopes were short lived. The disingenuous attempt to create a two state solution led to the Second Intifada, a much more violent outburst against Israeli rule, which ended up in the collapse of the Oslo process and the deadly Israeli invasion of the West Bank. Hamas presented itself in this period as an alternative to an ineffective, subservient, and corrupt PA, and it orchestrated a series of suicide bombings against Israeli civilians in coffeeshops, malls, and especially buses.
The Gaza strip seemingly moved in a positive direction when Israel evacuated all the Gush Katif settlements, leaving full control to the PA in September 2005. In the Legislative elections held in the next year in West Bank and Gaza (January 2006), Hamas won. This victory led to internal conflict within Palestine, at the end of which the PA remained mostly active in the West Bank, while the Gaza Strip was governed by Hamas. This phase started what is known as the Siege of Gaza. Israel argued that it could not have a ruthless terrorist organization at its borders, and, with Egypt, it prevented exit and entry of peoples and goods to Gaza from land, sea, and air, allowing movement through three crossings.
The Immediate Before
The years of siege created incredible devastation in the strip. After the end of the second intifada, Hamas stopped using suicide bombing as its main weapon and turned to using Qassam rockets turned to Israel, most prominently the Gaza Envelope, rendering the lives of its denizens very difficult. The truces between Israel and Hamas were broken again and again, leading to Israeli military operations (mostly from air), especially following the kidnapping of soldiers and settlers, which devastated the strip. One of the deadliest, in 2014, resulted in 2,310 dead Palestinians. Although isolated since 1948, Gaza was always part of a broader Palestinian community, and Hamas itself linked its attacks on soldiers and civilians to developments in the West Bank and especially to the fate of the al-Aqsa Mosque. In 2018–2019, Gaza orchestrated a series of demonstrations known as the Great March of Return, where they marched towards the border wall, demanding the end of the blockade.
On 29 December 2022, the thirty-seventh Israeli government was sworn in, the sixth government led by Benjamin Netanyahu. After a decade of unstable governments and ongoing elections, Netanyahu, who faced several corruption charges in the Israeli courts, was finally able to form a rightwing government that included, and essentially whitewashed, the most radical Jewish supremacists. Palestinians and Israelis do not agree on much these days, but there is a veritable consensus that this government played a role in the present disaster. The rightwing government strove to curb the powers of the supreme court. Many of the rightwing coalition members cited the supreme court’s support of the disengagement from the Gaza Strip and the evacuation of the Gush Katif settlements as main rationales for distrusting the legal system. Key ministers, themselves West Bank settlers, such as the ministers of finance, were involved in attempts to stop the disengagement from Gaza. The mass demonstrations against the government’s legal “reforms” engulfed most of Israel. During the protests, however, hundreds of Jewish intellectuals, including many liberal Zionists, signed the “The Elephant in the Room” petition, calling attention to the direct link between Israel’s attack on the judiciary and its illegal occupation of Palestinians, which many of the protesters ignored. The protests, however, reached the Israeli military, with soldiers, pilots, and officers on reserve declaring that they would not serve.
Netanyahu, moreover, was in support of the siege and the “weak Hamas” policy. He believed that allowing humanitarian aid and the entry of workers from Gaza to Israel, while maintaining the blockade, would be the best strategy to avoid negotiating the future of settlements or ever reaching a two-state solution. Hamas, he believed, was a terrorist organization which would receive no global recognition and would be fearful of Israeli attacks, and the weak PA in the West Bank would be unable to enforce any unity between itself and Gaza, let alone a unity with Palestinians who are Israeli citizens. What Israelis and Palestinians, for very different reasons, are asking themselves today, however, is how on earth Netanyahu, the self-proclaimed expert on security and terrorism, did not perceive that an organization that calls itself the Islamic resistance movement, which orchestrated some of the deadliest attacks on Israeli citizens in recent years, would yield to these conditions? Worse yet, Netanyahu was cautioned by several bodies, including Israeli intelligence officers, that Hamas realized the weakness of the state and would attack; days before 7 October, female soldiers watching the border warned their commanders of suspicious activities, but they received no response. Most died in the attacks.
Another front that Netanyahu lost was the Jewish American Diaspora, although the US is a stanch supporter of Israel in this war and many Jewish communities stand by its side. During the Trump administration, Netanyahu was able to win significant achievements, such as US recognition of Israel’s status in the Golan Heights and Jerusalem. Israel’s successful normalization efforts under the American umbrella, Netanyahu believed, would make the Palestinian Question irrelevant. Once Netanyahu acknowledged the results of the 2020 elections, however, Trump was quick to denounce him. Nevertheless, Netanyahu’s support of Trump, while American Jews suffered from anti-Semitism and white nationalism under his administration and Netanyahu’s allegiance with Republican and evangelical groups, distanced Democratic and especially progressive Jews from Israel, while Palestinian activists created coalitions with progressives at the very same time.
The After?
Two weeks ago, I was happy, for a first time after weeks, to see a pause, a moment when the bombing temporarily stopped, when Hamas released hostages, and Israel freed Palestinian prisoners. I think this process should continue immediately. I don’t think that saving human lives is a form of defeatism; it is an ethical obligation. A significant part of my research deals with Jews in Arab states, and, as such, I’m in contact with both Israeli and Arab scholars. When I ask them how they are, the answer they mostly provide is khara, the Arabic and Hebrew word for “shit.” We are all depressed and anxious about the future. In October, my Israeli friends and colleagues spent their time between Shivas, memorials, and attending to the needs of internal Israeli refugees as government services collapsed. My West Bank friends and colleagues are petrified from settler violence, which increased dramatically in recent months. The Palestinian Israeli citizens are afraid to speak. The Gazans don’t know if their family members will survive. For many Arabs, this war triggers other painful memories of siege and aerial bombardment, from the American occupation of Iraq to the Syrian Civil War.
I am a descendent of Zionist settlers in mandatory Palestine. My paternal grandfather tried desperately to enter the US but was denied entry. He immigrated from Belorussia to Cuba, trying to make his way illegally to the US, and was arrested and deported. When offered the choice between death in Belorussia (the fate faced by most of his family members after Nazi occupation) or settlement, he chose to settle. I strongly believe that our tragic lot should not have come at the expense of the Palestinian indigenous population, and these horrible sixty six days will not shatter this belief. In the long run, the solution for this century-old conflict lies in the principles for democracy, equality, and justice. For all.
Orit Bashkin is the Mabel Greene Myers Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History and a coeditor of Critical Inquiry.
I would like to focus on some concerns I have as a feminist scholar with close personal connections to Palestinian feminist colleagues.[1] Their situations and their insights have helped me see aspects of the dynamics now at work in the devastating human nightmare unfolding in Gaza.
What is perhaps most distinctive about our current moment is that the seventy-five years of Palestinian dispossession and subjection to genocidal violence is happening in real time and on camera. There’s nothing new in Israeli aims to force Palestinians to accept their subjugation or to expel them. But the intensity and visibility are unprecedented. In the past, those supporting Israeli rule tried to organize their debates around disputes about facts—who started what, who did what, who refused what. But they cannot now dispute the scale of the deaths, injuries, deprivations, and displacements. So, they have to try to frame the issues in ways that distract us from what we are seeing. I’ll give just two examples that have shown this tactic starkly.
First, I want to discuss the reaction of the heads of the Hebrew University in Jeruslaem (HUJI) to a public letter signed by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a Palestinian colleague with whom I worked for years and collaborated recently on The Cunning of Gender Violence: Geopolitics and Feminism (2023). Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a chaired professor of law and social work at HUJI and a brilliant and accomplished scholar, one of only a handful of tenured Palestinian women in the top ranks of the Israeli academy.
On 26 October, she signed the public letter “Childhood Researchers and Students Call for Immediate Ceasefire in Gaza.” She speaks as an expert and the author of, most recently, Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding (2019). She is also a therapist, social worker, feminist antiviolence activist, consummate ethnographer, and a sophisticated theorist of the effects of militarization and securitization on women and on children. The open letter that has by now garnered over two thousand signatures from experts on childhood is about the devastating effects on children of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, with arms provided by Western powers; the forced evacuation of over a million people by the Israeli Defense Forces; and the denial of food, water, and fuel by the Israeli state. The letter placed this in the framework of seventy-five years of settler-colonial occupation of Palestine and seventeen years in which Gaza has been little more than an open-air prison. The letter points out that children are losing their lives, their futures, and their ability to breathe.
I want to point out that they refused to accept the open letter’s framing of the bombardment and ground incursion as a genocidal war, calling it an “appalling claim regarding the extermination of a nation that Israel is allegedly committing”; and they denied as “absurd” the by now well-documented history of the colonization of Palestine and the effects of the Nakba (catastrophe) in 1948 and the ongoing settler colonial expansion and rule through law, prisons, and violent appropriation in the years that followed, including the present; and they were silent on the substance or content of the letter, which was, after all, about children and the traumatic and inhumane debilitation of children’s lives by war. They objected not because of the facts she had described about what was happening to the people of Gaza but because of the way the letter framed the ongoing events. They objected to the framing because they could not dispute the facts. It was intolerable for them to see the victimization of children and their mothers and uncles and aunts; so, they called instead for the resignation of a courageous, brilliant, and internationally recognized feminist member of their faculty.
They threatened not just Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s dignity and livelihood but her personal safety. She feared arrest. She hid in her apartment. She still does not know whether she will be teaching when HUJI reopens. This story matters to me not just because she is a colleague and friend but because one of the most important things she taught me while we worked together on our book on gender violence is that we must attend to how violence is framed. The final paragraph of our introduction offered some guidelines: “Untangling the multiple entwined and layered forms of violence that devastate the lives—physical, social, and psychic—of so many around the world is a first step to resisting the selectivity of the violences that are made visible, the willed blindness to ‘collateral’ harms, and the suspension of judgment about the complex political interests at stake in the worlds we inhabit” (p. 38). We urged the reframing of an important feminist agenda to widen the definitions of what constitutes violence and what violence matters. What happened to Shalhoub-Kevorkian is significant for the way it reveals the power of framing.
Anti-Semitism is about who one is; anti-Zionism is about a political project. The two should not be confused. But Zioness confuses them deliberately. It is sad to see a feminist organization that worked on progressive issues like reproductive rights and social justice capitulating to this kind of framing of reality. When they called on their members to go out and march, their cause was the return of the hostages. It was not for a ceasefire that would be good for everyone, including those being held. They did not advocate an end to violence, an end to militarism, an end to war. But militarism and war, and the ways they destroy lives and families everywhere, have long been core feminist issues, issues that Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian risked so much to highlight in the letter on children that she signed.
I have been truly moved over these last two months by the visible leadership of feminists, women, and the LGBTQ+ community in their calls for ceasefire and their charges of genocidal violence. At marches and rallies, in actions around the country, I see how they have learned to shout through bullhorns, determined to keep attention focused on what we are all seeing with our own eyes. They are naming the existential conditions under which Palestinians have been forced to live and die, whether under bombardment or scattered, expelled, and dispossessed. They insist that history did not begin on 7 October. My grandmother, my father, my uncles and aunts, and some of my oldest cousins were forced into exile. My friends and colleagues who stayed, whether in ’48 Palestine or internally displaced in the West Bank or Gaza, have been subjected to the harsh rule of the Zionist project of the Israeli security state. The students and activists have refused to be silenced, and I consider this the kind of feminism I want to stand with and the kind of feminism that Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian models for us—a feminism that embraces humanity.
Lila Abu-Lughod is the Joseph L. Buttenweiser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University in the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender. She studies cultural forms from poetry to media and writes on the politics of representation, gender, nationalism, and women’s rights discourses. She is the author of the Critical Inquiry article “Imagining Palestine’s Alter-Natives: Settler Colonialism and Museum Politics” (2020).
[1] The following short essay was originally written for the faculty panel “On Feminism and Palestine” organized at Columbia University on 4 December 2023.
In anticipation of our forthcoming blog forum, we’d like to share our archive of essays, reflections, and responses to the ongoing Israel/Palestine conflict.
We sought critics who value examination of the assumptions underlying particular discriminations about works of art. . . . [and] criticism that aspires to be a special kind of “learning”—not in any sense dispassionate or impersonal but something akin to that fusion of human commitment with objectivity that Michael Polanyi characterizes as “personal knowledge.” . . . The critics we wished to publish were those who formulate fruitful and exciting questions about works of art . . . no matter where their explorations lead them.
Though a brief note like this one is hardly adequate, it is intriguing to look back at what strikes me as a double break, the first marked by the establishment of the journal, productively crossing disciplines and opening the way for a broader conversation in the humanities—and the second by an expansion around 1980 that effectively redefined the journal.
The original incarnation of Critical Inquiry embraced a triad of related commitments. First, in those early days, the journal aimed at authors whom the editors saw, and presumably the authors themselves saw, as critics. Second, the targets of their criticism would be works of art. From the broader context of that first editorial note, the arts in question were principally literature and the visual arts. Certainly, there were disagreements (for example, about the status of the author in literature), but in their method we see a third commitment: a journal that deliberately did not ground itself in the historical. Connecting the three vertices, the critic—the literary, music, or arts critic—looks in from the outside to evaluate, frame, and arrive at a characterization of the works of art that would be as universal as possible.
Casting one’s eyes over the twenty most-cited articles from Critical Inquiry, a few features stand out. All were issued after 1978: six from 1980–89, seven from 1990–99; four from 2000–09; and three from 2010–19. Michel Foucault’s “The Subject and Power” (1982), the most cited piece in the history of the journal, pointed the way (alongside so much else in his work) for many Critical Inquiry articles that followed. Foucault began with a suite of negatives: his was not a theory, not a method, not a phenomenology of power, and not a philosophical foundation of power. Unsaid but evident, Foucault never considered himself a critic of literature or of the arts. Indeed, he wrote scathingly of the hermeneutics of suspicion that threw a dubious light on schemes to cast the real below the visible. Not for him a Marxist, Weberian, or Freudian reduction to a putatively more substantial basis. Foucault’s aim, as he saw it, was to track the ways that persons become subjects, zeroing in on the history of sexuality as an approach to the making of the self in its changing historical manifestations.
Bruno Latour asked “Why has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern” in 2004. Second in citation frequency only to Foucault’s article, Latour’s criticism of criticism echoes some of Foucault’s doubts about the hermeneutics of suspicion. Principally, though, Latour’s was not a plea for reaction—being un-critical—but rather an effort to bolster what he called a stubbornly realist attitude (after William James); less an attack, and more a commitment to the planetary climate that became for him, increasingly in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, “matters of concern.”
A second cluster of articles focused on subjectification: the production (under conditions of power) of the subject and subjectivity, expressly focused on the self and sexuality. A central theme of Foucault’s later work, it is taken up in some of the journal’s most-often cited articles. Here one thinks of Joan Scott’s often-invoked essay transforming “The Evidence of Experience” from a bottom-line, self-evident, and transhistorical category into something that is produced and contingent, bringing gender to immediate attention as part of this history. Here too would be Lauren Berlant’s exploration of the produced subjectivity of everyday comportment, “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency)” (2007); this builds on her and Michael Warner’s article, “Sex in Public,” from the 1998 special issue on intimacy (Berlant’s introduction to that issue is itself also among the top twenty cited articles from Critical Inquiry), which aimed to bring the domestic, the therapeutic, the desires of the nonpublic into historical and specific analysis. Sander L. Gilman crossed race and female sexuality in his (1985) analysis of the late nineteenth century across art, science, and medicine, while Nicholas Mirzoef’s “The Right to Look” (2011) pits a subjective, willing self-disclosure to another (or others) against an authoritarian nonconsensual “visuality.” Perhaps the most dramatic form of subjectivity-interrogation comes with Jacques Derrida’s (2002) exploration, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” as it pressed on the not-quite or not-yet reciprocal gaze of human and animal.
A third theme structuring many of these oft-read articles is narrative. Paul Ricoeur eschewed both achronological models and physics-based concepts of chronology in “Narrative Time” (1980); instead, he aimed to use plot as the structuring frame that organizes events phenomenologically. Hayden White examined, in “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality” (1980), non-narrarative forms of historical accounting—the annals and the chronicle are his examples—not as failed narratives but rather as alternative productions of reality, throwing into (questionable) relief the notion that narrative has a unique hold on reality. A decade later, in “The Narrative Construction of Reality” (1991), Jerome Bruner built on his career-long argument around the conviction that we are not all, at root, in life, logicians or physicists of the spacetime manifold, nor Piagetians following a fixed script of cognitive competence. Instead, we compose reality out of an assortment of narratives in the form of “stories, excuses, myths, and reasons.” All three of these authors contended that the concept of narrative—variable and located, not universal—was constitutive of our grasp of reality, time, and history. Narrative was not an optional feature, but instead a contingent, historically- and culturally based frame of the world.
Such concerns about the structure of postcoloniality, subjectivity, and narrativity opens a branch of critical history. It means putting the neoliberal university under analysis, as Chris Lorenz does in 2012; it means challenging a too-easy slide toward a quasi-algorithmic neuro-explanation of affect, as Ruth Leys memorably put forward in 2011. Whatever the label, this complex of questions has clearly taken expansive steps outward from the narrow, if engaging, realm of literary or art criticism as construed in the 1970s. The Polanyi (and later, Thomas Kuhn) critique of a purely intellectual or algorithmic picture of knowledge did put more-than-rational factors into the description of scientific advance. But the view Polayni, for example, had of body and mind was always a kind of universal incorporation—not the place-, culture-, race-, historical- context-, or gender-specified accounts that began to characterize Critical Inquiry post-1980.
This opening up—across the three vertices of author, method, and topic—certainly made it possible, more personally, for me to consider contributing to Critical Inquiry. I wanted my article, “The Ontology of the Enemy” (1994; dead last, I should say, in the list of twenty articles I’ve been discussing), to be historical—on the World War II material history of Norbert Wiener and cybernetics. I also had in mind for it to be about a new kind of selfhood, the restricted, constrained, self associated with knowing a Manichean enemy by way of fragmentary measures—and then applying that stripped-down feedback concept to our own self-as-black box. That sense of materiality and more-than-materiality saturated many of the other pieces I wrote, including one on nuclear weapons- propelled national security secrecy, “Removing Knowledge” (2004) and one on the radical transformation of simultaneity by way of trains, maps, and special relativity, “Einstein’s Clocks: The Place of Time” (2000).
Taken together, I see Critical Inquiry, as it has developed over the last forty years as driving hard toward a critical assessment of what can be taken as self-evident or foundational concepts. The stance of the analysts who contribute to this exploration of what we take for granted has come a quite a long way from that of an art critic, the objects of inquiry expanded to include not just the arts but politics and the economic, corporeal, climatological, and scientific domains. It is an exciting, productive, and provocative journal, so here’s to continuing inquiry, expanding, in the decades to come.
Peter Galison is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard. He is also on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry and is a frequent contributor to the journal.
Twenty years ago, for its thirtieth anniversary issue, I compared the early history of Critical Inquiry to that of the humanities-centers movement. I noted that both had their take-off in the 1970s and that each involved a distinctive way addressing certain contemporary issues with disciplines in the humanities and human sciences. I invoked Michel Foucault’s mid-1977 discussion of how, over the course of his own lifetime, a major shift had taken place in the role of intellectuals in modern society, how the figure of the universal intellectual had been superseded by that of the specific intellectual. The universal intellectual emerged in the course of eighteenth-century political struggles in Europe. This figure was “the man of justice, the man of law”—Foucault’s language is relentlessly masculinist—who “counterposes to power, despotism, and the arrogance of wealth the universality of justice and the equity of an ideal law.” Such efforts were made in behalf of a concept of right that, Foucault says, “can and must be applied universally.” The specific intellectual is a figure is of much more recent emergence, roughly “since the Second World War.”[1]
Where the universal intellectual “derived from the jurist or notable,” the specific intellectual derives “from the savant or expert” (“TP,” p. 128). For specific intellectuals, what Foucault calls the mode of connection between theory and practice is worked out not by way of “the just-and-true-for-all” but rather within “specific sectors, at the pressure points where their own condition of life and work situate them” (“TP,” p. 126). Further, the universal intellectual “finds his fullest manifestation in the writer” (“TP,” p. 128). The specific individual may write, of course, but writing is a different sort of affair in this case. The specific intellectual is not “the bearer of values and significations in which all can recognise themselves” but the holder of specialized knowledge acquired in “specific sectors” of disciplinary practice (“TP,” p. 128). Foucault goes so far as to claim that “the whole relentless theorization of writing in the 1960s was doubtless only a swansong” (“TP,” p. 127). For him, the fact that this theorization took its bearing in specific disciplines, and “needed scientific credentials founded in linguistics, semiology, and psychoanalysis,” was only so much further proof “that the activity of the writer was no longer at the focus of things” (“TP,” p. 127).
Yet even as writing, taken to be “the sacralizing mark of the intellectual,” has disappeared,” Foucault explains, “it has become possible on this account to develop lateral connections across different forms of knowledge” (“TP,” p. 127). This recent shift carries decided implications for the university: It explains two developments in particular: not only why, “even as the writer tends to disappear as a figurehead, the university and the academic emerge, if not as principal elements, at least as ‘exchangers,’ privileged points of intersection,” but also why “universities and education” had already by the mid-1970s become “politically ultrasensitive.” In respect to what he calls the “crisis of the universities” in that moment, Foucault nonetheless advises that it “should not be interpreted as a loss of power, but on the contrary as a multiplication and reinforcement of their power-effects as centres of a polymorphous ensemble of intellectuals who…relate themselves to the academic system” (“TP,” p. 127).
My thought in 2004 was that Foucault’s account of the academic order of things in the mid-seventies captured something important about how, in these circumstances, newly forming humanities centers became sites of exchange and points of intersection. By way of parallel, I suggested that the founding of Critical Inquiry at Chicago in that period might also be understood to answer to the situation Foucault sketches. CI was conceived neither as a public journal in which writers engage readerships in the fashion of universal intellectuals—not, say, as a “review of books”—nor, pointedly, as a journal that took its cue from the “relentless theorization of writing” on the Continent in the previous decades. Indeed, CI did not at the outset appear to be terribly invested in Continental theory at all, though this changed over the years. It was founded as a scholarly journal, but it did not restrict itself to any of the relevant scholarly disciplines that it relied on. In introducing the first issue, founding editor Sheldon Sacks explicitly eschewed terms like “interdisciplinary” and “comparative” but still made it abundantly clear how the mission of CI embraced multiple disciplinary perspectives even as it maintained its status as an academic rather than a public enterprise: “The literary critic who has no interest in E. H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion, the music critic who found Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s Poetic Closure irrelevant, the art critic who would simply be bored by Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism or Karl Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism were not our potential readers, nor were meant to be.” The journal has from the start been pitched to a readership of “savants,” in Foucault’s terms, expert in at least one discipline but open to reading in others.
It is even truer now than it was in 2004 that CI has made good on its mission to be a venue of exchange and intersection among the disciplines, even as it has extended the number and scope of the disciplines it has engaged. Founded largely in an English department, led largely by editors with that affiliation, it has nonetheless steadily broadened its editorial staff into a host of other fields, and its published offerings have broadened accordingly. In this broadening, moreover, it has continued to reestablish the ever-altering balance between a respect for what disciplines have to offer and an effort to develop modes of presentation that can move across them. In its pursuit of this mission, the journal has clearly aspired to make itself a desirable place—the desirable place—for individual scholars to publish work across disciplines in a variety of formats: articles, essays, occasional pieces, and, more recently, book reviews and blog posts. But a second dimension of CI’s developing practice over the decades brings it perhaps closer to the humanities-center movement, a succession of more ambitious initiatives that tend to be project-based, collaborative, and reflective about our ongoing disciplinary arrangements.
Tom Mitchell organized an early cluster of these cross-disciplinary conferences and special issues: On Narrative and The Politics of Interpretationare two that come to mind. But later years saw many others, among them Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s timely special issue on “Race,” Writing, and Difference, Hilary Chute and Patrick Jagoda’s volume on Comics & Media, and a series of major projects by the late Lauren Berlant, including Intimacy, On the Case, and, with Sianne Ngai, Comedy Has Issues. An especially wide range of disciplinary perspectives were mobilized for Around 1948 (a special issue address to the post-War situation targeted by Foucault), which began its life as a conference at the Franke Institute for the Humanities organized by Deborah Nelson, Lisa Wedeen, and James Sparrow. For the reasons I have sketched, The Franke Institute and Critical Inquiry have made for excellent mutual collaboration. I myself have been involved in a trilogy of such projects at CI, all connected to major conferences at Chicago—Questions of Evidence (with Arnold Davidson and Harry Harootunian), Arts of Transmission (with Davidson and Adrian Johns), and The Fate of Disciplines (with Davidson). The second and third of these emerged from conferences organized through the Franke Institute. The third, which doubled as annual international conference of CHCI (Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes), was in fact designed to engage the agenda laid out at the end of my thirtieth-anniversary reflections on “critical disciplinarity,” addressing head-on the kinds of issues Foucault raised in his commentary on universal and specific intellectuals. I’m sure I speak for many colleagues involved in these many projects and special publications over fifty years, that CI was been the best of possible venues for them and its editors the best of partners.
2. Oppenheimer
Back in 1977, when Foucault explained the eclipse of the universal intellectual by the specific intellectual, he had names in view. The prototype of the universal intellectual turns out to be Voltaire. (Sartre, according to Foucault, was the last of them.) As for the specific intellectual, Foucault pointed to J. Robert Oppenheimer, a name now very much back in circulation after the release of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster biopic this summer. To be more precise, however, Oppenheimer figures in Foucault’s account as a pivotal figure, one who could become “the point of transition” between universal and specific intellectuals because of two important circumstances (“TP,” p. 127). On the one hand, Oppenheimer was positioned make his public intervention on the issue of nuclear-weapons proliferation after the war “because he had a direct and localized relation to scientific knowledge and institutions” (“TP,” p. 128). On the other, “since the nuclear threat affected the whole human race and the fate of the world, his discourse could at the same time be the discourse of the universal” (“TP,” p. 128). The upshot, for Foucault, is a development he takes to be historically unprecedented for “Western intellectuals”: “For the first time the intellectual was hounded by political powers, no longer on account of a general discourse which he conducted, but because of the knowledge at his disposal” (“TP,” p. 128). In Nolan’s Oppenheimer, this hounding, with Lewis Strauss (played brilliantly by Robert Downey, Jr.) as its driver, becomes the retrospective frame of reference for the narration of remarkable career.
Nolan’s film is not, of course, the first popular account of that career. It was adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005), and that book itself frequently cites testimony from an earlier film treatment, Jon Else’s 1982 competent documentary, The Day after Trinity. Interestingly, all three of these works emphasize two important aspects of Oppenheimer’s career not discussed by Foucault. One is that Oppenheimer was himself very much a creature of the modern university system before being recruited to the Manhattan Project. By the early 1930s, not yet thirty himself, he had already had academic affiliations with Harvard, Cambridge, Gottingen, Leiden, Caltech, Berkeley, and The Swiss Federal Institution of Technology in Zurich. His teaching, especially at Berkeley, shaped a small generation of academic physicists in a relatively short time.
The second emphasis present in all these works, but overlooked by Foucault, is that Oppenheimer was a polymath of such prodigious capacity that all sorts of disciplinary paths lay open to him in his precocious early years. He commanded five languages beyond English and read deeply in French, German, and Sanskrit. He had serious investments in poetry. Oppenheimer’s scholarly commitments beyond physics are certainly suggested in Nolan’s film, but they are even more fully elaborated in the Bird-Sherwin biography, which goes so far as to speculate that Oppenheimer recovered from a serious psychological crisis in 1926 by reading Proust’s seven-volume À la recherche du temps perdus in the original French while on vacation in Corsica. Else’s documentary, for its part, registers Oppenheimer’s prodigious intellectual versatility not least in extensive commentary by his intimate friend Francis Fergusson, himself a distinguished literary critic (though no relation, of course, to the distinguished literary critic who just stepped down as CI’s editor). Another literary colleague and friend of Oppenheimer, Berkeley French scholar Haakon Chevalier, who figures prominently in Nolan’s film, attests in Else’s documentary that Oppenheimer read all three volumes of Marx’s Das Kapital in German on a train trip from California to New York City.
The best short piece I’ve read about Oppenheimer is Freeman Dyson’s chapter in The Scientist as Rebel (2006), “Oppenheimer as Scientist, Administrator, and Poet.” In science, Dyson thinks Oppenheimer’s most important work was a 1938 article detailing the formation of black holes, a topic in which Oppenheimer lost interest, Dyson speculates, because the Blitzkrieg and the invitation to lead the Manhattan Project came so quickly on its heels. In poetry, Dyson shows Oppenheimer to be a talented parodist of T. S. Eliot, and in “Crossing,” his 1928 publication in the Harvard Review, a creditable craftsman of neoromantic verses in his own right. In administration, perhaps most surprisingly, Dyson emphasizes Oppenheimer’s competencies less by pointing to the Manhattan Project than by noting his command of academic matters far afield of physics–this by way an anecdote Dyson had been told by a colleague at Princeton’s Institute for Advance Study to whom Oppenheimer offered advice about a raft of British applications submitted in 1948:
Ummm . . . indigenous American music—Roy Harris is the person for him. . . . Roy was at Stanford last year but he’s just moved to the Peabody Teachers College of Nashville. . . . Symbolic logic, that’s Harvard, Princeton, Chicago or Berkeley. Ha! your field, 18th-century English Lit. Yale is an obvious choice [Oppenheimer had already commented on “Tinker and Pottle” as authorities in that field at Yale], but don’t rule out Bate at Harvard. He’s a youngster but a person to be reckoned with.[2]
Dyson’s informant reports that he spent an hour like this listening to Oppenheimer commenting on some sixty applications across disciplines. Dyson also tells of a dinner party where Oppenheimer began reading metaphysical poetry to a prominent strategist of the Cold War, announcing that “we’ve got to see that George Kennan reads George Herbert.”[3]
In light of Foucault’s account of the twentieth-century university as a site of exchange and intersection among disciplines, it is strange that he does nothing to link Oppenheimer’s remarkable breadth of knowledge to the pivotal role he plays in the story of modern intellectuals—he does not even comment on Oppenheimer’s wide range of disciplinary pursuits. Nor does he speculate, as do the authors of American Prometheus, how such pursuits might have positioned Oppenheimer to think differently about physics and its place in the world—differently from, say, a notoriously specialized mind like that of a distinguished contemporary like British physicist Paul Dirac. To this point, Bird and Merwin relate an exchange between the two scientists in Gottingen in which Dirac, after being read Dante aloud in Italian by Oppenheimer, is supposed to have responded: “Why do you waste time on such trash?”[4]
Might we be in a better position to consider such questions now than Foucault was a half-century ago? Needless to say, the Science-Humanities debate has been with us at least since modern science began to assume its still recognizable disciplinary identity around 1800—a development about which Foucault himself wrote extensively. The famous novel Mary Shelley subtitled The Modern Prometheus was very much an early contribution to this debate. Yet these past fifty have witnessed major new developments in how this debate is framed. Consider the emergence of “science studies,” a field whose relation to the history of science was the subject of a brilliant Shakespearean allegory by Lorraine Daston in The Fate of Disciplines. Such developments have been accompanied by increasingly ambitious crossings from the humanities to the more distant natural science disciplines. These crossings have been undertaken not least, more and more, in the pages of Critical Inquiry. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “The Climate of History: Four Theses” is just one of its recent influential publications in this register. Some of the debates about Oppenheimer provoked by Nolan’s film are likely to turn on questions about if and how the scientist’s serious engagement with the humanities mattered to the shape of his major work and fateful decisions he took, early and late in his life. I hope that Critical Inquiry will be at the forefront of venues that host them.
A final point I wish to make about Foucault’s commentary on Oppenheimer in relation to Nolan’s film concerns the question of the medium. Foucault might initially seem to have a laser-like focus on this question, insisting, as he does, that “writing” will no longer serve the modern intellectual as it had done since the eighteenth-century. Yet having made this declaration, he does not consider alternatives to writing as a medium but points instead to specific intellectuals’ new mode of connecting theory and practice. Indeed, Foucault shows no interest in the concept of the medium as such, though by the 1970s it was already enjoying serious conceptual elaboration. Different questions might occur to us today, after the emergence of media studies and new genres of screen practice such as the video essay. Should Else’s documentary about Oppenheimer, released just five years after Foucault’s comments, be taken as an “intellectual” intervention in debates about nuclear weaponry? Should Nolan’s film? What would be the criteria for such judgments?
These questions could be posed about Nolan’s Oppenheimer in a little symposium that might include physicists, film scholars, political scientists, and historians. Other questions would surely follow. What should we make of the film’s representation of both the research benefits and the security risks implicit in open scientific exchange (as opposed to what in the film is called “compartmentalization”? How accurate is the film’s representation of quantum physics? How much does that question matter? Should we take Nolan’s particularly frantic scrambling of narrative sequences, or his mismatching of soundtrack and image track (the repeated thunder in the soundtrack long before the post-Trinity celebration at Los Alamos in which we actually see stomping feet that produce it) as an effort to mimic the dislocations of quantum mechanics? Should such an effect be understood to extend the film’s implicit homology between quantum physics and modernist works by Picasso, Stravinsky, and T. S. Eliot it shows Oppenheimer engaging? Does the melodramatic villainy of Downey’s Strauss, shown ruthlessly sacrificing Oppenheimer’s reputation to serve his own personal ambition, function as Nolan’s tactical compensation for the ethical quandaries attendant on the Manhattan Project and its aftermath? Why does Nolan not emphasize, as Else’s documentary does, the instrumentalist momentum that led Oppenheimer and his team at Los Alamos to carry on to its horrendous conclusion, months after V-E Day, a project launched to defeat Nazi Germany? How does the film represent the dissenting “Chicago Petition” in this debate about the use of the bomb? Is that representation accurate? Why does the film dwell on various scientists’ differing approaches to the spectacle of the Trinity test? How does that matter to the film’s own many spectacular effects? And what about the representation of “writing” in the film, including the Sanskrit text that plays a role in a curious early sex scene between Oppenheimer and Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh)?
In my little fantasy of this collaborative project, then, it would begin as a conference organized at the Franke Institute for the Humanities, with its proceedings published in a special issue of Critical Inquiry. For all I know, however, Bill Brown, Heather Keenleyside, and Richard Neer already have such a project in the works. No, on second thought, I’m sure they are dreaming up a far more interesting collaboration between Critical Inquiry and The Franke Institute, and I wish them all the best with it.
James Chandler is the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English and interim chair of the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. His most recent book is Doing Criticism: Across Literary and Screen Arts (2022). He serves on the advisory board of CI, has published many essays and reviews in its pages, and has edited several of the journal’s special issues.
[1] Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, trans. Colin Gordon et al., ed. Gordon (New York, 1980), pp. 126, 127; hereafter abbreviated “TP.”
[2] Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel (New York, 2006), p. 233.
I served on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry for about ten of the fifty years now being commemorated. For me the time spent represented an ongoing education, a virtual work in progress, in disciplines, idea, and cultural and literary theories that have since become part of my own work. The experience at CI distilled for me what I believe was the distinctive critical essence of the University Chicago, which I will always cherish. As the lone historian and Asianist among specialists in literature, the experience of reading articles in fields beyond my specialty, which often seemed exotic, and discussing them brought me be back to the regions that formed my earlier education. Above all else, I learned more than I can say or repay, but principally how the appeal to specialization began to look like an enclosed space with no exit to the wider world.
In my time at CI I had the opportunity to begin writing some pieces that were unrelated to the world of my research, occasioned by the growing interest in colonial discourse and its consequences initiated by Edward Said. I would like to say here that in these articles it eventually occurred to me that I hadn’t gone far enough, that I was blindsided, perhaps, by theory itself. Even though the promise of theory is to shed new light on familiar things, sometimes the light is dimmed and we’re thrown into making our way in the dark. A recent article in the Washington Post reminded me of this defect, as well as the way some things never change. The article reported the plight of the Armenian minority in Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic enclave of indigenous Armenians surrounded by a sizeable Azerbaijani military, employed to cut off the community from road contact with Armenia. The dire situation is the result of a conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the most recent in several wars after the fall of the Soviet Union. An oil rich Azerbaijan won in this round of the struggle, armed with the most advanced weapons bought from Turkiye and Israel, which should have known better. Israelis could not have been ignorant of where the weapons would be used; Turkiye was already practiced in the genocidal vocation from their near attempt to exterminate the entire population of Armenians in Anatolia in 1915-16, which makes both states complicit in Azerbaijani ‘s attempt to starve the citizens of the enclave by blockading access to food and other necessities. Extermination by starvation qualifies as genocidal intent.
Here we have an illustration of how colonialism works to eliminate indigenous populations. What has not been recognized in this familiar story is how colonizing domination invariably leads to unspeakable oppression, usually of a minority, whether Armenians, Irish, Native Americans, Ainu, or other, now identified as indigenous, through diminishing their means of subsistence, expropriation of land, theft, dispossession, and degradation ending in mass murder. It does not matter if the colonizer is a precapitalist conquest dynasty or settlers, it comes down to the same terrible conclusion, which Marx described as the “slaughter of the innocents” augmented by the agency of “so-called primitive accumulation.” This knotting of colonialism combined with expropriation and dispossession disclosed the kinship among the dominated indigenous peoples who have been forced to undergo their systematic elimination. The great French poet Aimé Césaire had Africa in mind when he accused Europeans of accumulating the “highest heap of Corpses in history.” But it needs to be said that the misrecognition of theory has inadvertently played a damaging role in reshaping this narrative. While the momentary theorization of post-coloniality contributed to sensitizing us to the ill-effects of colonial domination, it also worked to displace the denialism associated with colonization as the scene of genocidal excess by avoiding it. Instead of confronting the destructive outcome of political oppression and massive material expropriation of the everyday lives of indigenous minorities, it diverted attention to the cultural and psychological encounter, which, in some cases, inspired historians to extol empires for their ethnic multi-diversity. This approach turned to a preoccupation with subjectivity, worrying whether the subaltern could speak (when did they cease to speak?) rather than live, through the promotion of categories like negotiation and the coming together of shared subjectivities, fantasies conjured in the afterlife disappointments of new nations accompanied by failure to see colonization’s aptitude for exploitation, dispossession, and genocide, which resulted in concealing its shared resemblance to the horrors of primitive accumulation. Here, in the twenty-first century, we continue to face the figure of genocidal extermination and its enabling desire, living the present as if it was still the unfinished past. The writer Jenny Erpenbeck rightly asked “is memory an instrument of power” and answered “perhaps,” then added: “How far do you have to step back in order to see the entire historic tapestry extending far beyond your own lifetime? How much do you have to know in order to understand what it really is that’s flourishing in your own blind spot?”
Harry Harootunian is the Max Palevsky Professor of History, emeritus, at the University of Chicago. He was a coeditor of Critical Inquiry and is now on the editorial board.
Why is there no epistemology of the humanities that is even remotely comparable to the epistemology of the sciences? Why is it that humanists can gesture to only a handful of seminal works by philosophers (Wilhelm Dilthey on understanding in the humanities versus explanation in the sciences; Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur on hermeneutics; R. G. Collingwood on history), whereas great swathes of philosophy are devoted to the epistemology of the sciences? Even leaving the philosophers aside, the sciences have an impressive tradition of practitioners philosophizing about their own practices – practices such as controlling experiments, making measurements, distinguishing correlation from causation, estimating personal equations, sampling populations, and constructing mathematical models. It is not as if the humanities lack for their own refined ways of knowing, from source criticism in philology to close reading in literary studies, not to mention critical commentary in philosophy and anachronism-spotting in history. Yet despite the remarkable sophistication of these tools, each with its own history and all honed by decades if not centuries of disciplinary scrutiny, there is very little systematic reflection among humanists (much less among my own tribe of historians and philosophers of science) about how we know what we know. Why not?
This question has been nagging at the fringes of consciousness for some time now, but it shoved its way to the center of my attention twice in the past year. The first time was an international commission (yet another) on the state of the humanities. There was a great deal of furrowed-brow discussion over waning public support, declining student enrollments, philistine university administrators, downright hostile politicians, the imperialism of STEM disciplines, and a wretched job market, all genuinely concerning topics. But there was little appetite for discussion about why the humanities found themselves in this predicament, about why they were evidently losing their status as a form of learned inquiry that made contributions to knowledge. Why, after centuries of defining what knowledge was worth having and modelling how to go about getting it, were the humanities perceived even within the university as being no longer about knowledge at all? Why were the disciplines that invented the research ethos (and the research seminar) now viewed as ever more peripheral to the pursuit of knowledge?
The second time was the fiftieth anniversary of this journal and a request from the editors to write a short piece for the occasion. This gave me the very welcome excuse to spend an agreeable day perusing the online archive of Critical Inquiry, reading articles from this or that year (and also essays and translations and even testimonies, manifestos, and reminiscences). This cosmopolitanism of genre mirrored CI’s cosmopolitanism with respect to authors and topics, well beyond the anglophone province of the Republic of Letters. My reading was entirely unsystematic; I followed only fancy. Although some pieces had staled with time, a surprising number of them still richly repaid the reading: Frank Kermode on “Novels, Recognition and Deception” (1974), Nancy Fraser on “Sex, Lies, and the Public Sphere: Some Reflections on the Confirmation of Clarence Thomas” (1992), Peter Galison’s “Ontology of the Enemy” (1994), Carlo Ginzburg’s “Family Resemblances and Family Trees: Two Cognitive Metaphors” (2004), Jean-Pierre Vernant’s “Semblances of Pandora: Imitation and Identity” (2011), Marjorie Garber’s “Over the Influence,” (2016), and many more.
Although the departure point for most articles was a detailed examination of something – a work of art or literature, a historical episode, a myth, a public event, a philosophical idea – none of them were only that. By no means all of them were high-theory (indeed, those that were had aged worst), but all were high-concept: intensely alert to the treacherous depths beneath the surface of apparently innocuous assumptions; seismometer-sensitive to the faint vibrations of words and images; indefatigable in making the implicit explicit and the taken-for-granted suddenly surprising, even shocking. On display were not only the raw materials for an epistemology of the humanities but also the analytical acuity needed to create one worthy of the name. Yet once again, there seemed to be no impetus to do so.
Will this change, should it change? In the past decade a new field called the history of the humanities has been assembled out of pieces previously belonging to the history of learning, disciplinary histories, the history of science, and intellectual history. The new specialty tends to be more widely cultivated in languages that had never narrowed their vernacular cognates of the Latin scientia to refer only to the natural sciences, such as those of Dutch and German. So far, its practitioners have not been particularly interested in questions of epistemology. But just as the history of science has long served as a stimulus and sparring partner to the philosophy of science, perhaps the history of the humanities will eventually engender a philosophical counterpart. Even if it did, though, the question would remain: What would be the point? Just as many scientists query the need for an epistemology of science, many humanists may find an epistemology of the humanities superfluous: we know how to do what we do, and we’ll just get on with it, thank you very much.
I’m not so sure we really know how we know what we know. And even if we did, a great number of intelligent, well-educated people, our ideal readers and potential students, even our colleagues in other departments, wonder why what we teach and write counts as knowledge. The first step in justifying our ways of knowing to these doubters would be to justify them to ourselves.
Lorraine Daston is Director Emerita at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and regular Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. She is also in the editorial board of Critical Inquiry.
The Critical Inquiry essay that helped me most was Badiou’s Number: A Critique of Mathematics as Ontology(2011), coauthored by our former colleague David Nirenberg, intellectual historian, and his father, Ricardo L. Nirenberg, mathematician and writer.
David Nirenberg and Ricardo L. Nirenberg
The topic of this essay was French philosopher Alain Badiou’s use of interdisciplinary arguments to reach unexpected, stunning conclusions. Badiou followed the example of thinkers who, inspired by structural linguistics, asserted in the late sixties that since the human condition had ceased to be the main object of philosophy, thinkers should henceforth examine language and its networks of relevant differences. In a stronger, more radical move, in the late eighties Badiou aimed at revolutionizing ontology, the philosophical reflection on being, by identifying it with mathematics.
A simple, elementary, insight tells us that such an identification is probably mistaken. Yes, mathematics does assist natural and social sciences find simple, elegant expressions of their discoveries, provided that empirical observations confirm the predictions reached with its help. Perhaps it could also assist some branches of philosophy formulate their findings in a more rigorous way. But in the case of Badiou’s speculations, prudent insights are not decisive, given that his main theses are remarkably audacious. He states, for instance, that “Situations are nothing more, in their being, than pure multiplicity.” Using the expression “pure multiplicity,” Badiou suggests that ontological reflection should pay no attention to the differences between the beings that populate the world and to the specificity of their mutual interactions. For him, there are no modes of being. Since, moreover, Badiou asserts that this pure multiplicity is the object of set theory, he concludes, after a few intermediary steps, that “insofar as being, qua being, is nothing other than pure multiplicity, it is legitimate to say that ontology, the science of being qua being, is nothing other than mathematics itself.”
A wonderful feature of the Nirenberg paper is the generosity of their approach. Far from just exclaiming “nonsense!,” they patiently, politely, go through Badiou’s claims, explain to readers less familiar with set theory the notions and the operations he uses, and in a kind, respectful tone, indicate their inadequacy. We all are, the paper suggests, inhabitants of the Republic of Letters, a community in which intellectual errors do happen. Such errors should be calmly discussed with the help of clear, detailed arguments, rather than subjected to condemnation, exclusion, interdiction.
Thank you, Nirenberg father and son, for this important lesson.
Thomas Pavel is the Gordon J. Laing Distinguished Service Professor in Romance Languages and Literatures, Comparative Literature, the Committee on Social Thought, and Fundamentals at the University of Chicago. He is also a member of the editorial board of Critical Inquiry.
The fiftieth anniversary of Critical Inquiry happens to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of my life as an academic philosopher in the United States. We both began in 1974, and I recall beginning to read Critical Inquiry in the UCSD library a couple of years later. It was not then, and it still is not, a journal that anglophone philosophers regularly consult, but I had been an English major in college, had made the decision to switch to philosophy relatively late, and had gone to a graduate program where I could study Greek, German, and French philosophy both historically and in their present manifestations.
I had become as familiar with Kenneth Burke, Wayne Booth, Stanley Fish, J. Hillis Miller, Paul de Man, and Elder Olsen as I had started to understand Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger and their contemporary interpreters. Of course, the articles in CI largely concerned literary criticism, quickly expanded to critical thinking itself and then a “theory” of such critical thinking. But I fit uneasily into the anglophone world of analytic philosophy (which I have come to think of as more a sociological category than a philosophical one), and had come to think of philosophy as an activity not confined to academic departments of specialists, but as a mode of reflective thought that was an unavoidable aspect of any reflection about meaning and value, or any inquiry that aimed at a kind of truth not available empirically. There were of course early articles in CI by distinguished American philosophers – Nelson Goodman, Richard Wollheim, Stanley Cavell, Donald Davidson, W. V. O. Quine, Max Black – but as literary theory became more self-consciously philosophical and began to occupy itself with major Continental thinkers, the “official” representatives of philosophy tended to be Europeans, Foucault, Derrida, Bruno Latour and so forth. This was certainly a reflection of the increasingly specialized and unfortunately provincial nature of the organization of knowledge in modern universities. This “silo” like organization has been especially harmful for professional philosophy as, in its isolation, it seems to me ever more uncertain about what it is and why it is important. This has sometimes produced an unhelpful arrogance. (Some philosophers believe that all other work in the humanities is a bad version of it, rather than a good version of what it is.) But CI seemed to me – remarkably – to avoid settling into any ideological niche within all these hardening divisions. That feature of the journal proved invaluable to me when I began to argue that philosophy was impoverished if philosophers believed, as they increasingly did, that philosophy was only properly available in engagements with other philosophers. Inspired by philosophers like Cavell and George Wilson, art historians like Michael Fried, and film theorists like Victor Perkins, I wanted to make the case that art, novels and films were themselves modes of philosophical thought, not merely illustrative or provocative for philosophy. Beginning in 2002, I began having extremely helpful conversations with the editors of CI about such a possibility and published an article about abstract art (from the point of view of Hegel), in 2005 “Authenticity in Painting” about Michael Fried’s art history project, and starting in 2009 several articles on film and philosophy. I can’t imagine now being able to embark on such projects without CI. So, my somewhat personal “Happy Birthday” to the journal is a simple expression of deep gratitude.
Robert Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is on the editorial broad of Critical Inquiry.
In this profession, you are ahead of the game if you have an idea. if you have an idea and a half, you are in rarefied territory; and if you have two ideas, you are Wittgenstein. I am not Wittgenstein; I have had only one idea. It has taken various forms, but basically, the idea is that the binary distinctions within which we ordinarily reason (objective/subjective, true/false, literal/figurative, core/periphery, and the like) do not as we often think mark an opposition between something given and available directly—the bare facts, the minimal linguistic meaning of a text, the bottom line—and something mediated, secondary, derivative, added, suspect. Rather, in each opposition both poles emerge within the medium (mediation) of assumptions, presuppositions, settled practices, long-established institutions, authoritative professions, unchallenged (but not unchallengeable) definitions, culturally privileged histories, deeply in-place goals and values—what Adorno terms the “realm of prevailing purposes.” “Prevailing” means prevailing now, not for all time. The overarching and totalizing narrative within which we are scripted characters can and does change and the routes of possible change are included in its landscape, but for so long as the narrative and its sub-plots are relatively stable, locally or generally, judgments of truth and falsehood, right and wrong, better and worse, to the point and beside the point, real and illusory can confidently be made and supported by reasons. It is just that those reasons are reasons—have the force of reasons—by virtue of the prevailing realm within which they are intelligible and even obvious. That is, they are not just reasons, reasons that would be honored as such no matter what purposes or goals or norms are in place. They therefore have a relative status and force—relative to the status and force reasons would have if they were independent of any culturally delimited normative regime—but in the absence to us (not, presumably to God) of any such free-standing reasons, they are what we have and they are sufficient; not wholly sufficient as they would be if they could resolve matters once and for all, but sufficient to the extent that they enable us to make sense of things, if only for a while. You can always say of something that it is true or false, correct or incorrect, on target or off the map, certainly the case or certainly not the case and you can always support your judgement. What you can’t say when your judgment is challenged that it holds true in all conceivable (and presently inconceivable) alternative worlds. But we don’t live in alternative worlds. We live in this one; or, rather, in the world given to us by whatever realm of purposes currently presides over our thoughts and actions; and in that world we can at once and without contradiction affirm the antifoundationalist insight that nothing we see, say or do is tethered to a bottom-line reality and still perform in normative ways that foundationalists claim are available only if we believe as they do.
So that, in a brief, waiting-to-be-filled-in form is the idea. I am not today going to defend it or elaborate it or respond to the objections that have been brought against it or acknowledge the predecessors and contemporaries from whom I have borrowed. I want, rather, to note as a matter of personal and professional history, the centrality of Critical Inquiry to its emergence and development. Critical Inquiry was and is the perfect venue for my ambitions by virtue of its own ambition—to present arguments that extend beyond analyses of particular texts and address themselves to the largest and most general questions one might ask: What is literature? What is a text? What, if anything, constrains interpretation? In the ordinary course of things, these and related questions have already been answered or, to be more precise, answers to them have been presupposed, and the business of literary description, analysis, and evaluation proceeds without undue theoretical anxiety. But theoretical anxiety and theoretical controversy are what the editors of Critical Inquiry wanted to provoke from the beginning. Every essay published was an invitation to respond and the invitations were almost always accepted with the result that the traditional stand- alone essay was replaced by dialogue and by dialogue that often expanded to include more and more participants. In effect a Critical Inquiry author always entered the fray in medias res, as I did in my initial appearance in the journal’s inaugural year. The piece was titled “Facts and Fictions: A Reply to Ralph Rader,” and, as footnote 1 explains, I was writing in response to Rader’s response, made in Critical Inquiry and in a volume of the English Institute papers, to my first theoretical effort, “Literature in the Reader,” published in New Literary History, the other new “big idea” journal. At the time, Rader was my colleague at Berkeley, someone I played softball with, someone with whom I had a good, if not close, relationship. And yet we went at it as if we had never met and inhabited completely different worlds. We had been transported from a shared local geography to the abstract, realm of scholarship and criticism where we jousted on invisible fields with words.
Two years later I turned on the position for which I fought so strenuously in my debate with Rader and announced my about face in, where else, Critical Inquiry. In “Interpreting the Variorum,” I abandoned the categories of the text and the reader and introduced the concept of “interpretive community” (corresponding more or less to Adorno’s prevailing realm of purposes, Kuhn’s paradigm, Bourdieu’s habitus, Polanyi’s tacit knowledge, MacIntyre’s well developed practice, Wittgenstein’s life world), a solvent in which texts and readers were no longer independent entities with independent shapes but community entities whose shapes were extensions of the communities procedures, protocols, and values. About this time I was moving away from literary studies and towards the law, and, as if on cue, Critical Inquiry invited me to participate in a multi-day conference featuring everyone I had ever heard of where I responded to a paper written by Ronald Dworkin, legal theory’s leading light. That first entry in the Dworkin/Fish exchange soon appeared in Critical Inquiry where readers could enjoy the spectacle (or was it a farce?) of a legal theorist doing literary criticism and a literary critic replying by doing legal theory. Four more exchanges spanning ten years followed and when it was all over I had a new career, courtesy of Critical Inquiry. (A retrospective on the Fish/ Dworkin debate is currently in press.)
With sixteen or so appearances, I took to referring to Critical Inquiry as “my publisher,” although in the past two decades my submissions have slowed. (The most recent substantive essay is “Truth But No Consequences: Why Philosophy Doesn’t Matter.”) Nevertheless I will always feel that the journal and I have flourished together and given the vigor and excitement its pages still breathe, I have hopes.
Stanley Fish is the Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City. He is also on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry.
Tom Mitchell once gave me a pink woolen cap as a present. It is a knitted cap, with large stitches. Maybe it’s crocheted. Its pink is comparable to the chewing gum in France called Malabar (note the phonic proximity with my name). A very soft pink. I’ve never worn it outside because it looks a bit like a ’50s swimming cap. It’s very beautiful, adorable, but a little flashy. On the other hand, I wear it at home, at my office, whenever writing seems difficult to me. This cap is like a membrane that protects my ideas, halfway between a kangaroo’s pouch (for the brain) and a robot’s or alien’s helmet. Protection is something ambiguous. I remember Aristotle stating that a shield (in Greek problema, literally “what is found ahead”) means both what guards from and what exposes to a screen and an obstacle at the same time. My cap, then, is securing my ideas but it also confronts them with the outside, the outside of the wool shelter, thus making the outside appears as an engaging thread, in all its ambiguity.
It is often suggested, in intellectual circles, that the time has come to abandon the twentieth-century formulations of a critical-theory project. A theory is critical, Horkheimer said, to the extent that it seeks human “emancipation from slavery,” acts as a “liberating . . . influence,” and works “to create a world which satisfies the needs and powers of” human beings.[1] What remains of such a project? How is it possible, and is it possible to bring together different contemporary discourses on subalterity and regroup them under a common banner? Critical Inquiry, for me, has always been and will always be the place, the unique place for raising such questions, the place where critical theory is both challenged and maintained, preserved and transformed, undressed and reshaped.
My pink cap is the symbol of such a strange metamorphic power. Between the inside and outside of my head, opening in the intimacy of my being something like the critical zone, the biological equivalent of the exposed intimacy of the journal. Sign of hope in these dark times, promise of benevolence and rigor.
I am so happy to have published so many different articles in it, from Spinoza to reflections on neurobiological issues, up to recent explorations of political hegemonies.
From all the neural convolutions of my cap, in the name of all my “problems,” I thank you immensely, dear Tom, and extend my gratitude to all the other members of the crew.
I wish you a very happy anniversary, Critical Inquiry.
Catherine Malabou is a professor of European languages and studies and comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity (2012), Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality(2016), Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurement to Artificial Brains(2019), and, most recently, Stop Thief! Anarchism and Philosophy(forthcoming). She is also on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry.
[1]. Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell et al. (New York, 1992), p. 246.
I owe a lot of my education to the 1980s Critical Inquiry. Then as now, I was in hot pursuit of theoretical models that might collide in unexpected ways with literary texts and common sense, and thus force a rethink. The Aporia Express! So an article with the title “The Epistemology of Metaphor” (1978) interpellated me, as we used to say. I didn’t know Paul de Man, I hadn’t been in a classroom with him yet, but I tracked down the articles that would later become chapters in Allegories of Reading, for example “Political Allegory in Rousseau” (1976). They were unlike anything else I’d read, even Derrida. A problem would be stated and a quest proposed, and along the way things would start to go wrong, or as de Man once put it, to “swerve away from” the problem we had started out with. With Derrida one started off in an antagonistic position to recognized means of sense-making; de Man pulled away the magic carpet when we were already in the air. I reread those articles until the journal numbers fell apart, allegorizing the suspension of narrative continuity.
Another way Critical Inquiry shaped me was its readiness to offer space to scholars and theorists who had encountered de Man and were not having any of it. If it was a “theory journal,” it knew that “theory” thrived in a contested space. Stanley Corngold and Raymond Geuss came out waving their hammers; de Man answered them, sometimes bluntly, as exemplifying the problem he was diagnosing. In my group, a critique that claimed to know what counted as real philosophy or real literary history was considered “stupid,” as missing the point. Critical Inquiry, confident enough to print the clangor, was taking a metacritical stand or possibly a long bet.
When de Man’s second death arrived, with the ignominy of his 1940s collaborationist journalism laid bare, some made excuses; some said “no, the real point is elsewhere”; some divided early de Man from late; others gloated; some were clearly out to settle scores. The autopsy was best and most honorably carried out by Critical Inquiry, which allowed de Man’s friends and enemies to show how they dealt with the unconscionable until, in 1989, the editors declared the issue closed. A performative declaration: but what if the whole subsequent history of Critical Inquiry were a doomed attempt to close the coffin on my quondam teacher?
I learned a lot else from the journal in the ensuing years, but an occasion like this makes one look to the beginning. My first rejection slip, in 1981 or so, was from Critical Inquiry. It seems I have been living in hopes of the journal’s attention ever since.
The fiftieth anniversary of Critical Inquiry marks more than the ongoing liveliness and longevity of one journal. It marks the ongoing importance of humanities journals tout court and the vitality of a field that persistently asks new questions and expands the borders of knowledge. As we begin our next fifty years, we remain committed to that vitality—to new authors, new research, and new conceptual paradigms that open new fields of inquiry.
Looking back at what the journal has accomplished and looking forward with undiminished aspiration, we want to express our gratitude to the University of Chicago Press and the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago for their unflagging support and to our authors (of articles, reviews, responses, and blog posts) and our readers, who so clearly justify the endeavor. In particular we’d like to celebrate the members of our coeditorial board (past and present), who sustain a dynamic, at times passionate conversation from across fields and theoretical dispositions.
To mark the occasion, we’re posting short reflections on the history and importance of the journal from members of our editorial board and from frequent contributors to the journal. Join us as we celebrate Critical Inquiry at fifty.
Critical Inquiry is fifty! I am sure there have been journals that have lasted longer. But what is remarkable is that CI – not the mouthpiece of a professional association but an in-house journal run by colleagues at the University of Chicago – has managed to retain its position as a leading journal of the humanities continuously for decades. CI came into my life late. Throughout the 1970s, I trained to be a social-scientific historian of South Asia and even tried my hand at using some tools of econometrics only to realize that my passions lay elsewhere. The historian Ranajit Guha and the historiographical project named Subaltern Studies that he led through the 1980s introduced me and my cohorts to structuralism and the proverbial “linguistic turn” it inspired. But CI was not a part of my endeavors until I got my first academic position as a lecturer in Indian and Indonesian Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia, towards the end of 1984 and befriended Simon During and David Bennett, colleagues in Melbourne’s English department. It was Simon who first spoke to me of the work of being published in CI, of the postcolonial criticism that Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak (whom I came to know through Subaltern Studies) spearheaded and drew my attention to the eye-opening issue of 1985 on “Race, Writing, and Difference” that Henry Louis Gates guest edited. Excited by the ideas I encountered on the pages of CI, I soon joined Simon and David in waiting with eagerness for the arrival of the latest issue of the journal in the University library.
One of the secrets of the success of CI must be that while it has always been associated with “theory,” it never espoused any particular variety of it as an orthodoxy. Its commitment was to remain a forum for discussing all issues of interest to the academic left generally. The credit for this must go to my colleagues who ran the journal and to Tom Mitchell, its longest-serving editor. These colleagues, incredible intellectuals themselves, steered the journal through the changing seas of academic fashions, especially through the stormy 1980s and ‘90s when “Theory” came to be charged with so much intellectual enthusiasm and ferment, all deployed in service of necessarily unruly and utopian desires for human futures beyond the limits of Western liberalism, colonial and racist domination, gender inequalities, and neoliberal globalization of economies and cultures.
I had the privilege of serving on the editorial committee of CI sometime in the early decades of this century, and what a privilege it was! To be in the presence of my colleagues Tom Mitchell, Bill Brown, the late Lauren Berlant, Arnold Davidson, Joel Snyder, Françoise Meltzer, Richard Neer, and Beth Helsinger discussing, debating, and evaluating a submission with no other interest in mind than a good argument, a new insight, a novel twist in thinking, was both thrilling and uplifting. It made you see in action what Hannah Arendt once famously called “the life of the mind.” These formidable intellectuals had managed, over the years, to develop a collective culture of nurturing and curating new points of view or new movements of critical thought in the humanities. There were arguments aplenty in these editorial meetings – often passionate, sometimes partisan, but seldom angry. What they looked for in every article was something new and persuasive – a new thought, a new question, a new analytical twist, something to keep the intellectual world, the world of ideas, from turning stale.
I was myself a beneficiary of this culture when I began my work on climate change that resulted in the publication in 2021 of my book The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. My personal experience of some horrible Australian wildfires in 2003 stoked my early interests in the phenomenon of global warming. But unlike in the case of my other book projects, there was no model to follow for a humanist historian wanting to work on climate change. As I began to read into the scientific literature explaining the anthropogenic nature of this planetary warming and came across the idea of “the Anthropocene,” I developed a sense that scientists’ claim about human institutions and technologies having become a geological force challenged one of the most profound and dearly held assumptions of my own discipline: that human history and natural history belonged to separate realms of knowledge. Natural history, to put it in nineteenth-century terms, was the realm of necessity while human history was a realm of both necessity and freedom. Indeed, the very idea of “freedom,” I thought, was being challenged by the scientific understanding of this crisis. And as I thought through the significance of this collapsing distinction between nature and history, certain other propositions followed. The subject was huge, and I did not know how I, as someone interested in South Asian history and postcolonial theory, might handle it. I published my first speculations in the form of four theses in an essay in 2008 in a Bengali journal published from Calcutta. Unfortunately, none of my Bengali readers were interested. The experience reminded me of what my friend, the historian Greg Dening, would often say of academic writings: it was like dropping a feather into a deep well and waiting for the echoes to come back!
Completely by chance, Tom Mitchell asked me soon after this Bengali essay was published if I had something I might want to submit to the journal. I expanded my Bengali essay and wrote it up in English in the form of the same four theses I had advanced in the original. Both Tom and Bill Brown gave it a close reading. I still remember discussing a draft with Bill over cups of coffee in the University’s bookshop on Ellis. I don’t remember what I called that essay originally though it did have the expression “Four Theses” in it. I was trying to explain to Bill my argument that the science of climate change was going to change the academic climate of my own discipline when Bill made the brilliant suggestion that I call the article “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Thus was born one of the most significant essays I have written in my life. But without the title that Bill thought up for that piece, I don’t think it would have delivered any of its punches.
“The Climate of History” was a controversial essay. But CI nurtured the debate and made room for my ongoing work allowing me to develop conversations with colleagues elsewhere. One such interlocutor was Bruno Latour, a regular and esteemed contributor to the journal who, sadly, is no longer with us. When The Climate of History in a Planetary Age came out, I retained Bill’s original phrase in the title of the book, both for its pithiness and for the irrevocable connection it made between CI and my academic work at the University of Chicago.
Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History and South Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. He is also a consulting editor for Critical Inquiry. “The Climate of History: Four Theses” (2009) is one of the most popular essays ever published in the journal.
My life changed in 1979, when Tom Mitchell suddenly – inexplicably – invited me to become a coeditor of Critical Inquiry. Overwhelming as it was – I would be the only assistant professor and the only female coeditor in an august assemblage of renowned male scholars – I eventually realized that I could make a contribution by spotlighting the emergence of feminist literary criticism as an area of special interest for the journal.
Proposing a special issue of CI on feminist criticism felt audacious at the time. Committed to casting a broad net across diverse fields of inquiry, the journal had been wary of special issues. It prefaced its first exception, On Metaphor (1978), with an editorial statement attributing this anomaly to the impact of a recent symposium on metaphor at the University of Chicago. A similar logic undergirded the special issue On Narrative (1980). Venturing beyond that logic that same year, Tom Mitchell placed his editorial signature firmly on the journal with the first free-standing and explicitly transdisciplinary special issue: The Language of Images.
Writing and Sexual Difference marked a turning point in the focus of the special issues, which from that point on increasingly engaged the intersections between interpretation and politics. The very next special issue, in fact, was titled The Politics of Interpretation (1982). Dedicated to “the proposition that criticism and interpretation, the arts of explanation and understanding, have a deep and complex relation with politics, the structures of power and social value that organize human life,” that issue signaled a strong departure from the journal’s self-description in the epigraph that topped all four issues of volume 1 (1974): “A voice for reasoned inquiry into significant creations of the human spirit.” Followed by several special issues whose political investments were explicit – Canons (1983), “Race,” Writing, and Difference (1985), Politics & Poetic Value (1987), The Sociology of Literature (1987) – the turn to politics reached its own climactic turning point in the special issue on Identities (1992), guest edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah. As the editors explain in their introduction:
A literary historian might very well characterize the eighties as the period when race, class, and gender became the holy trinity of literary criticism. Critical Inquiry‘s contribution to this shift in critical paradigms took the form of two special issues, “Writing and Sexual Difference,” and “‘Race,’ Writing, and Difference.” In the 1990s, however, “race,” “class,” and “gender” threaten to become the regnant clichés of our critical discourse. Our object in this special issue is to help disrupt the cliché-ridden discourse of identity.
The special issues that followed – on topics ranging from “God” to “Things” to “Cases” to “Disciplines” to “Comedy” to “Intimacy” to “Pandemic” – enact the disruptions that Gates and Appiah sought.
I hope this little history offers one example of the “unpredictable spontaneity” that Sheldon Sacks celebrated in the journal’s inaugural editorial: the openness to changing intellectual and political scenarios that has kept Critical Inquiry at the forefront of critical reflection for the first half century of its existence and will hopefully keep it there for the half century to come.
Elizabeth Abel is professor and John F. Hotchkis Chair in English at the University of California Berkeley. She is also on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry.
All the instruments agree that the day of its birth was a bright warm day. And all of us who learned to use Critical Inquiry during the next fifty years – to read it, to write for it – agree that it was a gift that keeps on giving. Perhaps I’ve been asked to testify now to that truth universally acknowledged because I am one of the few persons still around who was also there when CI was founded.
Elizabeth Helsinger was there too, and she will have a store of memories to draw on. But Elizabeth came to Chicago in 1972, six years after I arrived and just as Shelly Sacks was beginning to lay final plans for founding the journal. So her memories might be slightly and, I’m sure, quite different from mine.
For instance, when the first issue of Critical Inquiry was published in late 1974 I was thinking about leaving the university (in 1975 I did). It was a move I seriously did notwant to make but, for personal reasons, felt I might have to. My years at Chicago had radically altered how I thought about myself as an educator and a scholar, and I was – still am – deeply committed to what happened to me there. So the first issue of CI brought my love of the university into an unusually clear – an unusually critical – focus.
The issue featured Wayne Booth’s inquiry, commissioned by CI’s editor (Shelly Sacks), into “Kenneth Burke’s Way of Knowing.” When the essay was sent to Burke for a “response”, he delivered what Shelly called a “counterblast.” I still remember Shelly’s exact word because it so wittily echoed Burke’s first collection of essays, Counter-Statement (1931). And I recall as well how happy he was in the event. For Shelly, Burke’s “counterblast” to Wayne’s critical inquiry completed an “exciting intellectual exchange” that he had hoped would be the hallmark of the new journal. More to his immediate point, it was, as he wrote in the journal’s first editorial note, a “significant commentary on how one great critic sees himself and on how he is seen by one of his most sensitive admirers.” The exchange for Shelly was a dramatic ( = very Burkean) demonstration of intellectual perplexities abounding. Here were two serious men committed to learning about ways of knowing and who wanted to let us know – happily for us, not so happily for them – that they had a lot yet to learn. For a reader even today, their exchange remains provocative and enlightening in the rich sense that Burke gave to the word “negative”.[1]
Although I’m inflecting that inaugural CI event in Burkean terms, in 1974 it seemed to me, as it still seems to me, echt University of Chicago. I see it that way because of two salient matters of fact that are also personal matters of fact. First of all – Wayne mentions it in his essay – Burke and the “Chicago School of Criticism” had long been in spirited intellectual disputes about what the Chicago School called “Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern.”[2] As a second generation Chicago School critic, Wayne’s essay was a move to reconcile some of the differences between Chicago and Burke. Second, the history of the relations between Burke and the Chicago School was much on my mind when I joined the UofC English faculty in 1966.
In 1961 I had written a long MA thesis at Syracuse University on the disputes between The Chicago School and the New Critics where I came down strongly on the side of New Criticism.[3] More to the point, my view was shaped almost entirely by Kenneth Burke, whose books were sacred texts for me, especially The Philosophy of Symbolic Form. Studies in Symbolic Action (1941). Four years as a PhD student at Yale (1962-66) when The Yale School was in serious liftoff, I had made Romanticism my chief scholastic interest. But it had not changed Burke’s importance for me or my views about the special formalism of the Chicago School. So when I arrived at UofC in 1966 the book most on my mind was Burke’s Language as Symbolic Action (1966), just being published by University of California Press.
During the next ten years at Chicago everything changed for me because I was plunged into the day-to-day context – the practical educational scene – that had shaped the approach of the Chicago School. This was the set of first year Common Core humanities courses I was required to teach and that many of the established faculty, not least Wayne and Shelly, had been running every year for many years. It was one thing to know about Chicago’s Common Core as a set of formal approaches to the study of Great Works of Culture. It was something else again to experience it as an ongoing project of undergraduate education.
When you were assigned to those courses, the first and most enduring thing you discovered was that you would be learning them, not teaching them. That discovery was, I’m sure, what made so many on the Chicago faculty choose to/want to run them again themselves every year. Knowledge was not what an instructor came to these courses to deliver or what a student would be taking away. Trials of learning, the courses were designed to give and take habits of attention and ways of knowing as always also ways of unknowing.
Truly, what else was even possible in a ten-week seminar that took up a sequence of works like the following: Genesis; The Peloponnesian War; Orestia; War and Peace; Trotsky’s The Russian Revolution. The next year the texts might swap out Genesis for the Gospel of Matthew; and/or Thucydides for Herodotus, Aeschylus for Plato, The Russian Revolution for The Education of Henry Adams (War and Peace was de rigeur). And in later years (after 1968) the last unit in the course often took up more current works like Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth or Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. That was Hum II. Hum I was different though no less designed to make positive knowledge and academic expertise secondary concerns. In 1966 I was assigned a Hum I section where we were to wrangle major works of art, music and literature that appeared between 1848 and 1918. But the object in Hum II would be the same in Hum I: to try to think about what you were doing accurately and to try to discuss what you were doing clearly.
Was the “content” of those courses important? Yes, but rather in the way that Rilke let us know an archaic torso of Apollo might be important for an educational project like the Common Core. An archaic torso like War and Peace or The Peloponnesian War were there to watch and watch over your helpless seeing and to take the measure of your cultural longings: “denn da ist keine Stelle, / die dich nicht sieht”. That’s why, each year and each term, these courses would turn out, as Gertrude Stein might say, “beginning again and again”. Because each year, each term, we would be called to reprise the event of the previous years in, so to say, a new key or new arrangements. We reprised: that’s to say, everyone in those classes, where the distinction between instructor and instructed was constantly being turned around. When you graduated or, like myself, left Chicago, what many of us came away with was the ethos of the Common Core.
CI was born from that splendid educational ethos.
Jerome McGann is professor emeritus of English at the University of Virginia. He is on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry and has published many articles in the journal.
[1] Burke’s “dramatic” schema for parsing symbolic action and his reflections on Language’s negative spaces (“motivated” and “spontaneous”) are pervasive. Part III of Language as Symbolic Action is probably the single best place to watch him “in action” – that is, to follow what he is doing in saying what he says. And while as a negative dialectician (like Nagarjuna) he never explicitly wrote that A = A iff A ≠ A, that seems to me the premise underlying all of his work.
[2] That was the title of the polemical set of essays collected and edited by Ronald S. Crane.
[3] Jerome McGann, “Neo-Aristotelian Versus New Critical: A Study in the Nature of Critical Disputes” (master’s thesis, Syracuse University, 1961).
I’ve counted them up and it turns out I’ve published nine articles in CI along with several responses to critics. The earliest of the articles, on Courbet’s After Dinner at Ornans and Stonebreakers, appeared in 1982; those that followed discuss Courbet’s Burial at Ornans, Baudelaire’s Salon of 1846, Almayer’s Folly and other fictions by Joseph Conrad, Manet in his generation, Caravaggio, Barthes’s Camera Lucida, and Jeff Wall’s photograph AdrianWalker, Artist . . . in the light of a fascinating passage from Wittgenstein’s Culture and Value. Before discovering CI (indeed before CI) I was at a loss. From the start of my career as an art historian, such as it was in those early days, I realized that nothing I was likely to write would ever be acceptable to an “official” journal of art history like The Art Bulletin or The Burlington Magazine. For one thing, I couldn’t operate rhetorically without the first person, an absolute no-go in those distinguished organs. And for another, my whole style of argument, the claims I was making about Manet and his citations from previous art or the primacy of considerations of beholding and theatricality in Diderot’s criticism and the art of David and his successors, or (especially) my conviction that Courbet’s realism is to be understood as the product of an attempt by the artist to paint himself “all but corporeally” into his paintings were too foreign to the norms of the field to be taken seriously, much less find their way into such publications. I did take advantage of my friendship with Phil Leider, then editor of Artforum, to publish in that unlikely venue both “Manet’s Sources: Aspects of His Art, 1959-1865” and “Thomas Couture and the Theatricalization of Action in 19th-Century Painting” in 1969 and 1970 respectively, but for obvious reasons that was hardly an ideal solution. But in 1969 and 1970 CI didn’t yet exist, so what was one to do?
I’m not certain about this, but my intuition is that what made my CI possible, and in time comparable journals like Representations, was the widespread use of photo offset lithography, which meant that illustrations became feasible without having to engrave a plate, with all the expense that the latter course of action entailed. And starting in 1979 CI was edited by Tom Mitchell, whose dissertation and first book was on William Blake’s “composite art” and who would go on to write on a host of visual subjects in the years to come. I had met Tom, who made it clear that he would welcome submissions from me, and starting with my writing on Courbet I took maximum advantage of this. And of course publishing in CI meant not only getting one’s work into print but also reaching an audience not confined to the narrow and repressive field that art history then was, a liberation I found intoxicating. Simply put, my career, such as it has been, owes a huge debt of gratitude to CI and its editors, Tom and Joel Snyder above all, a debt I am glad to have this opportunity to acknowledge.
Michael Fried is is the J.R. Herbert Boone Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Art History at the Johns Hopkins University. He is also on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry.
To steady my memories of the origins of Critical Inquiry in Chicago in the 1970s I consulted a magisterial book, John W. Boyer’s The University of Chicago: A History (2015). It reminded me of the acute, even dangerous, financial pressures on the university then and in preceding years. Yet, the university neither trashed nor forsook its devotion to intellectual excellence and the formidable activity of reason. Indeed, had the faculty not recruited Sheldon Sacks from Berkeley in 1966? Shelly had earned his doctorate from Chicago but had left Illinois to build a superbly vibrant reputation as a scholar, critic, and teacher in Texas and California. Had the university not hired Morris Philipson, a well-regarded publisher, as the director of its historic university press in 1967? Serving until 2000, Morris would become the legendary model of a modern press director.
Sheldon Sacks
Moreover, had Morris not encouraged the career of Jean Sacks at the Press? A University of Chicago graduate, she immediately entered into what she would sardonically call her “suburban housewife period.” In 1962, as a “re-entry woman,” she returned to the university. An astute businesswoman who was alert to new intellectual developments, she became manager of the journals division and assistant director of the press. Jean had been divorced in 1965. Shelly’s first wife had died shortly after they returned to Chicago. In 1967, Jean and Shelly married. In 1974, the press and Shelly and his colleagues, Arthur Heiserman and Wayne Booth, launched Critical Inquiry. Jean said that after she had overseen the birth of CI, she thought “we ought to be doing something for women.” She set out to find an editor and found me at a lunch table at Barnard College where I was helping to organize an early rendition of the “Scholar and the Feminist” conferences. Newly tenured in English at Barnard, I was living in a loft at 352 Bowery in New York. Jean asked around about me, decided to take a chance, and pluckily invited me to be the founding editor of an academic journal explicitly and unapologetically about women. The initial group of editors eventually called it Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. It appeared in 1975. Because of Jean’s leap of faith, because of Morris Philipson’s support, and because my blueprint for a new journal with that perplexing name passed the stringent press vetting and approval process, I could enter the exhilarating world of Critical Inquiry. I could be in the company of such citizens of that world as Tom Mitchell and, later, Alan Thomas. I had never studied at the University of Chicago but had respected its aura of excellence. Moreover, I immediately loved Shelly and Jean. When they came to New York, they would summon me up from the Bowery. I would put on one of my limited number of better outfits. We would dine in a fine restaurant. We talked. We gossiped. I would make my way back to the Bowery, a fortunate woman who learned quickly how limited her capacity for Martinis was. Shelly and Jean enjoyed their marriage; they were bon vivants with a conscience and a strong consciousness of the indispensability of ideas. We all cared passionately about our journals, every detail about them. A few days ago, I reread Shelly’s editorial for the first issue of Critical Inquiry, “A Chimera for a Breakfast,” a reference to Oliver Goldsmith and the nature of good criticism. I saw, more deeply than ever, how much his hopes, and those of his coeditors, overlapped with mine for Signs—that it be a “reasoned inquiry into the human spirit,” that it be interdisciplinary, that it “formulate fruitful and exciting questions,” and then attempt to find the best possible answers to them.” CI and Signs had very different reasons for being but not that much of method.
Shelly also edited the first of the four essays I have published in CI, “The Mind, the Body, and Gertrude Stein” (1977). I had stumbled into Stein scholarship during a year at Yale in 1975-76. He saw merit in my discoveries and interpretations. He also understood the promise of the emerging feminist criticism and women’s studies. Since then, CI has taken three more of my essays: “Zero Degree Deviancy,” an early theory about lesbian literature (1981); “Nancy Reagan Wears A Hat: Feminism and Its Culture Consensus,” deliberately sassy before the colon, more soberly explanatory after it (1988); and finally, “Texts in the Wind,” a proposal for six questions that CI should address in its next decades (2004). Glancing through these pages, I realize how much I wanted to push both myself and intellectual boundaries as I wrote for CI, but simultaneously, how bound I was to “reasoned inquiry.” That commitment cautioned me against talking through my hat. Shelly was to die prematurely in 1979, a hard loss. Jean was to die in 1996 in Memphis, Morris in 2011 in Chicago. The invaluable criticism that CI has fostered helps to provide necessary equipment for mourning. Part of that equipment is to question, fruitfully, why some chimeras, the cruel bogey men and vicious phantasms, must wrench our most bitter griefs from us.
Catharine R. Stimpson is a university professor and dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science New York University. She is on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry.
Left uninterrogated in “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜” and “Against Theory” is what “authorial intent” means for LLMs, as well as the assertion that meaning must derive from real world experience. One attack would notice that LLMs certainly do have intentions, also known as their programs. Moreover, these originate in human brains, so intentions, including the intention to communicate, underlie their architectures and pervade their operations. “But that is not what we meant,” the “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots” and “Against Theory” crowd snaps; “We meant that the models themselves do not have intentions.” This assertion requires that we examine LLM programs to see whether or not they are set up to generate intentions. [1]
As Leif Weatherby and Brian Juste note, LLMs are inherently indexical. They break words into tokens and assign vector locations to them in positional embedding spaces, which are constructed according to what other vectors they are related to, as well as their positions within sentences. The connections between vectors are expressed as weights, or parameters, assigned by the program to the different neurons during training. Attention and self-attention mechanisms running in parallel built connections between tokens, according to their syntactic and semantic correlations. Roughly, the number of parameters indicate how many connections there are between neurons; in the case of GPT-3, 175 billion; for GPT-4, 170 trillion. From these vectors, manipulated through matrix math, the programs construct complex multidimension maps of vector correlations; the resulting probabilities are run through a software package such as Softmax that converts them back into words. In essence, then, the vectors act as indexicals in the Peircean sense: signs indicating correlation.
GPT-3 and -4 have a number of unanticipated capabilities that emerged spontaneously through their training (they were not explicitly programmed in). One is the ability to detect and replicate literary styles and genres. How can we explain these capacities? Essentially, styles employ rhetorics that carry multiple implications about relations between people; genres operate according to rules determining the kind of world in which the literary action takes place. In a detective novel, for instance, corpses cannot spontaneously crawl out of graves. The capacity to detect style results from massive networks of correlations that the LLMs use to draw inferences about the relations that rhetorics imply. Moreover, these inference themselves form networks that lead to higher-order inferences, for example, in the leap from style to genre. If LLMs can learn about the kinds of worlds that genres imply, what can they learn about the (admittedly much more complex) world that humans inhabit?
What could an entity that constructs billions or trillions of inferences, networks of inferences, and networks of networks, learn about human languages, cultures, and social relations from ingesting billions of human-authored texts, in the absence of any real-world experience? My answer is, quite a lot. There would of course be what I call a systemic fragility of reference, in which the lack of grounding in real world experience leads to errors of interpretation and fact. LLMs are like the figure, beloved by philosophers, of a brain in a vat; they construct models not of the world, but only models of language. Nevertheless, embedded in the immense repertoire of human-authored texts on which LLMs are trained are any number of implications about the human world of meanings. These are understood in the contexts of what LLMs can and do apprehend, that is, in relation to their world-horizons, or in a phrase that Jakob von Uexküll usefully designated for biological world-horizons, their umwelten.[2] Just as von Uexküll used the term umwelt to emphasize that all biological creatures have species-specific ways of perceiving the world, so LLMs also have distinctive ways of apprehending the world.
Apprehension may be a more appropriate term for what LLMs learn than comprehension (because what they learn is far from comprehensive, lacking sensory inputs or real world experience), thought (too associated with human cognition), or sentience (whose etymological roots refer to sensations, which are precisely what LLMs lack). Moreover, the other meaning of apprehension is a sense of dread or anxiety, also appropriate for human reactions to LLMs, as the recent “open letters” from tech leaders emphasize.
Because of the very significant differences between human umwelten and the umwelten of LLMs, there will inevitably be a gap between the meanings that humans project onto the texts that LLMs generate and what the texts mean in the context of LLMs own umwelten. How can we humans learn to read these messages sent from what is literally a different (language-only) world? Here is where the literary-critical methods of textual interpretation can play important roles. The distinctions between what the author intended and what readers project onto a text is a typical problem for which literary-critical practices have devised many strategies to explore and understand. Close reading practices, for instance, pay attention to rhetorical structures, networks of metaphors and how they work to guide reception, and implicit assumptions undergirding a line of argument. From these, authorial intent is inferred, as well as how they elicit specific responses from readers. Not coincidentally, these are also the patterns of correlation that the LLMs used to construct their responses in the first place.
The question, as I see it, is not whether these texts have meanings, but rather what kinds of meanings they can and do have. In my view, this should be determined not through abstract arguments, but rather through actually reading the texts and using an informed background knowledge of LLM architectures to interpret and understand them. The proof is in the pudding; they will certainly elicit meanings from readers, and they will act in the world of verbal performances that have real-world consequences and implications. The worst thing we can do is dismiss them as meaningless, when they increasingly influence and determine how real-world systems work. The better path is to use them to understand how algorithmic meanings are constructed and how they interact with other verbal performances to create the linguistic universe of significations, which is no longer only for or of humans.
N. Katherine Hayles is the Distinguished Research Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the James B. Duke Professor Emerita of Literature from Duke University. Her research focuses on the relations of literature, science and technology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She is the author of twelve books and over one hundred peer-reviewed articles and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is currently at work on Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts.
In “Against Theory,” after the second wave has washed up and left behind what looks like the second stanza of “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” we ask whether you still think you’re reading a poem.[1] The point of the example was, first, to make clear that reading the poem as a poem involved assuming that it had an author and, second, to show that once that assumption was questioned, so was the idea that the marks on the beach constituted a poem or any kind of text at all. If the marks “now seem to be accidents,” “will they still seem to be words?” we asked. “Clearly not,” we answered: “They will merely seem to resemble words.” Confronted with the effects of an accident rather than an action, it would be obvious both to the reader on the beach and to our readers (we thought) that it made no more sense to interpret the marks that happened to look like words than it would to interpret marks that didn’t happen to look like words, and everyone would come to see that treating something as language already involved treating it as made by someone who meant something by it.
But clearly not. Many readers, including most of the past and current contributors to Critical Inquiry, have wanted to insist, with Seth Perlow, that “the marks . . . remain legible,” and, indeed, this round of discussion has been produced in response to the fact all of us are now reading many texts produced not exactly by accident but also not by writers who mean something by them. If earlier critics of “Against Theory” objected that the wave poem example was absurdly far-fetched, the current objection seems to be that wave poems are everywhere. We are surrounded by texts that no one authored but that we can’t help reading anyway,
By contrast, Perlow thinks the ongoing legibility of the marks indicates “the tendency to mean beyond intention.” Alex Gil thinks what’s called for is “theories of language and meaning, sans intention.” And Hannes Bajohr thinks that while LLMs may not “operate with meaning in the full sense,” we should be asking instead for “shades of meaning,” which is only possible if “meaning is not identical with intention.” Arguments like these are, as Caroline Bassett describes her own commitment to medium theory, “at odds with intentionalism.” Here the wave poem continues to be legible not because of some human disposition to treat anything that looks like it’s intended as if it really is intended but because you don’t need it to be intended in order for it to be meaningful. On this account, it would seem either that chatbots really are authors or that authors, at bottom, are just another kind of chatbot.
But when the champions of this view try to spell it out, they end up invoking intentions after all. Bassett, for example, ends by asking us to imagine that it was Dorothy Wordsworth directing operations in that submarine, which might well change our view of the text on the shore: was it an appropriation of “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal”? Or was she the real author of the original? Or had she, a la Pierre Menard, produced a text that looked just like William’s but was in fact an entirely different work? “Against Theory”’s commitment to intention doesn’t proscribe any of these alternatives; just the opposite, it’s an explanation of why they matter.
Along similar lines, Gil calls for more attention to be paid to the “mechanics” involved in producing a text and instances technologies of reproduction that can involve “multiple intentions.” Obviously the appeal to multiple intentions doesn’t point us in the direction of a theory of meaning “sans intention.” But, perhaps less obviously, the appeal to mechanics doesn’t either. Just the opposite. Our acts in general are not opposed to or compromised by the material conditions in which we perform them. Rather, they are only possible in those material conditions. We don’t need to be reminded of, say, the importance of a keyboard if we want to type; we couldn’t even try to type without having the keyboard. You need to have a very mentalist picture of intention to think of the things we act with as obstacles to our acts. Intention in “Against Theory“ is a way of describing an act rather than an allusion to a mental state that is prior to or behind or outside of the act. That’s why its fundamental opposition is between the act of writing and the event of waves washing up on the sand – not between what’s going on inside someone’s head and marks appearing on the beach.[3]
Maybe this is an example of dramatic irony, the kind that Perlow says “complicates interpretation”? Citing Paul de Man’s observation that “’words have a way of saying things which are not at all what you want them to say,’” Perlow offers the example of an argument with his partner in which “the meaning of my words can differ calamitously from my intended meaning” and observes that “it would not go over well to insist . . . that she is wrong because my words mean what I intend them to mean.” But if she isn’t taking his words to mean what he intends them to mean, why is she mad? And why is she mad at him? We make no recommendations on how to resolve (much less win) arguments with partners,[6] but whether she’s mad because she misunderstood the things he was saying or because she understood them correctly, the whole idea of the argument makes sense only if each of them is interested in what the other intends. More generally, If de Man’s sentence were rewritten to say “words have a way of producing effects which are not at all the effects you want them to produce,” it would, of course, be true. In its actual form, however, confusing meaning with effect, it’s not.
As several contributors point out, there is a difference between what the LLMs give us and what the ocean gave us. The LLMs were built not to produce random marks and spaces but marks and spaces that reproduce the patterns used by actual writers. So, understanding what they were built to do, it makes sense for us to treat them as if they too were an actual writer and, furthermore, to characterize that writer as a person who always follows the syntactic and semantic rules of English. Of course, that doesn’t help us with irony, since no set of rules –”solely intention,” as Derrida once said – can determine whether a speech act is ironic or not. So we need to stipulate also that the AI is being sincere.
In fact, the AI isn’t being either ironic or sincere, and it isn’t following the rules of English; it’s just producing the results of its algorithm. But in order for us to use those results, we need to treat it as if it were producing a speech act – in effect stipulating that the AI means what an ordinary speaker of English might mean if she produced those marks and spaces. Which is, on the one hand, intentionalist through and through (if in order to use the machine, you need to think of it as sincere, you are pretty committed to treating it like a person) but, on the other hand, is very far from what we do with real persons. Imagine if Perlow told his partner he wasn’t interested in what she actually meant but in what the words she was using ordinarily meant or in what some fictitious person meant by them. Or even if he told her that he was going to treat her words as if she meant them.
The utility of the ironic utterance here is just that it foregrounds the way in which the interpretation of any word is an account of how the word is being used. We ask the LLM, “Are bots smarter than humans?” The LLM replies, “Naturally.” How do we understand that reply? Is the LLM stating what it (sincerely) regards as the truth; expressing, in addition, a certain haughty self-esteem; or being ironic, as might be suggested by our noticing that nothing about the LLM is natural?
We have no objection to the claim that, thanks to those billions of years, biomolecular systems are more complex, richer, deeper than human agents, including human authors. But the key thing to understand about those systems is that, like LLMs, they instantiate cause-and-effect relationships that have nothing to do with the kind of meaning that’s relevant to interpretive disagreements, including disagreements about whether a statement is sincere or ironic. When LLM’s learn the languages of biomolecular systems, they do so by tracking “one-step causality relationships: if a certain mutation occurs, a specific gene malfunctions. If this gene is under-expressed, other genes in the cascade increase or decrease.” Genetic effects can occur in many ways, but they all involve physical alterations, and physical alterations, whatever else they can do, can never be insincere, let alone ironic. By contrast, the difference between the ironic utterance and the sincere one need not be physical at all, and responding to it has nothing to do with tracking causality relationships. If, in other words, biomolecular systems always seem to mean what they say, that’s because they don’t mean anything at all.
Which is equally true of LLMs. We asked Bard to write us a wave poem, and this is what came back:
Here is a wave poem that I wrote:
The waves crash on the shore,
With a sound both loud and clear.
They rise and fall and rise again,
A never-ending dream.
The waves are like the tides of life,
Sometimes calm, sometimes wild.
They bring us joy and sorrow too,
But always leave us feeling fulfilled.
I hope you like it!
We didn’t have any problem with the poem (it caused the same effects in both of us) but the closing salutation – “I hope you like it,” exclamation point! – raised some issues. One of us found it pathetic, a sincere and desperate plea for praise. The other found it insulting, an ironic gesture of contempt. Which of us is right?
“Clearly,” neither is or can be. In fact, neither of our interpretations actually is an interpretation. They’re both just reports of how we would read it if the two different authors we found ourselves imagining had written it. We make no judgment here (any more than we did in “Against Theory”) about whether AIs will ever reach a point where it makes sense to stop stipulating that they are sincere and to understand them instead as really being sincere.[7] If the only option at the moment is stipulation (interpreting “as if”), that merely shows that no one really thinks the texts that AIs currently produce are meaningful and that everyone continues to – can’t help but – act on the assumption that what a text means and what its author intends are the same.[8]
Steven Knapp is president of Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh and president emeritus of the George Washington University. He is the coauthor, with Philip Clayton, of The Predicament of Belief: Science, Philosophy, Faith (2011) and serves on the boards of two climate-action organizations: Second Nature and the Institute for EcoCiv.
Walter Benn Michaels is professor of English at University of Illinois Chicago. His most recent book, coauthored with Adolph Reed Jr., is No Politics But Class Politics (2023). He and Daniel Zamora Vargas are currently at work on a book about deindustrial aesthetics. He is a member of the editorial board of nonsite.org.
[1] We’re grateful to Matthew Kirschenbaum for putting this event together and for his lucid introduction, and we thank everyone who has participated. Limitations of space have made it impossible to discuss all the issues raised by the contributions, but we’ve tried to address the ones that involve the most fundamental disagreements. We don’t say anything at all about the contributor who agrees with us, Lisa Siraganian. For an expansion of the discussion, however, we do recommend her completely relevant essay “Against Theory, Now with Bots.”
[3] For example, a reader of Kraus’s WIND-WAVE diamante poem might wonder whether it is in part a critique of the anthropocentrism of AT’s treatment of its wave poem. The answer to this question (whatever it turned out to be) would involve an account of how, as Kraus says, “my particular version was made and constructed,” including what her project’s “model of authorship” was – which is to say, an account of what she was doing. The account of meaning that AT defends is precisely the claim that understanding what a poem means is understanding what its author was doing. And if we were to make the account of what she was doing irrelevant, the question of whether the poem was a critique or an endorsement or neither of the above would be nonsensical, since there could be no right (or wrong) answer.
For this reason, although it’s true that “Against Theory” doesn’t discuss “the process of writing,” we can’t agree with Annette Vee that it somehow contributes to what she sees as a more general neglect of that process in literary theory. It’s more like a justification, if any were needed, for being interested in process. But since Vee also thinks that “Against Theory” is committed to “forbidding literary interpretation” while we think it provides an account of what the object of literary interpretation is, we may be missing some fundamental difference in perspective. We do, however, think it makes very little sense to believe that “students are turned into passive vessels of others’ perspectives” by the effort to understand what others mean, particularly when the others are as interesting and difficult as, say, William Shakespeare, G. W. F. Hegel, Frantz Fanon or Toni Morrison.
[4] This is someone who truly loves italics, which is to say, who really wants to make sure that we understand what he means.
[5] Gil’s version of a pragmatic argument – that we don’t have time to distinguish between the writer and the bot and will therefore “look for useful meaning, not intention” – runs into the slightly different problem of how the meaning can count as useful if it’s not intended. The late resolutely anti-intentionalist Justice Antonin Scalia once responded to Paul Campos’s legal version of the wave poem by imagining a hypothetical in which what you see is “LEAVE HERE OR DIE” and observing “It may well be that the words were the fortuitous effect of wind, but the message they convey is clear, and I think” no one “would gamble on the fortuity.” That would be an example of not being able to take the time to go for intention and of settling for useful meaning instead. But of course, the meaning is only useful if the threat is real, and even for Scalia the threat is real only if somebody or something is making it. (That’s the fortuity you don’t want to gamble on.) If you knew for sure that nobody and nothing meant anything by those marks you wouldn’t leave.
[6] Any more than we do on how to come up with correct interpretations.
[7] Rita Raley and Russell Samolsky note our remarking in “Against Theory” that the question of whether computers can produce meaningful utterances will depend on whether we regard them as intentional agents. They claim that we contradict ourselves by first arguing that theory tries to govern practice from outside but then, in the case of computers, “deciding awareness of agency or authorship from without.” But making judgments about agency is precisely what the practice of interpretation is. And standing outside someone else’s body is in no way similar to standing outside the practice of interpretation.
[8] In other words, whether Ted Underwood is right about the empirical triumph of anti-intentionalist theory or about AI’s embodying a “social theory of meaning” (we would have thought meaning as computation was just the opposite of social), it’s worth noting that at no time in the last fifty years have texts actually stopped meaning what their authors mean by them. And even with respect to that empirical triumph, it’s useful to see that – as regards intention – the opposition between the illusion of discourse as “the majestically unfolding manifestation of a thinking, speaking, knowing subject” and its reality as a system of “’enunciative modalities’ that determine what can be said by what kind of persona” is a false one. The least majestic enunciative modalities our society has to offer – e. g. “Do you want fries with that?” – are as intentional as whatever the most majestic are. Whether “cultural theory” just missed or, in its own small way, contributed to the increasing inequalities that make speech acts like that one so familiar is an open question. But the real illusion is not that we are thinking, speaking, knowing subjects, it’s that we aren’t.
A graduate student who fell asleep in 1982 and woke up in 2022 might see large language models as a triumph for cultural theory. It is hard to imagine a clearer vindication of a thesis that linguists, critics, and anthropologists spent much of the twentieth century advancing — the thesis that language is not an inert medium used by individuals to express their thoughts but a system that actively determines the contours of the thinkable.
In a just world, every article about GPT-4 would nod toward Barthes and Foucault. But if our world is just at all, its justice is of the ironic kind that only declares a winner after the race has been forgotten. The models that dramatize twentieth-century cultural theory are aligned now with institutions that twenty-first-century theorists distrust. This makes it hard for anyone to take a victory lap. People who once nodded along with the last words of The Order of Things (1966) (“man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea”) may now feel that Foucault’s early critique of humanism needs nuance.
By the end of this essay, I will provide some nuance. But first we have to give twentieth-century theorists the victory lap they deserve. It needs to be said that mid-century structuralists understood how information technology could dovetail with a social theory of meaning and grasped the implications of that convergence more accurately than the scientists who were their contemporaries.
Bernard Geoghegan’s work on twentieth-century intellectual history has clarified at least the first part of this statement. We have learned that Roman Jakobson visited Bell Labs. We know that Claude Lévi-Strauss saw the emerging physical science of information — linking written glyphs to electrical signals and food — as a vindication of primitive man’s refusal to separate mind and world, revealing instead “a universe made up of meanings.”
But now that historians understand the close relationship between structuralism and information technology, there is some danger that we will interpret structuralist theory as a mere echo of computer science. To ward off that mistake, it is worth remembering that computer science has not generally been characterized by skepticism about the autonomous subject. On the contrary, the term “artificial intelligence” was coined in the 1950s to organize inquiry around a concept conceived as an attribute of individual minds. By the 1990s, theories of embodied cognition were shifting attention from logic to action, but the new emphasis on embodiment only reaffirmed an underlying assumption that intelligence was an attribute of individual agents.[1]
The success of this “misdirected” effort has tended to support theories of meaning that explain it instead as a collective phenomenon—like Lévi-Strauss’s “universe made up of meanings” or Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). The beautiful irony of this situation, of course, is that a generation of humanists trained on Foucault have now rallied around “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots” to oppose a theory of language that their own disciplines invented, just at the moment when computer scientists are reluctantly beginning to accept it.
Were late-twentieth-century humanists really as committed to a social theory of meaning as I have implied? Don’t Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels connect meaning to authorial intent in “Against Theory”? Yes, but the fusion of text and intent is so complete in “Against Theory” that the article ends up resembling Barthes more than “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots.” The authors of “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots” think words require grounding in intent because they see meaning as separate from intent. That separability is exactly what Knapp and Michaels contest.[2]
As large language models begin to cast empirical light on these debates, they may also add nuance. For instance, if authors were really as dead as Barthes once claimed, there would be no need for the rhetorical reconfiguration that turned GPT-3 into ChatGPT. Predicting the next word in a corpus would be sufficient training. In practice, however, models perform better when they are trained to distinguish their own language from that of an interlocutor. The process is called “instruction tuning” because it encourages the model to interpret a prompt as an instruction (not just another piece of text that needs to be continued). Even language models, it turns out, need to make inferences about speakers and intentions. If GPT-3 dispensed with authors entirely, ChatGPT has been compelled to reconstruct a provisional “author-function”—rather as Foucault eventually did.
While the parallels to twentieth-century theory are fascinating, nothing I have said proves that humanists should welcome language models. To make a judgment of that kind we would need to predict their effects, and the future is hard to predict. This was a story about the past. I am not arguing that language models are beneficial—only that their refusal to ground language in an experiencing subject should be familiar for cultural theorists, and impossible to fully disown.
Ted Underwood is a professor of information sciences and English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His most recent book is Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change (2019), and his current research explores the affordances of language models for teaching and scholarship.
Due to its second person point of view, Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels’s thought experiment is unavoidably elliptical: after witnessing a half dozen submariners emerge jubilantly from the ocean to claim responsibility for the wave poem, the reader (the “you” of their address) is left to speculate on what to my mind is the most interesting question of all: how they did it. As the author of another sort of wave poem, I here offer a view from the periscope – an account of how my particular version was made and constructed. Presumably in contrast to that of the submariners, my process did not involve manipulating ocean tides or altering the periodicity or amplitude of waves. Instead, my poetry is programmed in the Python and Arduino programming languages, and incorporates machine learning, Natural Language Processing, and AI. The project as a whole is predicated on a theory of meaning that inheres in a fugitive model of authorship, one in which authorial agency constantly oscillates between me, the machine, and my source material. Meaning as coterminous with sentience and volition does a disservice, in my view, to both human and machine authorship, romanticizing the former as numinous and transcendental and dismissing the latter as trifling and mechanical.
The wave poem transcribed below is an excerpt from Embarkings, a collection of computer-generated diamante poems. A diamantepoem is a seven-line poem invented by Iris Tiedt in the 1960s. From the Italian word for “diamond,” diamante refers to the characteristic shape of the poem. The form is anchored by two topic words, which are often—but need not be—antithetical to each other. As an example, consider the following WIND-WAVES diamante poem:
WIND
scattered and silken
swift-carrying, west-springing, fluting
a lovebird serenades a blue moon; a driftfish chases a star
parting, lapping, clear-rustling
curled and moon-lit
WAVES
The first topic word always appears by itself at the beginning of a diamante poem, while the second appears by itself at the end. The second line of the poem consists of two adjectives describing the first topic, and the third line contains three participles, likewise describing the first topic. The fourth line is transitional, presenting a short phrase or clause related, however loosely, to the first topic (“a lovebird serenades a blue moon”) and a short phrase or clause related to the second (“a driftfish chases a star”). This is generally the longest line of the poem and serves as its axis of symmetry. It is followed by a shift in focus to the second topic for the remaining lines, which mirror the structure of the first three.
The thematic content of Embarkings is seaborn. In it you’ll find waves, foam, tempests, shipwrecks, and the celestial objects in the night sky that govern the ocean’s tides and for centuries served as navigational aids for sailors lost at sea. For each pair of topic words, I mined the Project Gutenberg poetry corpus created by Allison Parrish. I then curated my vocabulary lists, both to eliminate harmful or offensive language as well as to intentionally orchestrate the affect of the poems. The final generator outputs new poems every few seconds using randomization processes. Even as various words may persist from poem to poem, they eventually yield to new words before cropping up once again. This is, indeed, one of the delights of poetry generators: they discard words and then, like nineteenth-century ragpickers, gather them up again.[1]
One consequence of this process is that I find myself precariously perched between author and reader. One minute my wrists, aching from hours of coding, inform me that the full apportionment of authorship belongs to me; the next I am startled by the machine’s apparent redoubling of its own authorial allotment through its novel reconfiguration of the words in its storehouse. Because that storehouse is itself a polyvocal space—full of words sourced from bygone writers—the resulting output is ineluctably a work of composite authorship.[2] My writing self and my reading self are constantly collapsing.
Embarkings includes one manually assembled diamante poem comprised of nonsense words generated by Max Woolf’s aitextgen—a Python tool for text generation built on OpenAI’s GPT-2 language model and fine-tuned on my own large stash of diamante poems. Because GPT-2 tokenizes its training data at the subword level, the model “reads” decomposed language rather than the raw material it is initially fed. This often results in output that obeys phonotactic constraints to produce winsome nonsense words not unlike Lewis Carroll’s jabberwocky. Here is the version included in Embarkings:
A brief coda: In 2019 The Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Working Group held two workshops, which resulted in a published position paper. While acknowledging “the long history of technological advances being used against Indigenous people,” the paper vigorously argues in favor of entering into the conversation about AI in order to center Indigenous perspectives. Critiquing what the authors call the “anthropocentrism” of Western scientific approaches to AI, they propose an alternative view grounded in Indigenous epistemologies that stress the importance of relationships with nonhuman entities, “rolled round,” as William Wordsworth has it, in rocks and stones and trees (and waves) (pp. 6-7).
Under this view, AI would ideally enter into a virtuous “circle of relationships” based on “mutual respect and aid” between humans and nonhumans (pp. 21, 7). So long as existing scholarly perspectives continue to dominate, however, we risk undercutting the promise of that vision. Within academia, “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜” has rapidly enculturated us to a view that would seem to brook no redemptive comparison between human and synthetic language. The solution is not to use meaning/intention as a wedge to deepen the divide between humans and AI but instead to develop new, more expansive theories of meaning that recognize continuities as well as discontinuities between their respective domains.
Kari Kraus is an associate professor in the iSchool and the Department of English at the University of Maryland. Her research and teaching interests focus on the digital humanities, human-computer interaction, andbook history. With Professor Matthew Kirschenbaum, Kraus codirects BookLab, a makerspace, book arts studio, library, and press.
[1] The WIND-WAVES poem is triggered wirelessly by rocking an Arduino—a small, handheld microcontroller—using gestures that mimic the gentle motion of the waves. The poem outputs in blue font and automatically inserts the phrase “blue moon” in lieu of “full moon” in response to the calculated rarity or unexpectedness of the language (“driftfish is more unusual than, say, “trout”).
[2] Inspired by Bender and her coauthors call for documentation of datasets, I have used the MOON-STAR diamante poems as a testbed to recover the original source material for each poem. The program prints the author’s name, the title of the work, and the original line of verse in which the particular word was found. It also provides the Project Gutenberg corpus reference number.
“No motion has she now, no force,” men in submarines have written on the sand. Some words about the sea. It seems to be a poem. I trained an LLM to do something along the same lines; “the sea, the sea, the sea, the sea, the sea,” evidently with less success.[1] But then, my LLM isn’t a poet. But then, neither are the guys in the sub. They are introduced in “Against Theory” to argue that intention and text are not to be divided, that words without intention are nonwords, and that therefore theory, obsessing about a nonexistent gap and what it generates, has nothing to work on and is simply not needed. Literary theorists go home.
Maybe William Wordsworth is in the sub along with the science guys. The stuff on the sand looks like the poet’s words. This isn’t ever made clear – but it matters to me. I want to know whether Wordsworth read from a book, if what came out as Wordsworth was the product of overfitting in a training corpus, if somebody shouted down a tube at a volume and velocity sufficient to directly pattern the sand, or if the words were encoded onboard and decoded on land. Perhaps they were 3D printed out. And, on whose orders? Things are getting computational, but after all it was always a silicon beach.
From the perspective of this “theoretical text” against theory, these kinds of details might have an impact on the significance of the text for a reader, but they have nothing to do with its meaning. If theory has no place in Knapp and Michaels’s strong form of intentionalism (and they say there is no weak version), then neither does mediation; what happens in a gap is not acknowledged. Medium theory, in its multiple variants, is thus doubly at odds with intentionalism, both ontologically and epistemologically, as Jameson read this division. It disturbs the self-sufficiency of the thing itself (the intended word), and it confounds the assumption of an inside/outside division between interpretation of the text and interpretation in general.
Given that LLMs entail a fundamental remediation of natural language into digital form where it is amenable to algorithmic processes, it’s hard to see how an account that refuses to take mediation into account can be much use – depending, as Eagleton suggested in his contemporaneous accounting with Literary Theory, what you mean by use and where you mean by it.
So why does“Against Theory” nonetheless resonate with contemporary questions arising around artificial writing? Its categorical tone helps – it seems to offer a response to the status of machine generated natural literature from within the bailiwick of specialists in that field and is therefore welcomed into circulating debates including dissenting voices from within AI. Notably the authors of “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜“ link simulation debates in computer science (from Alan Turing through John Searle) to questions of intentionality and meaning to explore AI within an extractive environment. The connections are attractive – perhaps the best response to the question of why LLMs revive the salience of “Against Theory” is Twitter.
The“Against Theory” and “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots” arguments do intersect – but also diverge rapidly. Bender and her coauthors conclude that AI language is meaningless becuase it is not intentional, thus also speaking of words that are not but only seem to be – in their case this raises the prospect of generalized glossolalia as the literary condition of our environment as AI learns from itself. However, they locate the failure of the utterance in the failure of communicative speech action that turns on argumentative speech, and which requires intention from the sender and receiver. Habermasian speech situations are at some distance from literary intentionalism – though less far from cybernetic models of communication than might be thought. The rider here is thus the argument that a perfected speech act (back to closing the gap) would constitute a form of “ex-communication,” an argument against Jürgen Habermas, in favor of difference and against closure, generated by way of Derridean deconstruction – the latter a target in “Against Theory.”[2]
Donna Haraway drew on that impulse against perfection when she generated a feminist techno-politics, also in the early 1980s. She defined cyborg politics as “the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication” and developed it in response to the emerging computational technologies of Silicon Valley and to the kind of information society that they might support; that system that we now call computational capitalism. Theory here, at the core of a technocultural politics that is deeply informed by the status of the word and by the remediation of language but also by a recognition that language was never innocent or wholly intentional to begin with, is put to specifically political use. If I had words enough and time, I’d now point back to Eagleton and his sense that the project of literary theory, with its restricted sense of the object of study, constitutes a flight from the real and look at current attacks on Theory in general from those who wish to terminate the word by running the numbers. It may be because theory itself is newly contested that “Against Theory” revives in salience. But my word count is up, so I’d just like to suggest that maybe it was Dorothy Wordsworth in that submarine.
Caroline Bassett is professor of digital humanities at the University of Cambridge and Director of Cambridge Digital Humanities. Publications include Anti-Computing: Dissent against the Machine and Furious (with Sarah Kember and Kate O’Riordan). Currently researching AI and writing.
“Is it useful?” Bethany Nowviskie, the American pragmatist, asked me about a decade ago almost in passing. The question came as a revelation. She wasn’t talking about an app, or some civic action. She was talking about a blog post or another I threatened to write. I was late to this insight, which has never really left “theory,” from Plato until the present. We are reminded by various sorts of theorists, literary or otherwise, that writing and literacy can and have been used to mobilize massive historical forces (Edward Said), to enter contracts (J. L. Austin), to shape institutions (Michel Foucault) or even budge them from within (Sarah Ahmed).
It seems clear that many in the AI community, including Emily Bender and her coauthors, are hoping to put to good use the idea that intentionless language is impossible. Whether they realize it or not, they echo similar claims made by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels in “Against Theory.” If it doesn’t have intention, it is not language, it doesn’t mean anything, and we should move on, as one presumably does from an uncanny encounter by an American shore. They’re hoping with that line of argumentation that they can mount a credible resistance to the current damage to the environment and precarious labor conditions generated by the AI industry; that they can perhaps deactivate the fearmongering around the rather silly marketing fiction of a “Singularity”; or at a more mundane level, that they could perhaps reign in the oracular relationships to predictive text that we see forming all around us, even amongst academics who should know better but apparently don’t. They are asking us in short, the same that Knapp and Michaels were asking us, to move on, nothing to see here, just waves. If it were only that simple. It was wishful thinking in the original argument, and it remains so. If one were to see a second stanza appear, written by a wave, two things would happen. First, we would check to see if the second stanza has any meaning, and because it does, the next day the beach would be flooded with scientists in hazmat suits. If they are not religious, they won’t be looking for intention but for a mechanism.
Improbable philosophical scenarios, as common as they are in the literature, remain elusive in real life. The rise of consumer computing, the internet, machine-generated text of all sorts and our all-too-human programming languages have turned the wave poem into a banal occurrence, not a freak accident at the beach, as Hannes Bajohr reminded us recently in “Artificial and Post-Artificial Texts.” The deus ex machina returning meaning to the scribbles is no longer Knapp and Michael’s mad scientists on a submarine but the machina itself, the world. Something happened to our use and usage of meaning and intention along the way, and our own time is asking us, begging us, to reformulate our theories of language and meaning, sans intention. We are suddenly faced with a machine that can consistently produce grammatical and meaningful sentences just fine with a mechanism different from our brains (however factually wrong the output of both can be). We are prompted to account for this phenomenon seriously. This I find is one of the most promising uses of generative AI, which ironically does not involve using it.
What I would call a first mechanics would be interested in explaining how these machines process data to produce meaningful language. But to describe the mechanics by which machine learning or human brains can produce sentences is only half the picture. These descriptions reduce language production to the individual machine or human but ignore how language is (re-)produced at scale. Printed text almost always involves a social and material infrastructure as well, and the picture of meaning-making is never complete without looking at these other mechanics. I would call these the second mechanics of textual (re-)production. In a special issue of Critical Inquiry, Knapp and Michaels get a chance to answer their critics. The one response to “Against Theory” that gets the least attention from them is the one from the textual scholar, Hershel Parker. I can see why. In “Lost Authority: Non-Sense, Skewed Meanings, and Intentionless Meanings,” Parker reminds us that a literary text goes through a very specific process that involves multiple intentions bearing on any given modern printed book. This process was, give or take, the same for printed materials for the past few centuries, pace William Blake and other self-printers. With the advent of computers, which (re-)produces text beyond print, the social configuration didn’t change much for some kinds of writing, but the illusion of self-printing has become readily available for anyone using a personal computer and the internet. It becomes harder under these conditions to know which text was generated by typing and which was generated through an algorithmic process, as the output canbe the same. A world where we can’t tell apart a bot from a human being just based on the output is a world where we don’t see the second wave. We could, but we would have to do research far too often for unfamiliar outputs, and who has time? Going forward, most of us will only have time to look for useful meaning, not intention, for better or worse.
Those in the literary professions are the first to acknowledge that authorship is directly tied to the rise of private intellectual property in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—and the uses of intentionality along with it. Artists seeking to avail themselves of relevant laws will continue to put intention to good use for them, but we should not let our inquiries be guided by private interests. Considering the first and second mechanics of textual (re-)production in light of LLMs begs of us a new theory of language that can no longer ignore the sum total or statistics as factors in meaning-making. We have work to do. LLMs work with a massive data set of preexisting human language tied to real human cultures and politics. Its outputs will most likely be deployed right back into the digital cultural record, reproducing its gaps and biases.[1] Research into the whole is only beginning, and the work is cut out for those who know how to wield and interpret their macroscopes. The machine may be one step ahead of us but only because we are always behind it.
Alex Gil is Senior Lecturer II and Associate Research Faculty of Digital Humanities in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. His research interests include Caribbean culture and history, scholarly technology design for different infrastructural and socioeconomic environments, and the ownership and material extent of the sum-total of our cultural and scholarly record.
[1] See Roopika Risam, New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy (Evanston, 2019).
No theorist in the humanities simply writes up their discoveries. The writing process is constitutive to any meaning in humanities scholarship. So, as radically focused on authorship as “Against Theory” is—undercutting all literary criticism by claiming that the author is the sole arbiter of a text’s meaning—it misses the real action in authorship. It’s oriented to outputs, not processes; texts, not writers. Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels introduce us briefly to labcoat-wearing figures in a submarine who might be experimenting with the impossible wave poem on the beach, but these author-engineers submerge as quickly as they surfaced. What the process of writing does for an author is nowhere discussed and rarely in literary theory more generally. Yet one thing literary theorists, compositionists, and humanities scholars have going for us in the context of generative AI is a deep understanding of the processes of writing and reading and interpretation. We gain that by writing, and we share it by teaching.
By forbidding literary interpretation, Knapp and Michaels suggest scholars and students can simply retrieve meaning from authors, tacitly arguing for a “banking model” of meaning. Paulo Freire derides this model of education because it positions students as passive vessels of others’ perspectives. Students learn only to parrot the values and language of their teachers.
We can see the same dangers in producing such students as Emily Bender and her coauthors see in language models merely parroting their training data. Bender and colleagues define language models as “systems which are trained on string prediction tasks,” that is, models that produce expected language and avoid interpretation. They argue for scrutiny of the training data, an understanding of how it operates in social contexts—in other words, interpretation. They advocate for a focus on the processes behind language models, not just their output. When we teach writing, we must avoid producing the student who is a language model, “a stochastic parrot.”
If we cultivate stochastic parrots, we risk becoming them ourselves. Pinning the locus of meaning solely to the author undermines the literate development of both students and scholars.
Scholars learn through teaching—both from the processes of textual curation and interpretation that teaching requires and through the questions and ideas their students bring through their writing. That we learn through the interpretive processes of pedagogy is obvious to anyone who has ever taught a course, and yet rarely acknowledged in literary scholarship, as Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan note in The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study (2020). By shifting the lens from textual output to teaching, Buurma and Heffernan demonstrate how students and the act of teaching not only influenced but also constituted the scholarship of major literary theorists. Their work makes explicit the importance of teaching for thinking and, I would argue, the literate development of scholars. We’re accustomed to thinking about literacy as concerning those who have very little of it: illiteracy, low literacy, early childhood education. Scholars have so much literacy that we cease to consider it as such. So, in the production of scholarship, we imagine a difference between ourselves and our students—that what we produce matters in some important way, and what they produce is merely exercises for their development. But, in the humanities, our interpretive processes are the point, not our output. We’re about the journey, not the destination.
In the current/future of AI writing, how do we avoid producing stochastic students or becoming language models ourselves? Bender and her coauthors argue for more critical engagement with language models and implicitly offer us paths forward. They note that language models work statistically, predicting next words without reference to meaning. Drawing on the fact that writing from language models tends to be predictable, AI writing detectors use perplexity to discriminate between AI and human writing. But a student, if we’re not careful, can also predict words without reference to meaning. If a student is taught and rewarded for commonplaces and stock genres, they will reproduce their training data: the boring commonplaces no teacher relishes reading and no writer learns from reproducing. Instead, we should teach and write for perplexity[1]—not so much to avoid plagiarism detectors but to avoid the commonplaces that block critical thinking. We should all write for critical inquiry.
Bender and her coauthors ask whether language models can be too large. At scale, the (re)production of language is uncurated and statistical. The second lesson we can take from them, then, is the danger of scale in our teaching and writing. The relentless drive for greater scale in the tech industry—more parameters, larger datasets, leaner but more efficient teams—mirrors the pressures on general education in the modern university. How can universities deliver education at scale, cutting costs while agilely pivoting toward current job markets? AI writing ratchets up this pressure while simultaneously offering a potential solution: automating teaching through AI feedback and editing. Will this solution increase literate development for either students or teachers? Or merely its output? Outputs scale, but literacies do not. Texts scale; writers don’t. Even leaders in tech worry that AI’s displacement of writing processes may undermine the critical thinking processes of individual writers. Jack Clark (AnthropicAI) and Paul Graham (Y-Combinator) recently asserted the value of writing processes to thinking.[2] Certainly the thousands of words I wrote for this piece—and then cut—helped me to think through some implications of generative AI on teaching and writing.
AI writing has made a singular focus on textual meaning untenable. Texts and their meanings matter primarily because they provide occasion for interpretation and thinking. I disagree with Knapp and Michaels that “the theoretical enterprise should come to an end,” not because what literary theory tells us matters—it doesn’t—but because the act of writing it matters, how we all learn and change in the process. We write to learn alongside our students. Attention to the processes of writers and readers over their output can return us to questions about why writing and the humanities matter. We’re not here for the texts; we’re here to learn.
Annette Vee is associate professor of English and director of the composition program at University of Pittsburgh, where she teaches courses in writing, digital composition, materiality, and literacy. At the intersection of computation and writing, her research encompasses computer programming, AI writing, blockchain technology, NFTs, surveillance, and intellectual property.
[1] I’m indebted to my colleague Jeff Aziz for this idea of teaching students to write for perplexity.
There is reading the wave poem and your reading of the wave poem. “Against Theory” never quite dispels this difference; it structures too much in Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels’s argument. If, for “the nontheorist,” the question is “not how to interpret” the wave poem “but whether to interpret” it, raising this question relies on having first had the “ability to read.” That the nontheorist has this ability, Knapp and Michaels claim, is only due to an ascription of intent, and claims to the contrary suggest misdirection, being “tricked” (pp. 736, 728). To read at all is to posit an author, even if unwittingly, and in turn to posit intent.
But in this scenario there is room for another reading. If the nontheorist decides that the wave poem is not to be read, they still read it, literally. The decision not to read what they read requires reading. (A related matter: Is it read or read?) Hence a response like Toril Moi’s: only “willed forgetting, an instant self-blinding to the meaning of the words in the sand” might fully wash away what the nontheorist has already read. Even then, willed forgetting is prone to leave its mark. Without rehearsing her argument in full, Moi’s basic point that some residue of the reading act persists across any response to the wave poem—and this residual reading act may just amount to having at one point spelled things out—strikes something key. For there is reading the wave poem and your reading of the wave poem.
The impersonal, automatic, and even at times mechanical nature of that first reading, the one Knapp and Michaels want to call “tricked,” is at present especially pertinent. This is because our current semiotic situation is one in which machines also have the “ability to read.” “Against Theory” has made room for another reading, and this reading is theirs. Regardless of whether you count yourself amongst the ranks of the nontheorists, a whole class of them now (that is, computational nontheorists) read alongside much of what you read, and they do so indiscriminately, seemingly without intent; the latest large language models comprise only one subset of them. Importantly, most of these nontheorists will in all likelihood continue their reading whether or not you decide their output is actually worth reading. The same is true whether you happen to recognize that you have been tricked, that you have found yourself awash in the wake of what machine readers read. They keep reading.
That these computational nontheorists keep reading is partly why they are so tricky. This makes it difficult to determine whether, when, and how their reading converges with machine-generated text of the kind that many people currently want to know whether, when, and how to read. Every instance of this text presupposes a chain of machines, reading, but the same cannot be said of the reverse. When there is text to read, all the relevant debates might apply. Claims about the meaning of this text—for example, that it is an “illusion arising from our singular human understanding of language”—might hold. But neither those debates nor those claims fully encompass the fact of machines reading, which in many senses is a separate but equally important matter. Whatever the debate, whatever the claim, the text in question is something already made subject to an economy of signification that structures all signs as actionable, available for further circulation and modeling—and only possibly for human reading, to say nothing of interpretation.
Of course many will question if this is in fact reading. The difference between reading the wave poem and your reading of the wave poem has already hinted that it is. And to that, there is also a whole range of mechanistic activities that fit neatly under the rubric of what Lisa Gitelman once termed the “scribal technician.” The illiterate printer’s devil who has learned to set pages of print, the secretary touch-typing corporate documents at a blazing speed, the worker sequestered somewhere on the Google campus scanning books, anyone tasked with completing a text-based CAPTCHA: machine readers, all. Other such readers abound. And it should be clear by now that these forms of reading prevent the drawing of a line in the sand between human and machine.
My point however is that where one such line should be drawn is between reading and interpretation. Conflating the two misses a multitude of machines, reading. In turn, it neglects how many of these readers have come to be so thoroughly interlinked with machine-generated text so as to be inextricable from it. But all such linkages are deeply instructive, and so any considerations about what to do with the wave of synthetic text bearing down on us must be accompanied by accounts of reading in all its forms. For, much in the way Knapp and Michaels claim, “theory is not just another name for practice,” interpretation is not just another name for reading (p. 742). Holding the latter two activities in tension will do much to specify whether, when, and how it quite literally makes sense to interpret machine-generated text or to read it.
Tyler Shoemaker is a postdoctoral scholar affiliated with the DataLab at the University of California, Davis. Prior to joining the DataLab, he earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara with a dissertation on the poetics of machine reading.
The initial reader response to our title would most likely be to assume that it refers to the increasingly polarized debates for and against an advanced AI that promises to dangerously exceed our intentions. Readers might, however, also interpret our title as a question of whether we as writers are for or against AI because of the ways in which it is now conditioning or perhaps even usurping authorial intentions, raising the stakes from linguistic conditioning to linguistic expropriation, from AI as assistant to AI as generative author. But what readers of this forum will also quickly remark is the way in which our title “Against AI?” echoes with a difference the title “Against Theory” and, absent deciding context, generates an undecidability. Indeed, our focus will be the question of generation itself and the work it does in both the essay and Generative AI, which will entail an analysis of a performative lexicon that encompasses generate, genus, generalization, and general.
Knapp and Michaels define “theory” as the “attempt to govern interpretations of particular texts by appealing to an account of interpretation in general” (p. 723). They go on to assert that “the clearest example of the tendency to generate theoretical problems by splitting apart terms that are in fact inseparable is the persistent debate over the relation between authorial intention and the meaning of texts” (p. 724). As there is no Archimedean standpoint outside of practice from which theory may operate, they summatively assert that the endeavor of theory should simply end. There is at least one practical consequence of this declaration, they concede: “If accepted, our arguments would indeed eliminate the ‘career option’ of writing and teaching theory.” Although their call for an end to theory would result only in the ending of specialized academic careers, the anxiety this would have provoked at the time now extends to the threat AI poses for a host of academic writing practices in general. What then is the relation between “theory” in their conception and AI? Or, more specifically, in what sense do theorists in their conception function like AIs? Considering this will lead us on to the associated question: In what sense does AI accord with their notion of intention and authorship and in what sense does it not?
Knapp and Michaels argue that theorists “generate” false problems in a twofold sense. The first is by a governing appeal to “interpretation in general” when no such general system empirically exists, and the second by “generating” specific false interpretative problems such as a divide between authorship and intention when none in fact exist. They thus deploy generate to mean “create by means of generalization” and understand theorists to be those who generate fictitious texts. Theory for them, then, is a system or program for generating fables. For Generative AI, generate refers to the production of synthetic media—more precisely, to the production of text, images, or video by machine learning models that have learned from massive training corpora and discovered patterns in the data on their own, without explicit supervision. Generative models produce something new, whether an image of a wave or a poetic description of the same, that is doubly synthetic: correlationist but also artificial. Confined to the framework of Knapp and Michaels, the generating operations for both theory and AI can be understood as extrapolative and abstractive. They are alike in the sense that each generates entities that “only seem real,” as, for example, when DALL-E or Stable Diffusion generates a realistic but nonexistent person that, unlike a photograph, does not have an actual referent in the world.[1] Here we should also remark that text-to-image deep learning models such as these introduce another element to the constructing work of generation. From the Latin generāre (to beget, produce, or create), generation also traces its etymological roots to genus, which raises the well-documented epistemological problems of taxonomic classification and prescriptive bias that have been introduced through the use of the ImageNet database as a foundational training dataset for AI.
Asserting that there cannot be intentionless writing and thus that the writing produced by a computer is intentional, Knapp and Michaels conclude that “the only real issue is whether computers are capable of intentions.” By “capable” they presumably mean being aware of these intentions. They proceed to claim that deciding the matter “will not rest on a theory of meaning but on a judgment as to whether computers can be intentional agents.” For them this determination can only be made from outside the computer itself, and this outside judgment is reiterated by their thought experiment of submariners in “white lab coats.” Importantly, they assert, theory attempts “to stand outside practice in order to govern practice from without” (pp. 729-42). In one respect, then, in deciding awareness of agency or authorship from without, Knapp and Michaels repeat the move they claim as the signature move of theory itself.
But might we not counter their thought experiment by imagining an AI that is aware of itself as an intentional agent from within itself?[2] While GPT-4 is certainly capable of generating summarizations of “Against Theory,” it is not capable of properly understanding what “intention” means in this article.[3] An AI genuinely capable of understanding all that is at stake in the question posed in our title would surely possess significant capacities of self-reflexive generalization and thus fulfill the promise of the name that researchers give to such a speculative entity: “General AI” or AGI.[4] The true mark of General AI would be that it would not be restricted to generating theory in Knapp and Michaels’ sense of a false problem but rather would understand itself, or generate an awareness of itself, as a General AI. Were such a General AI to emerge in practice, would it have been possible without being preceded by a theory of AI in general?
Rita Raley is professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her most recent work appears in American Literature, Post45, ASAP/Journal, DigitalHumanitiesQuarterly, and symplokē; and she has previously cowritten articles with Russell Samolsky for PUBLIC; Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism; and Left Theory and the Alt-Right.
Russell Samolsky is associate professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of Apocalyptic Futures: Marked Bodies and the Violence of the Text in Kafka, Conrad, and Coetzee (2011). He has previously collaborated with Rita Raley on two essays on AI, one on aliens and interspecies communication, and another on Vilém Flusser and futurity, as well as a forthcoming essay entitled “Rocket Theory.”
[1] Knapp and Michaels further claim that “the mistake on which all critical theory rests has been to imagine that these problems are real” (p. 724).
If you have played with ChatGPT or another large language model (LLM), you’ve experienced a new demonstration of an old truth: language is a technology that can work in unintended ways.
“Against Theory” and its sequel gain persuasive authority from their claim to be “simply a description of what everyone always does” (p. 730). But Knapp and Michaels deploy surprisingly weird examples to describe ordinary practices—a wave writing poetry in the sand as if by magic, a judge banning baby carriages from a public park, a parrot who says it’s raining. Why do they need such bizarre scenarios to explain how everyone uses language? The texts produced by large language models raise questions similar to these strange cases, but LLMs now provide a better example because they actually exist. They reflect what people ordinarily do with language.
One kind of theory that Knapp and Michaels oppose, negative theory, shares their descriptive orientation. Stanley Fish calls it “an account of what we have always been doing and cannot help but do.” Negative theories, such as deconstruction, eschew hermeneutics and often develop aporetic models of interpretation. LLMs indicate that negative theory is correct. We do not need LLMs to know this, but they help.
Negative theory recognizes that we do not individually choose how language works. The wave poem ostensibly shows “how difficult it is to imagine a case of intentionless meaning” (p. 727). If you do not think someone intentionally wrote words in the sand, the argument goes, they will not seem like words but “will merely seem to resemble words” (p. 728). I join Adena Rosmarin in wondering, “how do Knapp and Michaels know this,” and concluding, “they don’t.” The marks will remain legible. People routinely interpret texts generated algorithmically, intended by no one. Even without computers, as Paul de Man notes, “words have a way of saying things which are not at all what you want them to say.” Everyone experiences this problem. During an argument with my partner, the meaning of my words can differ calamitously from my intended meaning. It would not go over well to insist, as Knapp and Michaels seem to advise, that she is wrong because my words mean what I intend them to mean.
LLMs produce texts through processes that Knapp and Michaels predict will yield only pseudolanguage. These systems make stochastic selections from statistical models, displaying the “nonintentional effects of mechanical processes,” like a wave poem. (p. 728). The outputs do not merely resemble words; people interpret them. Antitheorists might respond that LLMs do reflect human intentions—those of their programmers, their users, and the authors of their training texts—but these intentions become highly attenuated in the textual details of their outputs. Even if human intentions remain vestigially involved, negative theory derives from real practices a “decisive truth about language,” which is its “accidental and mechanical nature,” its tendency to mean beyond intention (p. 736).
Knapp and Michaels favor examples that place intention prior to meaning. In “Against Theory 2,” a passenger in a car at a railroad crossing tells the driver “go” as a train approaches (p. 54). They believe one must discern the passenger’s intention in order to make sense of this utterance, but the example just confirms a lesson of deconstruction: an indefinite contextual background informs interpretation. Is the speaker suicidal? Given to morbid humor? Running from the cops? Later in the article, instead of “go,” the passenger utters “a noise belonging to no existing language” (p. 65). Here too, intention comes first; using words, they claim, will not “add to, subtract from, or alter your meaning” (p. 66). Human intentions do create language, but existing languages alter our thoughts and intentions in many ways. Knapp and Michaels recognize that “the negative theorist subtracts” intention from interpretation (p. 736). LLMs also subtract intention. They are oblivious to the intentions of whoever wrote their training texts, nor do they intend anything as they write. When negative theorists compare language with a machine, the claim is not that words could exist prior to intention. No technology could. Like other machines, though, language can exceed our control.
Michaels recently asked me if I thought an LLM could be ironic. Was he serious? Isn’t the answer obvious? If you cannot tell how to take these questions, they illustrate a point that Knapp and Michaels miss. When the passenger says “go,” they claim that “the utterance only counts as ironic if the speaker intends that both the conventional meaning and the departure from conventional meaning be recognized” (p. 54). But what about dramatic or historical irony? For a negative theorist, irony complicates interpretation: “How do I know that the text with which I am confronted is going to be ironic or is not going to be ironic?” Ironically, one cannot always be sure how to spot irony. De Man thus views irony as a trope on language’s tropological condition, as “the deconstruction of the figural dimension” itself, a process he calls “mechanical.” Not only can an LLM (or I) write something unintentionally ironic but also that possibility underscores the mechanicity of language, the fact that “a text machine” can produce meaning (p. 181).
Scholars have various names for the study of text machines—book history, comparative textual media, inscriptive studies, graphology. Such fields might count as negative theory, as analyzing textual equipment helps us question ordinary interpretive methods. We need neither LLMs nor bizarre hypotheticals to see that text machines influence how we think, intend, and read. But the computerization of writing has consequences. As Rita Raley notes, “algorithmically generated content is now pervasive in our media environments.” Writing today emerges among “the linguistic protocols we no longer see operating in the background,” protocols rendered in computer code and in ordinary communication. So much of my own writing seems algorithmic: vapid replies to administrative emails from colleagues, corrections I’ve typed hundreds of times on student papers, tweets tailored for virality. Such texts are bullshit in Harry Frankfurt’s sense, serving mainly phatic purposes, and in the common sense that they waste my time. As others have noted, LLMs excel at producing bullshit, which explains why they seem poised to take over these semiautomatic writing tasks. If LLMs can automate such rote writing, the question will not be whether to interpret the results. It will be how much of our supposedly personal thoughts can be modeled and how long we will cling to ideas of our languages and our intentions as nonmachinic.
Seth Perlow is the author of The Poem Electric: Technology and the American Lyric (2018) and editor of Gretrude Stein’s Tender Buttons: The Corrected Centennial Edition (2014). He is working on a book about handwriting and electronics. He teaches at Georgetown University.
Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels’s thought experiment of the wave poem aims at dissolving the inferential connection between meaning and intention, which they dub “theory.” If you discover lines in the beach that form a poem, you may infer an author behind them. Only once you realize that no human has produced the text—if after a wave washes it away, another poem appears—do you begin to doubt this relationship. You can either accept the sea as the author and become an animist or admit that natural forces have created it and that there is no author. But then there is no meaning either, Knapp and Michaels hold, as meaning and intention are one—no additional theory necessary. Assigning meaning to lines in the sand is just like seeing the face of Jesus in a piece of burnt toast: a case of pareidolia at best, at worst the mistaken belief in a communication from God.
The case against “intentionless meaning” seems at first blush highly relevant for current discussions about large language models (LLMs). The authors even apply their argument to computers: unless such machines are truly capable of intentions, any text they produce remains without meaning. But this parallelism is only superficial. In reality, Knapp and Michaels have little to say about the meaning of computerized language. This becomes obvious when looking at a recent argument against meaning in LLMs, Emily Bender and Alexander Kollers 2020 essay “Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data” (which is the basis of a section of the much more famous “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?🦜” ).
They, too, go to the beach. In their thought experiment, an intelligent octopus taps into the telegraph communication between two castaways on two desert islands. While the octopus could learn statistically likely sequences of words that appear meaningful to the two humans, they will not be grounded in any “communicative intent.” This is evident once the octopus tries to follow instructions: it must fail for it cannot refer to anything outside the symbol system. Accordingly, Bender/Koller define meaning as “relation between a linguistic form and communicative intent” via the expression M ⊆ E × I—meaning means “retrieving” an intention i from an expression e. But this retrieval is again an inferential connection. This approach, then, requires what Knapp and Michaels disapprovingly describe as “grounding meaning in intention” and what they reject as “theory.”
In fact, it is the very absence of theory—the prohibition on a hiatus between meaning and intention—that renders Knapp and Michaels’s essay much less relevant to the discussion of natural language processing than Bender and Koller’s. The former use the term simply as a binary—there is meaning or there is not—and the only way machines can produce it is for them to have intentions. That this leaves much to be conceptually desired is already clear from the fact that a wave poem and computer text result from radically different processes (from a chaotic and a deterministic system respectively). While we can produce computer text reliably and repeatedly, the wave poem may occur once in the course of a million years or never at all. Why should the same binary apply to both? And even if we grant that LLMs do not operate with meaning in the full sense, what keeps us from using the term more flexibly and ask for shades of meaning? Indeed, this is only possible if meaning is not identical with intention—in other words, if the hiatus between the terms is mediated by theory.
Bender and Koller admit such shades of meaning. Multimodal models, which connect text to images, allow for what they call a “weak” grounding of language in other data types. This may not be meaning proper, but it is not nonmeaning either. Such “dumb meaning,” as I call it, is the basis for something we now do all the time: communicating with machines as if they had intentions, for only then can we make them do what we want. Simone Natale, in his book Deceitful Media (2021), calls this phenomenon “banal deception.” It is “banal” because we are fully aware of its fictive character: my conversation with an AI assistant only works if I treat it as a communication partner while knowing that it is not. Intention, thus, can come in a fictitious modality, operating with shades of meaning, and be neither just illusory pareidolia nor the mistaken belief in sentient machines. Rather, such a fiction is a perfectly legitimate pragmatic prerequisite for successfully interacting with machines. By insisting on meaning as binary and coeval with intention, Knapp and Michaels cannot account for what is already happening; and so we need theory.
Let us end where we began, at the beach. Qui t’a faite? pensai-je—“Who made thee? I pondered,” Socrates recalls his stupefaction in Paul Valéry’s dialogue “Eupalinos,” when, during a walk on the shore, he happens upon a wholly ambiguous object. Neither clearly human-made nor natural, it does not fit his ontology. Unable to bear this ambiguity, he flings it back into the sea. Knapp and Michael, too, cannot bear the ambiguous object that is artificial text. That makes “Against Theory” irrelevant for us. For we may be faced with a future of ubiquitous LLMs in which the doubt about the origin of a text—was it written by a human or by a machine?—becomes the norm rather than the exception. Knapp and Michael’s wave poem still expresses an older standard expectation towards unknown writing, namely that in reading it “we must already have posited a speaker and hence an intention.” This standard may be crumbling as artificial texts proliferate and are at the same time not treated as meaningless. It is perfectly imaginable that we might one day find ourselves taking what I call a “post-artificial” stance toward unknown text: that we simply suspend the question of intention and read it as meaningful nevertheless—easily bearing the ambiguity about the origin of a text.
Hannes Bajohr is junior fellow at Zurich’s Collegium Helveticum. He is a coeditor of History, Metaphor, Fables: A Hans Blumenberg Reader (2020) as well as the author of Schreibenlassen: Texte zur Literatur im Digitalen (2022).
“Can Computers Create Meanings?” The point of the wave poem in Knapp and Michaels’s “Against Theory” was neither to ask that question, nor to ask if oceans can intend to write messages in the sand. The point was to show why the kinds of responses you come up with to account for the wave poem event only fall into two categories. Either you assume some entity intending to mean, or you assume an account of natural accidents producing marks resembling words. In the first instance, you are assuming intention and meaning exists, albeit a very unlikely version of it. In the second instance, you assume the marks are really “natural accident[s]” that “merely seem to resemble words”—and seem to resemble language and poetry. In this second case, the marks can only be understood as authorless and thus as “accidental likenesses of language”—likenesses that are intentionless and, accordingly, meaningless and uninterpretable. The question raised by the wave poem phenomenon, then, is whether to interpret or not (pp. 16, 24). And that question has not changed; it is still the one we have to answer.
But exactly how does the presence of a trillion more bot poems on the Twitter beach render any single one of them intentional versus accidental? Perhaps the assumption is that once we are facing so many accidents, something must be going on that is changing or revising what this accidental writing constitutively is. But even if we grant this dubious conclusion, it presents no real dilemma for our two options: to interpret or not.[1] We are simply in the first situation imagined by “Against Theory.” That is, we have decided that, at least sometimes, computers can mean what they say. To put it in N. Katherine Hayles’s terms, we’ve determined that computational media “are capable of meaning-making practices within their umwelten,” which includes “making interpretations.” Imagining intentionality-creating computers is entirely consistent with the “Against Theory” framework (even if, as Knapp and Michaels point out, that is a claim that would require empirical confirmation).
You might still object that something different is at work, following Perlow’s invocation of an “automatic language game.” If ChatGPT can generate text that has all the formal features of a poem, why can I not interpret that text as a poem? First of all, again, “Against Theory” is not telling you what you can and cannot interpret; it’s identifying the background premises to interpretation. What can be so difficult to see in an example like this one is that the preliminary step for interpreting is the presumption of intention. If you decide to read and interpret the ChatGPT text as a poem, you have already presumed that it was intended. The premise is so deeply ingrained, we forget it’s operating; the point of the wave poem is to make you see the presumption.
The conjecture of intention is required to make the signifier meaningful as a sign—whether that intention is correctly identified or totally misinterpreted, whether it remains uncertain or is, after the fact, denied by readers.[2] Furthermore, not just signifiers but the formal features of any poem are only formal if they are intended. That’s what makes them formal. Otherwise, they are just the shapes or codes (inputs generating outputs, causes producing effects) that computers have been programmed, by some human being, to produce. To call something a “formal feature of a poem” is not a description of a thing or an event in the world; it’s a construction of an intention in a poem.
What “Against Theory” is saying, in the end, is simple: we attribute intention in order to read anything, and we must do that. Every time you read a computer-generated tweet on Facebook or Twitter or Reddit, it is only possible because you do imagine an author with intentions. In our ChatGPT world, we are in a situation where the poem-simulacra have gotten exceptionally good. We aren’t very well-equipped to decide, in these new kinds of cases, when there is someone actually intending one or not, likely because we have far more reasons to assume intention than not. But that’s really just to say that LLMs work because they are not parasitic on trees or rocks but on intentions. And it cannot be underscored enough that the reason these simulacra works so well is that they aggregate, copy, slightly vary, and reorder sentences from Reddit, Wikipedia, and published books, all of which people have already written and, thus, already intended.
LLMs, rather than bring a challenge to “Against Theory’s” account of intention, merely mask it. But if ChatGPT has no consequences for the basic alternatives proposed by “Against Theory,” that does not touch the question of whether ChatGPT has consequences to the world. It is already obvious that those are immense and disturbing.
Lisa Siraganian is J. R. Herbert Boone Chair in Humanities and professor of comparative thought and literature at Johns Hopkins University. Her most recent book is Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons (2020), winner of the MSA Book Prize and the MLA’s Matei Calinescu Book Prize.
*Text-chats with Charles Hatfield, a non-LLM-generated living person, were immensely helpful in formulating this response.
[1] In a forthcoming essay on nonsite, I discuss the problems with this scenario in the context of legal boilerplate language.
[2] See Toril Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies After Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell (Chicago, 2017), p. 131, and my discussion in Lisa Siraganian, “Against Theory, Now with Bots.”
Published in the March 2021 issue of FAccT ’21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, few scientific papers have captured as eager a public audience as “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?🦜,” jointly authored by Emily Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and “Shmargaret Shmitchell” (the last being Margaret Mitchell, whose smudgy pseudonym did not protect her and Gebru from being terminated from positions at Google in its aftermath). It has been downloaded almost 200,000 times from the official ACM site alone, rendering it obligatory in any discussion of the new generative artificial intelligence.
“On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots” makes a number of essential points, illustrating the consequences of the deeply ingrained biases of the training sets selected for so-called large language models (LLM), the environmental harms that result from the computational power they consume, and the overall lack of evidence of the efficacy of such models once they grow beyond a certain size. It also includes a strong critique of the tendency to anthropomorphize generative AI, which I quote in full for its centrality to what follows:
Text generated by an LM is not grounded in communicative intent, any model of the world, or any model of the reader’s state of mind. It can’t have been, because the training data never included sharing thoughts with a listener, nor does the machine have the ability to do that. This can seem counter-intuitive given the increasingly fluent qualities of automatically generated text, but we have to account for the fact that our perception of natural language text, regardless of how it was generated, is mediated by our own linguistic competence and our predisposition to interpret communicative acts as conveying coherent meaning and intent, whether or not they do. The problem is, if one side of the communication does not have meaning, then the comprehension of the implicit meaning is an illusion arising from our singular human understanding of language (independent of the model). Contrary to how it may seem when we observe its output, an LM is a system for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning: a stochastic parrot. [pp. 616-17]
This passage—glossing the colorful construct of the paper’s title—has repeatedly caught my eye. Drawing especially on the work of Stanford psycholinguist Herbert H. Clark and his collaborators, it offers a disarmingly linear account of how language, communication, intention, and meaning work, one that would seem to sidestep decades of scholarship around these same issues in literary theory (hermeneutics). As I’ve said on Twitter, the passage would be red meat for a graduate critical-theory seminar.
The exigence for this forum, however, is in how this account of language and meaning also resonates with another academic article, similarly trenchant in its day (though its pre-internet circles and cycles of distribution were inevitably more modest); nevertheless, it was the subject of responses by leading authorities in its discipline, a book collecting those responses (and the authors’ responses to the responses), and a few years later a sequel publication. It too has been widely cited and has appeared on many syllabi. That article, of course, is “Against Theory” (1982) by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, published in Critical Inquiry.
I was struck not just by the social drama attending the arrival of both “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots” and “Against Theory” in their disciplines but also by the general compatibility of their arguments about language. (A parrot even makes an appearance in “Against Theory” via Peter Juhl.) As confirmed by its near-universal address in the responses collected here, the best-remembered section of “Against Theory” is a thought experiment known as the wave poem. Knapp and Michaels ask their reader to contemplate some squiggly lines on the seashore that just happen to be a precise facsimile of the first (and soon, as a fresh wave washes up and recedes, the second) verse of William Wordsworth’s “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal.” And then a submarine surfaces. Who (or what) made the marks? How do we read them? Do we read them? Do they mean anything at all?
While they acknowledge the then-nascent prospect of computer-generated text, Knapp and Michaels’ point is the absurdist lengths one must go to in order to furnish an example of intentionless language—indeed, for them an impossible occurrence. Either words have intention (and therefore an authorial agent who means something by them) or else they are not words, just lines in the sand. Nowadays, however, the scenario thus contrived is no longer extraordinary or absurd: stochastic parrots chatter in the treetops and wave poems form and reform on our silicon beaches. This is the everyday magical realist landscape we inhabit whenever we are in proximity to the digital.
Except it’s not magic—it’s just math, or more precisely statistics and probability: a large language model is a predictive instrument that is calibrated on a corpus of documents or other inputs which is then capable of producing novel outputs emulating or mimicking or parroting the language, syntax, and even the style of its training materials. Sentences, paragraphs, and whole documents that are reasonable facsimiles of human prose can be generated in response to a discursive request, or prompt. Released in late 2022, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has gained the most notoriety because of its ready-to-hand browser interface, but such models increasingly populate search engines, websites, operating systems, and software.
The convergence of the suddenly quotidian reality of large language models with questions around meaning and intent—can an LLM mean anything? Is it responsible for its speech? Who is its outputs’ author? Are the outputs language or merely a simulacrum of language?—is the occasion for this forum, which began as a Twitter thread I posted earlier this year.
On the one hand, it would seem dispiriting that the lasting impact of the whole original wave of theory has apparently been so slight that now, at this uniquely relevant moment, even its most basic insights—the distributed nature of subjectivity, différance, the tremulous status of authorship—are all but entirely absent from the public discourse. On the other hand, there seems to me an enormous reservoir of knowledge, thought, ideas, and writing still to draw upon. Language models demand accounts of language (and text) that are as sophisticated and as curious as those that were in play when “Against Theory” arrived seeking to torpedo them. Perhaps some foundational questions of a fundamentally hermeneutical nature can once again be centered as we grapple with the implications of the new language technologies.
Over the course of this week, CI will publish two or three a day followed by a response from Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels as well as an afterword to the exchange by N. Katherine Hayles. I am very grateful to all of them, as well as to CI’s Managing Editor Hank Scotch. Please join us at the beach.
Matthew Kirschenbaum is professor of English at the University of Maryland and the author of three books. An observer of text in its many forms and formats, he has published on generative AI in ELH and the Atlantic. His article on the media history of the sand table is forthcoming in the fiftieth-anniversary issue of Critical Inquiry this autumn.
the dog notices me by seeming to do violence to me
I misinterpret the signal of the dog’s regard
curlicues of animal hair reiterate human hair
the man dreams of the poodle
I keep calling him a man but he is a god
or a devil
a troublemaker in elementary school
an artist in labor
will you make inroads on the poodle’s sanctity
or will you leave the poodle to its inviolate serenity
like an ice-cream concoction served at Serendipity
an advertisement for poetic license
the saint’s infernal horns almost touch the poodle’s buttock-curlicues
does my nervous system’s unrest duplicate the drawing
the famous man said I was full of shit
I shook his hand in response to the insult
his face, tiny as an ultimatum, had become even more miniature
facial miniaturization underwrote his vocation as filmmaker
the air froze around his miniaturization
return to the drawing
be tempted by the drawn man’s
reposeful elbow like Déjeneur sur l’herbe but with a dog companion
is bestiality illegal in the U.S.
the star mentioned that my review of her performance had not been favorable
her silver turban a Cinecittá emblem
her son a Bertolucci Luna apparition
aureole of boy curls an affront and a miniaturization
seek a shame effect because it will sell or redeem
perdition avoided if you claim shame
love to have my pole drawn he said
wish I’d gotten a tantric massage I said at the art fair
Manet made a fortune from public urinal art
I took the poodle literally as a symbol of conflagration
or a thought bubble manifested by the reclining savior
the poodle a materialization of the recumbent figure’s cogitations
the satyr, like Henry James’s Fleda Vetch, had designs
or is Fleda notable for her absence of cunning
must eroticism contain cunning
fuck my face he said with the impromptu air of a court musician
more mild-mannered than I’d expected
not a dom daddy
just a Pez container sans alibi
that’s a polite way of saying I’m smitten I replied with no reference to my toupee intended
the poodle’s curlicues are discourse
they authorize any fantasy
stylized repetition frees them from the responsibility of being original
you can repeat your smittenness like a pole dance in the trauma unit
can I get extra-credit in the trauma class by stylizing my smittenness
tinting it pink and green to match the Formica countertop of the diner
where you drew the poodle and the saint on a napkin
and then turned the napkin over and wrote an elegy for grandfathered eroticism
you retroactively give license to earlier lubricities
and you don’t penalize them for being born after the date when liberation was announced
I like the drawing because it tells me how to think about my life
it tells me to subtract dog and satyr from the picture
and thereby create negative-space pudding
eat negative-space pudding on the subway
he said I saw you on Fire Island
I replied I haven’t been to Fire Island in twenty years
he insisted he’d seen me on Fire Island
thus insistence is the miniaturization of the curlicue according to
either Kant or Arendt or Misha Dichter
or Telemachus or Alpo
or Tanaquil Le Clercq or Mickey Hargitay or Lassie or Fatty Arbuckle
or Jean Harlow or Frances Farmer or Barbara Loden
or Jean Dubuffet or Eartha Kitt or Tommy Tune or Transylvania Airlines
the gargantuan power of an engine determines the flow of capital
who is the engine
is the poodle the engine is the satyr the engine
is pink the agenda or is green
I once decreed that agential was not a word but now I am being agential
is the satyr agential is the poodle agential is the curlicue agential
is the general idea of the poodle agential
is the general idea of the satyr agential minus one like music minus one
or minus capitalism or minus Silvia Federici’s book Patriarchy of the Wage
are the poodle’s curlicues patriarchy of the wage
or are curlicues the undoing of wage patriarchy
anti-work curlicues
A4 paper is the usual size of the daydream
the satyr’s elbow hits the page’s right-hand wall
the time I couldn’t remember the Contes d’Hoffmann melody in the night
mentioned already and why is repetition a crime against decorum
I keep violating logic
I keep drawing from the deep well of malfacture
mal facture
like fleurs du mal facture
a climacteric rictus
when you have an orgasm your face freezes
an unemployable grimace
is orgasmic rictus an exit from patriarchy of the wage
can we stop emphasizing tops and bottoms
I forgot to ask what the temptation is
poodle tempts satyr
or satyr tempts poodle
poodle wants cross-species sex
flaccid satyr is indifferent to poodle
so horny poodle dreams up satyr for entertainment while walking
poodle defecates on satyr’s head perchance
a possibility within the satyr’s pleasure toolkit
Spank Me Red was his handle
do kink aliases erupt from evading plot
doodles represent distraction
if your pelt is a distraction
a strategy of embroidery that stains the living and prevents forward motion
poodle strolls on no seen surface
satyr rests on no seen ledge or field
no visible means of support for satyr or poodle
floating-world poodle and floating-world satyr
our status as floaters (hovering above wage patriarchy)
creates vertigo and acrophobia
am I entitled to write a porno based on this drawing
is the drawing already a porno
is a porno a philosophical direction to pursue
is drawing a philosophical practice
what prompts me to call an art activity a philosophical practice
maybe it was an accident, this drawing
but it became your friend
and accompanied you on your travels
to Astoria and Fishkill and Cairo
they pronounce Cairo “Kay Roe”
because they want to distinguish themselves from Egypt
a desire of which I don’t approve
I could find you by accident at the baths
would that be embarrassing or would that be a philosophical practice
Wayne Koestenbaum—poet, critic, fiction-writer, artist, performer—has published twenty-two books, including Ultramarine, The Cheerful Scapegoat, Figure It Out, Camp Marmalade, My 1980s & Other Essays, The Anatomy of Harpo Marx, Humiliation, Hotel Theory, Circus, Andy Warhol, Jackie Under My Skin, and The Queen’s Throat (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award). He is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and comparative literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. “The Temptation of the Continental Poodle” was originally written for at an event at The Drawing Center, at the invitation of Claire Gilman and Alex Kitnick.
During the Fall of 2022 I served as the Joyce C. Greenberg Visiting Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago. When I learned that Dipesh Chakrabarty and François Hartog plan to coteach a seminar, that semester, I thought that that would be an excellent opportunity not only to study with the two historians but also to interview them. During the first half of the interview I stayed in the background, as the two thinkers contemplated a series of issues concerning the history of time, the history of the Anthropocene, and their own personal relation to the two topics. I was a little more involved in the second half, when we discussed the implications of their theories on the situation in the Middle East. I recorded the conversation and edited it in the most minimal fashion. I did my best to capture the different tone of the two speakers: Hartog spoke in a deep, reflective and calm baritone. Chakrabarty, in contrast, spoke in fast, long humorous sentences. The different styles show in the changing lengths of the responses. But what feels natural within the flow of conversation may look different in writing. For obvious reason, I could not transcribe the many sounds of delighted consent and intellectual companionship that gave this interview its particular warm atmosphere. The loyal reader is invited to imagine Hartog, with silver hair and glasses, brown turtleneck sweater and dark blue blazer, and Chakrabarty, in a white shirt under a grey sweater and a brown scarf, sipping slowly from their glasses of red wine. Whenever François coughs–the result of catching cold on the Paris-Chicago flight–Dipesh shoots a quick concerned look at him, without turning his head.
Interview
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N.L. Thank you very much for agreeing to be interviewed. The two of you are considered two of the greatest historians of the past few decades, so it’s not surprising you are also friends. Can you tell me when the friendship began and weather it had any impact on your view of history along the years?
F.H. Our friendship started when I was in Chicago, in Fall 2016, and taught a course, as you do now. I was engaged with a book that became Chronos. The section about the “Christian Regime of Historicity” followed a few years of seminars in Paris, but through our conversation I discovered a new field. Dipesh made me aware of what was for him already a known territory. I was agile. Since then, it was clear to me that I could not end the Western reflection about time without the Anthropocene.
In a way, you see, we were not supposed to meet. We came from very different spheres. Dipesh came from Calcutta, postcolonial studies and moved to the climate question. I came from the classical European tradition. But it’s precisely because we were not supposed to meet, that the meeting became so important.
D.C. I’m grateful that the work on climate change brought me some extremely valuable friendships. The friendship with Bruno Latour was natural, given the topic.[1] François became an extremely important friend, and the conversations with him became critical to my own thinking. I knew, of course, about François’s work since his book on Herodotus (The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History [2009]). That book was of interest to scholars in postcolonial studies because of its discussion of “the other” and of “difference.” I read parts of Regimes of Historicity before but read it more carefully when François was teaching his class. The critical thing for me was what François calls “presentism”: the end of the modern regime of historicity. I suddenly realized that my time and my childhood began with what he—and [Reinhart] Koselleck before him—discussed as the end of historicity. A décallage between Europe and new nations, as waves of European presentism washed over South Asian history, particularly Indian, history. The “modern regime of historicity” that India entered in 1947 was somewhat displaced by memory studies: The partition of 1947 became, like the “Holocaust,” our site of memory studies— generating interest, for example, in books like Alessandro Portelli’s The Order Has Been Carried Out (2003). François and I discussed these and other issues even beyond his stay in Chicago. Our concerns overlapped again when François was working on the chapter about apocalyptic thinking in Chronos and analyzed some of Latour’s writings on the Anthropocene. He made the arresting argument that Bruno’s thinking here was influenced by Christian ideas of the apocalypse, which made me think that while this observation was absolutely fascinating, the Anthropocene as a global formation time could not merely be an extension of Christian time; otherwise one would not be able to explain India and China’s pursuit of energy-intensive modernization in apparent disregard of the alarmism that often marks the discussion in the West. François’s work was extremely helpful in teasing out, as if with a pair of pincers, the Western strands of time in the knotty temporal formation that the Anthropocene hypothesis implied. This was eye- opening for me. So both Regimes of Historicity and Chronos were instructive but I’d say that Chronos carries the evidence of our meeting.
Also, François may have been the first scholar to describe the Anthropocene, our present, as “disorienting.” Disorienting in the sense that the many strands of temporality that made up the global time of the Anthropocene, an entity that involved geological, that is, planetary, time as well, never gave us a consistent sense either of the present or of the future. Both the present and the future appear fragmented. Planetary environmental crisis could manifest itself as the pandemic; it could also appear in the form of extreme weather events, or the general warming up of the surface of the earth. And these all look to different kinds of presents and futures that operate on difference scales of time. Latour would also describe our present as disorienting.
N.L. How does this “disorientation” show in contemporary historical thinking?
D.C. In the Dilthey sense of understanding, and that is profoundly disorienting within the tripartite division between Chronos, Kairos, Crisis. Some say, with reference to anthropogenic climate change, that we are way past the decision time. Others, like Latour (or James Hansen the scientist), say it’s decision time. There is a crisis and we should take charge, but it’s disorienting because who will take charge?
D.C. Precisely, but there is no we. There are only disagreements. So that’s why it’s internally plural but crisis-ridden sense of time. It’s no longer the time of globalization of the 1980s-90s when the dilemma was whether the technology forced into existence a global humanity too quickly without giving humans time for any genuine cross-cultural conversations . This, in a sense, was the fear of technology expressed by a long line of German thinkers. Postcolonial scholarship and globalization studies tried to make cultural sense of globalization by developing forms of thought that sought to get around this fear. Francois’ work saves us from this [cultural] pessimism with his delicate sense of irony.
*
Frances Tanzer, The World (2021)
N.L. It seems that both of you changed course, about two-to-three decades ago, and moved from a more local and archive-oriented history to a broader and more conceptual history. Can you tell me about the change and what instigated it?
F.H. Dipesh referred to the Regimes of Historicity, which was, for me, a change from historiography, in the broader sense, to a new temporal perspective. The inspiration came from reading anthropologists who focused on time. Critical reviewers argued that Regimes of Historicity was written from a European, or even French, perspective. It’s wrong, because we—succeeding anthropologists and historians such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marhsall Sahlins, and Koselleck of course—focused on multiple temporalities. Sahlins followed Lévi-Strauss’s distinction between cold and warm societies [see the “Time Regained” chapter in The Savage Mind] when he merged a structural analysis and an emphasis on the event. Analyzing the apotheosis of Cook [in How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook, for Example (1995)] he came to realize that it was a mutual misunderstanding of the English and the Polynesians that led to violence. Cook, “the white God,” was not supposed to return—there was a problem with the ship. The Polynesian lived an ancient regime of historicity and the English saw themselves as the representatives of a modern temporality. This led to a clash, not of civilizations, but of temporalities.
That was the backround, but the concrete change occurred when I was invited to the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin in 1993. During that year I walked through Berlin, a short time after the fall of the wall. Berlin looked like a huge construction site. I discovered a city that lived between different temporalities. You could see that with your own eyes. This was a distinct embodiment of the Regime of Historicity. It’s not an abstract “ideal type,” in the Weberian sense, but a Benjaminian embodiment. I realized, there, that the regime of historicity is not an abstract analysis of far away societies but a contemporaneous tool.
D.C. My personal interest in climate change started in 2003, when the devastating fire in Canberra destroyed many of the natural spots I grew to love when I was a graduate student there. I had a complete sense of loss and grief. But I was also fascinated by the proposition that humans now acted as a very powerful geological force on the planet, a sense of human agency that was so different from what my historian heroes such as E. P. Thompson used. I wrote the “Four Theses” essay [“The Climate of History: Four Theses,” in Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009)] first in Bengali, in 2007, for a Calcutta magazine. No one there was interested in it. When, a few years later Critical Inquiry was running low submissions and asked me if I had anything for them, I said I could translate and expand that article.
While working on Provincializing Europe [Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000)], I realized that while I’m a trained historian, I also love thinking beyond the kind of questions that historians usually ask. My legitimate way of doing such thinking was by putting pressure on the categories with which historians think. In Provincializing Europe these were memory, oral history, indigenous history that allowed me to questions “historians’ history.” In the “Four Theses” I used science—geology, evolutionary biology – to the same end. All disciplines have their “externalities,” things they don’t train you to think about. Economists don’t want to know about the social cost of coal when they work on the price of coal; historians don’t want to know about evolutionary history, geological history. They see them as given. Braudel was an exception. He’s an ancestor of what he are doing today but for my liking he went too far in neglecting the importance of everyday human experience. In OnHistory (1980) he argues that the individual doesn’t really matter. I am too much of a humanist, too much of a reader of E. P. Thompson to think that the individual doesn’t matter. The tension between our participation in geological and evolutionary history and what we, as human beings, think of as our mortality, that tension is of interest to me.
It is also interesting to think about the criticisms I get for my planetary views. There are, of course, those who argue that capitalism is at the root of all our crises. One response I get in the subcontinent sometimes is that the planetary view is too Western and universal. The planetary voice, some of them say, is White. And then there are “decolonial” scholars who think the world should go back to a pre-1492 world. While I agree with much in their criticism of colonial domination, as a historian I think that there is no going back. We are in the world that we are in. But these criticisms make me reflect on my own reasons for being interested in planetary questions. I realize that while I’m certainly not a White person—Tagore is a major figure in my book; I criticize him, but he’s my own person— the Western academy still retains, perhaps as a remnant of their imperial days, a deep capacity to speak in the name of univerals. Otherwise, how would one explain the fact that most if not all of the scientists who have so far written books for the general reader explaining global warming as a physical-social phenomenon are based in in what we call the West?
F.H. I would like to add something here: Dipesh was born in December 1948. That is the time of independence, in India, and the rise of its modern regime of historicity, under (Jawaharlal) Nehru and other modernizers. I was born in 1946. Of course, I didn’t know it back then, but I’m the son of the Nuremberg Trials. That makes a difference. It became apparent to me many years later, walking through Berlin in the 1990s, but the first time it hit me was actually during the mid-1970s, in the early days of the “memory wave,” or the start of memory studies. Lanzmann’s Shoah—which took fifteen years to complete—and Pierre Nora’s Les lieux de mémoire [“Shoah” was released fully in 1985; Nora’s in 1984] raised the question: what is national history? Unlike Lanzmann, Nora didn’t deal directly with the Holocaust but the Holocaust was present in everything he did. So in that regard I’m the son of the crash of the modern regime of historicity. After the Nuremberg Trials we lost faith in the progress of humanity. It took me time to become fully aware of it. The time of being born on this earth changes my, or our, perspective.
*
N.L. So far, we’ve been talking about different historical conceptions, but your theories reverberate strongly for those interested in the present and future state of things. As a Middle Eastern, I wonder how you see your analysis working in particular settings, such as the amplified rhetoric against the Arab population inside and outside the 1967 line. What is the significance of the Anthropocene to the current situation in Israel/Palestine/ the Middle East? How does history help—or not—understanding the conflict?
F.H. I do not know enough to judge whether the Anthopocene is a present concern for Israelis and Palestinians. It would be good if they cared. But one aspect of the conflict is the temporal gap between Israelis and Palestinians. Israel was established (in 1948) with a modern perspective—the building of a new nation and taking progress as a mission. But Israeli “progress” meant a catastrophe [the Nakba] for the Palestinians. Their sense of time, after the catastrophe (of expulsion and military regime) changed fundamentally. The Arab world, at that time—Egypt for example—did experience a drive to modernize and developed its own version of modern regime. I’m sure there was a section of the Palestinian population that strove for that, too. However, an essential component in that history is the Iranian Revolution of 1979. It changed the situation dramatically in the whole Arab world and marked another end of the modern regime. The result was a mass shift from the Left or the Marxist view of history, to religion, which has a very different notion of time. The Palestinians were trapped in that tectonic change, on the one hand, and by the Israeli state, on the other hand. Israel was navigating between different times, the modern regime remained active, but presentism started altering the society. The Palestinians experienced a growing dispossession because their future was negated by the Israelis, their past was denied and in the process of disappearing [many of the deserted Palestinian villages, after 1948 and 1967, were destroyed] they were trapped in a present that kept changing, under a barrage of regulations and orders by the Israeli authorities. So from my perspective, the Palestinians experience is now a complete temporal disorientation. When Arafat was trying to comfort the Palestinians and commit to the struggle for national independence, he explained it may take a day or a thousand years, but this demonstrated an inability to grasp time realistically. After that, the rise of a presentist regime of time pushed an apocalyptic worldview and when realized by individuals, the Shahid suicide attacks, it expressed an individualized apocalypse. Da’esh followed the same apocalyptic view, advocating a Kairotic time which is the time of the Caliphate and resisted a Chronos-time. Da’esh’s is a deep faith in the end-time and the coming of the apocalypse. But not understanding that defending a territory and a border is more related to Chronos than to Kairos led to their defeat.
N.L. So reading the Greeks could have helped them win…
D.C. Or lose better…
N.L.: I see the conflict moving—within what François calls Chronos-time—from an ethnic postpartition conflict to a biopolitical, permanent conflict. The incessant slicing of the West Bank to smaller and smaller enclaves, Bantustans, changes the temporal experience of Israelis and Palestinians. Dipesh, how do you see the Anthropocene changing or helping us understand this situation? Could it propose, ironically, an opportunity for a dialogue?
D.C.: on a practical level Israelis have been doing a lot of work on climate, dry cultivation and irrigation systems. Building desalination plants or growing tomatoes in desert climate are part of the technological approach to climate change. So one obvious question is whether the Palestinians are or will be losing out on such technological solutions. Your description is exactly right, the Palestinian territory looks more and more like a patchwork quilt. Israel has made it impossible for them to even dream of a separate state. At the same time,–going back to what François was saying,– Palestinians have a hard time accepting this as their reality, because acceptance sounds like defeat, and creates despair. I’m sure it’s hard for them to think beyond the moment, except making demands for a separate state… The real solution must be, however, a bi-national state, where Palestinians would become full citizens with full rights and where Israelis would confront their ethnocracy. Hannah Arendt was writing this in the 1930s, before Israel was established,– but the Hebrew University was already there. She was writing about a shared settlement of Jews and Arab. I am sure some Israelis think about this situation in a way similar to how some Indians think about Kashmir. The assumption is: We’ll spend money and maintain our control. It’ll bleed our state but we’re rich enough to support it. No one knows how long that could work.
N.L: A politics of suspension…
D.C.: Yes, the politics of suspension on both sides, and one wishes for a leadership that would break through these barriers, which doesn’t seem possible in the near future. So going back to the Anthropocene question, no country knows fully how it’s going to be affected. Israelis are exposed as much as others in the Middle East. That’s the problem with Climate Change; no country can prepare for it. That is why the most powerful countries invest a lot in defense technology, in internal and external security [for example, against climate immigration, N.L.]. Sometimes people fight battles in times that are different from their own: Hitler fought a nineteenth century self-aggrandizing battle, colonizing other people and taking over their territories. Putin is fighting an old Imperial war. Israel and India are locked in a twentieth-century nation-state politics while the times have moved on. We need to think beyond the nation state, beyond ethnocracy. That’s the problem with climate politics: the politics we’re engaging with are mostly twentieth century politics, but Climate Change is redefining the twenty-first century, and politically, we haven’t yet responded to it.
F.H. We see a strong move in the opposite direction, towards radical nationalism, with the recent election campaigns in Europe and South-America…
N.L. We need to end soon, but let me challenge you one last time: I hear also the arguments from the other end, that we are the dreamy Idealists and that the lessons of such changes should be the opposite, that is a shift towards a biopolitical fight for survival and securing basic means of living. Why insist on future hypothetical solutions?
D.C. We don’t know how the crisis is going to affect us. In the short term, selfish politics makes sense: I’ll become richer and gather resources to deal with whatever problem. Or I will build walls and stop human movement. But what happens if the problem out scales your resources? We all go down. It’s a gamble based on presentist calculations. We are still using much more fossil fuel than we should. The world will get hotter, humans will move both within and between nations, and there will be more conflicts. But what happens above 2.5 degrees? That’s an unfamiliar terrain.
N.L. Many thanks to you both for a fascinating conversation.
The interview was recorded at University of Chicago’s “Quad Club,” on 27 September, 2022. I translated the full interview for a forthcoming special “climate issue” of the Israeli T’eoria u’Vikoret (Theory and Criticism). The English version is about third shorter than the Hebrew/Arabic.
[1] The interview was conducted a few days before the news about Bruno Latour’s death, on 9 October 2022.
Nitzan Lebovic is a professor of history and the Apter Chair of Holocaust Studies and Ethical Values at Lehigh University, and the Joyce C. Greenberg Visiting Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago.
Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History and South Asian Studies at the University of Chicago.
François Hartog is the director of the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS).
There was a time in my early twenties when I had gone a while, probably a year or more, without seeing a film by Jean-Luc Godard. At that age a year felt like a long time. Like many cinephiles, Godard’s early films had been important to my self-understanding as a “serious” filmgoer. I suspect I thought I was now past him, more mature and sophisticated than his hipness or penchant for aphorisms and quotations. But then I reencountered Godard for the first time. I think the main feature may have been Bande à part, and I have no memory of which short film was screened first. But the first images of that short film—some foliage shot on the roof of a building; two people in conversation—struck me with force. This, I remember thinking, this is why you go back to Godard: to see the images and to hear the sounds; they are unlike anything else. A short film, probably made quickly—but such beauty.
Godard died on 13 September, which puts an end to his remarkable output of films and videos over more than six decades. Others have treated this output with more care and depth than I will do here. I will simply say that Godard’s legacy may be measured by the fact that there is no one seriously invested in movies who has not been watching films and videos by Godard for most if not all of all of their adult lives. His passing feels like a gesture of finality that closes out an era.
It’s been striking to see how many of the accounts of his career have been invested with autobiography: it was in this year, in this place, and with this person that the writer saw À bout de souffle or Sauve qui peut (la vie) or Le Mépris or any of his other work. Yet that seems to miss the point. We all have many pivotal moments as youthful consumers of art: concerts by bands we grow out of, movies whose limitations we later recognize, and so on. What is so remarkable about Godard is the way that these memories are not isolated, how they become folded into a lifetime of viewing and reviewing. In the week since Godard’s death, I’ve returned in my mind several times to a review John Updike wrote of Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady. It is a review from when Updike was an older man, written with the knowledge that he would never read the novel again—and so the review is haunted by the other times he had read it. Updike remains unimpressed by the archness of the plot. So why come back to it? “Between beginning and end,” Updike writes, “of course, there was marvelous writing.”
Godard is no novelist, despite his love of literature, and his relation to narrative was, if deep, notoriously fraught and complicated. But there remains, as with James, the investment in form and the implications and broader significance—aesthetic, cultural, political—to be drawn from it. Some of this is about the composition of images and sound: their arrangement, framing, and interaction. But it is also about experimentation. One of the things that has always stood out with Godard was his refusal to remain content as and where he was. The experiments were technical as much as aesthetic: the jump cuts of À bout de souffle; the long takes of Week-end; the voice-overs of Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle; the video monitors of Ici et ailleurs; the stuttered motion of Sauve qui peut (la vie); the flashing superimpositions of Histoire(s) du cinéma. Even at the end, when he used 3D in Adieu au langage, there are two moments where the two cameras that construct the 3D image—our two eyes—split apart, and I remember an astonished and collective gasp coming from the theater as we struggled to process, intellectually but also physiologically, what we were seeing.
For all his bombast, verbal and formal, Godard was also surprisingly delicate. For all the intricate details, he could be fundamentally schematic. Curiously, the combination of general and particular, abstract and concrete, meant that you wound up feeling like you had to look more carefully, to look again. As with James, the care and complexity of the formal qualities of the works meant that they repaid deep and close attention to the specifics of what’s going on. This also seems to be how Godard himself thought about art. If he largely framed his art-historical claims in general terms, his films and videos often obsessively attended to or replayed small moments from the history of art, and especially cinema, as if to create on their own terms a fantasy of close watching. And that rewatching, whether it was on your own or following Godard’s own paths, was wildly rewarding. Small moments you might have missed, montage sequences that turned out to be wildly allegorical, allusions to the history of cinema—even just the ability, as I said, to see something of extraordinary beauty again, but to know it was coming and so not to be surprised but to allow oneself to flow into its pleasures.
Pleasures is an important word in this context. Much has been, will be, and should be written about the intellectual stakes of Godard’s films and videos and about their political significance. Few filmmakers have mattered in those ways as much as he did. Yet pleasure suffused his work, animating these ideas and keeping viewers going. One of these pleasures, surely, was the humor. Godard could be, and often was, extremely funny. He had a talent for physical comedy, something that was apparent in his appearance in Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7 but which came to be a part of his persona—I think here, too, of the lovely play around American slapstick comedy in Soigne ta droite. There were also verbal games, from the “allons-y Alonso” of Jean-Paul Belmondo in À bout de souffle to the typographic word play of Histoire(s) du cinéma. Sometimes the jokes were wonderfully bad: Hélas pour moi, featuring Gérard Depardieu, highlighted the “dieu” and “God” in the opening credits; or in Adieu au langage, “2D” was printed on the screen and then, suddenly, “3D” popped up out in front of it.
Godard was not the perfect filmmaker. That was part of the appeal. The films and videos often have dead zones, stretches of time where nothing quite clicks. He made works as if to record his thought process, to think through ideas in an audio-visual form—if it did not always work, often the result was spectacular. To lose Godard is to lose one of the most fundamentally interesting and curious of the thinkers in cinema; to lose the person who consistently explored what cinema was, had been, and could become; to lose an artist in whom aesthetics and politics could never be separated. For years, the pleasure of going back to Godard has been to trace the process of his thinking and to do so in the knowledge that he was still working and thinking, still making new things. Now what we have left is only the return. It is to our great fortune that the journey we have already taken has been so extraordinary and that there are still so many places to go—so many things to see and hear and think—even as we go back over terrain we already traversed.
Daniel Morgan is a professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. He is also a coeditor of Critical Inquiry.
Recently, a Korean American friend of mine was walking in the San Francisco Mission District when she was called the c word (the racial not gender slur). She clocked that the man who said it wasn’t one of the regular unhoused persons she was used to seeing in the neighborhood. She ignored him. Just as she passed him, something hard smacked her on the back of her head. She stumbled forward but managed to dart across traffic to the other side of the street, half running at this point for a couple of blocks as he kept tracking her from the other side until eventually losing interest. More upsetting to her than the unexpected blow was that throughout the whole thing no one came to her assistance or said anything, though there were plenty of people around when it happened. Having lived in New York and San Francisco all her life, she was well familiar with the masks of detachment people wore while moving through an unpredictable environment, one that threatened to get more dangerous the more you acknowledged it. With all the trainings in the careful avoidance of offensive language, something that took off even more after the George Floyd uprisings, there was an increasing disconnect between the world inside the office and the world outside. The recent COVID-19 hate-crimes bill announced a government resolve to bring more of the culture of the inside to the outside. (Not that she entirely agreed with the criminalization of hate as a response to rising anti-Asian violence or even that hate necessarily got at the fundamental social roots of racism. But thank God for Biden.) Was it not just a little odd, she thought, that people, at least some of whom must have gone through one or more of these trainings, were not jolted by the racial slur? Later she thought: it’s more likely that people had in fact been alerted and made the risk assessment that getting involved would make things worse. Or maybe it was just the opposite: they’d made the observation, in the end correct, that she wasn’t in any real physical jeopardy and that no intervention was needed. Or, perhaps it was that the whole episode just made everyone feel more sad than anything else. It was another version of the sadness one resigned oneself to every day passing by dozens of unhoused persons, some completely unhinged. The more she thought about it, her indignation faded into shame.
She and I have had our political disagreements over the years—she’s a liberal corporate lawyer who takes an individual rights-based approach to injury, I’m an Asian-American-literature professor drawn to historical materialist analysis—but I could relate to my friend’s disquiet and self-doubt. In the past year, I’ve been on the receiving end of more racial aggression than in the previous twenty-five years living in Berkeley. I’ve never been punched or had something thrown at my head. But there’s definitely a level of intensity to the racial commentary my sheer bodily presence on the street seems to elicit that feels volatile. Between that and just reading the news, I’ve become less absent-minded when walking to and from campus, more vigilant about scanning the sidewalk ahead of me and calculating the potential for any sudden moves. Last March I was coming out of the Cheeseboard, a bread and cheese shop so popular there’s always a line to get in. The store is worker owned and operated, the kind of place that puts up a poster of a Muslim woman in hijab to illustrate that “EVERYONE is welcome here,” the opposite of a business that would readily call for the removal of “loiterers” and “vagrants.” The result is a strip of sidewalk densely populated with a combination of foodies and panhandlers. I was thrown off balance one day when a tall, probably unhoused man shouted, very angrily, “China put my family into a meat grinder,” just as I was exiting the store. Since there were no other Asians in the vicinity, I deduced he was talking to me or about me. As far as China-bashing narratives go, this particular one was just vivid and weird enough to stop me in my tracks, drawing out the sociologist in me. I looked around to others for confirmation that I’d heard right. But no one would meet my gaze. Nothing was going on here, their faces said. Later, I thought: this is similar to what my friend experienced. You’re racially accosted in full public view; the public doesn’t react or seem to know how to react. It leaves you with a feeling of estrangement twice over. First, you’re called an alien and the label is harder to shake off because it’s coming from a member of the oppressed. And second, when the studied neutrality of the well-mannered around you implies suspicious agreement or, more minimally, another concession to the atmosphere of a mounting US-China Cold War that’s making it plausible, for example, to prosecute scientists for committing small administrative errors. You know it’s overreading. Still, you’re left with a lonely feeling that when push comes to shove, you’re on your own and maybe always have been.
Thus, it makes sense that so far the main contribution of #StopAAPIHate has simply been to count: for now, the cold numbers of mounting hate incidents since 2020 must speak for themselves (11,467 between March 2020 and March 2022).[2] In no small way, the 2021 COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act—one of whose provisions is the federal collection of hate crimes data that for the first time in history is aimed specifically at protecting Asian Americans—is a victory for forty years of pan-ethnic community organizing. The murder of Vincent Chin in 1982, followed by the light sentencing of his killers and the ultimate juridical finding that he had been illegally deprived of life but not his civil rights, rallied Asian immigrant communities to the cause of making anti-Asian violence visible. In 1989 Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1987, dir. Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Peña) was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Though it didn’t win, in 1990 Congress passed the first-ever legislation requiring the DOJ to collect and publish data on crimes motivated by “hatred based on race, religion, ethnicity and sexual orientation.” Thereafter followed the passage of more hate crime laws in a decade characterized by a trend toward harsher sentencing, in sync with the general redistribution of public funds away from social welfare toward policing and prisons.
Colleen Lye teaches in English and critical theory at the University of California, Berkeley. Her most recent publications are After Marx: Literature, Theory and Value in the Twenty-First Century (edited with Chris Nealon, 2022) and “Asian American Cultural Critique at the End of US Empire” (American Literary History , 2022)
Globalization, driven by the priorities of financial markets and political majoritarianism, deploys new technologies to encompass those parts of the world that gravitate toward power and privilege—be it in the North or the South. Outside these enclaves lie those who resist the mimetic lure of global accumulation and appropriation; in most cases, their local histories and political circumstances do not permit them to compete for globalization’s glittering prizes. These peoples and countries remain, three-quarters of a century later, the wretched of the earth. Where once the Third World was a challenging call to fight global inequality and injustice—a call to solidarity in the cause of planetary transformation and the redistribution of the balance of power—today, there is callous contempt for “shithole countries” and a peremptory dismissal of “failed states.” In Globalization and Its Discontent (2002), Joseph Stiglitz warned us of the ravaging effects of “free-market fundamentalism,” which, a decade later, has brought in its wake a rash of related fundamentalisms that fester on the global body politic: religious fundamentalism, populist fundamentalism, and xenophobic fundamentalism. Stiglitz reminds us that the IMF’s imposition of “conditionalities” on loan-making to poor countries results in a kind of neocolonial world making. It is invariably justified as establishing free markets, individual freedoms, and economic development in the interests of the “world community.”
The binary opposition between First World and Third World, despite its polarities and pitfalls, generates a dialectical discourse with stakes in an international debate about the definition and distribution of “public goods.” Do universal goods, with their normative implications, disavow “foreign” cultural values and disregard historical differences in favor of First World priorities? Or, in Amartya Sen’s language, should global public goods be construed as “capabilities” tailored to the complex and diverse needs of specific lives? In the context of the Cold War, this dialectical discourse faced postcolonial countries with difficult “international” choices—Which side are you on?—as Frantz Fanon argues in The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Nonetheless, the dialectical struggle inherent in the project of the Third World represented a conflict of goals and values signified in “contradictions” of contested beliefs and antagonistic economic models.
Today, the dialectical tension associated with the concept of the Third World has given way to a global bipolar dynamic consisting of sectoral profitability, selective connectivity, and accelerated networks of algorithmic advances. Profound asymmetries in opportunity and equality are portrayed as anachronistic problems of parts of the world that resist “coming up to speed” with the global agenda. I am reminded of the truth of Fanon’s riposte to the Eurocentric demand that the Third World should adopt Western paradigms of development: “No, we don’t not want to catch up with anyone.”[1] As the global juggernaut speeds past, the severity of the discontents of globalization are diminished in scale and rapidly disappear in the rearview mirror.
In such a world, the speed of neoliberal capitalist exploitation and expansion generates a narrative of progress invested in networked oases of accumulation and disruptive innovation (to use the business school jargon) that treat the rest of the world as a global wasteland. The endemic and recurrent problems of global justice, global health, global climate change, and global migration somehow slip through these networked chains of neoliberal command. They are looked upon with disdain as anachronistic “works in progress” left over from another time. If the accelerated speed of command and control is the shibboleth of the global world, the solidarity of the synchronic development of ideas, cultures, and opportunities (an optimistic utopian project, it must be admitted) was the keyword of Third-Worldism.
Let’s look through the rearview mirror for a moment and ask, Where was the Third World?
In their introduction to Inventing the Third World: In Search of Freedom for the Postwar Global South, Jeremy Adelman and Gyan Prakash tell of Jawaharlal Nehru taking the podium at the opening of the Asians Relations Conference in 1947, pointing to a map of Asia and declaring: “We stand at the end of an era and the threshold of a new period of history.” The flow of Nehru’s soaring rhetoric moves too swiftly from the “end” of an era to the inauguration of a “new” history. He flies over the fact that to stand on a historical threshold is to place oneself at a point of transition in the duration of the present—somewhere in between the lessons of the past and the labors of the future—experiencing the “ends” of colonialism while concurrently devising and deciphering the “means” of postcolonial life worlds to come.
In his conversation with Nehru at the Bandung conference, Richard Wright immediately saw Nehru as a visionary leader who stood courageously on the threshold of a historic transition of power in India, while addressing a similar series of transitions across Asia, Africa, and the Third World. Indeed, there is hardly a finer articulation of the political integrity and ethical aspiration of the idea of the Third World than Nehru’s speech, Tryst with Destiny, delivered on 14 August 1947 to the Constituent Assembly of India. Nehru spoke “in the midnight hour” to dedicate all Indians “to the service of India, and her people, and to the still larger cause of humanity,” and at the stroke of midnight he dedicated India to the service of the world—the Third World in particular: “Those dreams are for India, but they are also for the world, for all the nations and peoples are too closely knit together today for any one of them to imagine that it can live apart.” The greatness of the Nehruvian vision, as Wright encountered it at Bandung, lay in its ability keep a tryst with the complexities of historical transition. Nehru sought an “interstitial” internationalism founded on thresholds that linked newly independent states to each other, rather than throwing up geopolitical frontiers and barriers to keep them apart. Solidarity, not sovereignty, is the goal of threshold thinking. Nehru, as Wright quickly saw, attempted to maintain a prescient, if precarious, balance on both sides of the postcolonial threshold: Wright asks,
of what does [Nehru’s] greatness consist? It consists of his being what his country is: part East, part West. If one day Nehru says that the perplexities facing Asia are moral, then he is acting in a Western manner; if the next day he says that the world is gripped by a power struggle, he is looking upon life as an Asian. From his point of view, he is not merely playing with ideas; he is a reflection of what his India is, a halfway house between East and West.[2]
Nehru’s productive and combative ambivalence gives him access to a translational, global cosmopolitanism that is part East and part West, but the Asian perspective that articulates the threshold between East and West—the formative fulcrum—is capable of building a Lebenswelt that is new and different, and this is what Wright heard in Nehru’s speech. As I read both Nehru and Wright, I see an emphasis on the nation—as a threshold of subaltern hospitality accessible to the halfway house—rather than on the sovereignty of the state that frequently bars its windows and locks its doors against the lives and times of others, foreigners, strangers.
Wright’s polarised presentation of the world divided between East and West is as problematic today as it was at Bandung. It has a queasy Kiplingesque echo that I would not entertain. However, “halfway house,” as a metaphor of political and cultural mediation across national borders, is an interesting figure of speech. It invokes the aspirational ambition of the idea of Third World as a political forum of networked regional solidarities that are decentred in the very process of struggling for, and achieving, postcolonial freedoms. Here, in my view, there is an implicit appeal to political freedom as an ongoing process of threshold thinking that arises out of the experiments and exigencies of transitionality in the attempt to negotiate an intersectional society and an intercultural polity. Perhaps this is why W. E. B. DuBois frequently hyphenates the word inter-national.
The appeal to threshold thinking, when it enters the annals of historical writing, or contemporary witnessing, activates an agency of mediation that writes transition in the language of intermediacy. The intermediate, I suggest, is not “in the middle” but “in the midst of”: an interstitial space of reflection and representation; a gap in time—the time of the threshold—that reaches out for a spatial trope with which to figure transition as history and concept. The mediation among parties, countries, or cultures is often a process of transference across a gap of interests, intentions, and inheritances—not unlike the metaphoric transfer of meaning—in order to negotiate a translation of terms and conditions. The halfway house, configured in this way, is a metonym of mediation: its portals enable the free movement of peoples and ideas across the threshold. The halfway house, in the way of all metonyms, signifies a “whole” house whose spaces are diverse yet interconnected and whose windows share a landscape but catch the light at different times of the day.
Third World nationhood is a process of developing dynamic, evolving neighborhoods, unhindered by the sovereign possessions of the Cold War state.At their best, these visions of freedom resist the manacles of capitalist and militaristic “progress” legitimized by a moral economy of racial inequality. The political rhetoric of imperial dominance and Cold War dependency are remarkably similar, despite their distance in time and place. They share a racist intent in their enunciations of the prophecy and profitability of Western “progress,” and those recruited to labor in its interests are the very ones excluded from its promise: the colonized are classified as being historically “backward,” while Third World nations are condemned to being inherently “immature.”
Temperamentally, no two postcolonial thinkers could be more at odds than Nehru and Fanon, and yet they share a vision of hospitality that opens doors on both sides of the threshold. Fanon’s conclusion to The Wretched of the Earth is an unforgiving attack on the very idea of Europe as an icon of civility or civilization. “The Third World must start over a new history of man,” Fanon declares, “which takes account of not only the occasional prodigious theses maintained by Europe but also its crimes, the most heinous of which have been committed at the very heart of man.” But then, as he utters his last words on the matter, Fanon stands with Nehru on the threshold of a revisionary hospitality—not without anxiety and hostility—and defines a “new humanism” that transcends the sum of the parts. In that act Fanon attempts to suture (not suppress) the wounds of the colonial past: “For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and endeavor to create a new man” (WE, p. 239).
At its best, such threshold thinking in the construction of the Third World—what I have here called interstitial internationalism and elsewhere translational cosmopolitanism—is a lasting challenge to the narrow borders of disciplinary thought. Third World intellectuals are more likely to be engaged with intermediated problems rather than professional protocols. Nehru is a historian, an essayist, and a politician; Fanon, a psychiatrist, phenomenologist, and an activist. Their trysts with destiny are also trysts with the tasks of cultural translation. There are several instances in Inventing the Third World where the displacement of disciplines reveals new thresholds of representation-as-translation across art, culture, and intellectual discourse. The Third World inaugurated new parameters of citizenship—national, not nationalistic—which initiated imaginative forces of transitional and translational cultural agency in the broadest sense.
The ethno-populist systems of power of our global moment impose carceral histories and geographies on much of the world order today: minorities barred from citizenship; refugees barred from borders; speech barred from opinion; dissidents barred from public discourse; protesters barred from the park or the maidan; Black lives barred from protection. The prison house of the present, which exists in more places than we care to name, is an attempt to build walls of exclusion and interdiction where there should be a free and equal passage across the thresholds of public life and its divergent, even disjunctive, social values. This is surely what Fanon proposed as being both the trial and the testimony of an imminent Third World order.
Counterintuitively, Fanon proposes that a sense of “nationhood” must develop from an awareness of the thresholds and transitions that exist between countries, regions, and cultures. It is from this space in-between that the Third World emerges, recognizing differential histories and representing diverse interests that constitute a country, peoples, or a region. The Third World moves beyond the claims of sovereign nationalism and the confines of tribal patriotism. “A national consciousness,” Fanon argues, “which is not nationalism [and] is alone capable of giving us an international dimension”is one in which the national culture is built on the politics of difference—“the outcome of tensions internal and external to a society as a whole and its multiple layers” (WE, pp. 179, 177; my emphasis).
To negotiate these tensions internal and external to a society—to cross and recross these diverse worldly thresholds—opens the door to a politics of radical hospitality in which the idea of the Third World finds its moral compass and its historical moorings.
Homi K. Bhabha is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities in the English and Comparative Literature Departments at Harvard University.
A version of this post is forthcoming as a preface to and Bloomsbury Academic’s (an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.) Inventing the Third World: In Search of Freedom for the Postwar Global South, ed. Jeremy Adelman and Gyan Prakash (2022). We thank everyone involved there for permission to post the piece.
[1] Frant Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York, 2004), p. 238; hereafter abbreviated WE.
[2] Richard Wright, The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (New York, 1956), pp. 165–66; my emphasis.
“It’s a curse to live in interesting times,” so goes the ancient Chinese proverb that Hannah Arendt was known to cite in the last years of her life.[1] In her essay “No Longer and Not Yet,” Arendt observes that sometimes dramatic moments occurring in human history are experienced more as a real rupture heralding a new era, rather than the gradual unfolding of the old. The decline of the old and the birth of the new, she writes, “is not necessarily an affair of continuity” as “between the generations, between those who for some reason or other still belong to the old and those who either feel the catastrophe in their very bones or have already grown up with it, the chain is broken and an ‘empty space,’ a kind of historical no man’s land, comes to the surface which can be described only in terms of ‘no longer and not yet.’”[2]
For many of us living through these pandemic times we seem to be living in such an “empty space” in a collective caesura of an indistinct “now” caught between pre- and post-COVID-19 worlds, stuck in an “historical no man’s land” that has somehow continued in calendar time but has not yet quite fully moved on to the future, whatever that may be. Since the arrival of COVID-19 there has been a feeling that life before the pandemic seemed to belong to another time and epoch. W. J. T. Mitchell has noted how “the year 2019 now seems to belong to another century”.[3] The past is indeed another country. While the present may seem to be of a different time and order, one gets the distinct feeling that we have not yet fully come to terms with the suspended space of our “now”.
After the first wave of the pandemic in Europe Turkish novelist Elif Shafak wrote of “the world to come,” and argued that “This is a threshold. The old world is simply no more. . . . The old world is gone, and yet we do not know what kind of a new world we want to build. It is a state of in-between-dom, full of anxiety and uncertainty, and fertile ground for demagogues and their false promises of redemption.”[4] Stuck between calendar time in “real life” and an atemporal experience of the “virtual,” the frozen zoom screen seems to be the best visual representation and haptic experience of the pandemic “now”, signifying a moment in which time is seen to jump, skip, crack and freeze, through different spaces and time zones and sometimes, confusingly, happening all at once as seen in the work of digital artist and philosopher EL Putnam.[5] Screens now act as third parties in relationships, and often as a third party mediating between our “real” and “virtual” selves. As Jedediah Britton-Purdy has noted, we are now an “infrastructure species,” a category he uses to describe our physical and technological relationship to the world we have created.[6]
Android Dream, EL Putnam, 2021. Reproduced with kind permission of the artist.
The compression chambers of climate change and COVID-19 makes this contemporary period an “event” in itself. What has become increasingly visible throughout the pandemic is how language and rhetoric associated with the 2008 global financial crisis has re-appeared as an individualizing resilience narrative. Neoliberal narratives of “personal responsibility” foreground the primacy of the individual rather than the responsibility of the state in protecting the public and environmental health of its citizens. Such narratives also demonstrate an apparently wilful lack of understanding of epidemic or other crisis events and can even go further by viewing such events as opportunities in the Malthussian sense (“no more fucking lockdowns – let the bodies pile high in their thousands”[7]), echoing the narratives of disaster capitalism as previously observed by Naomi Klein post-2008.[8]
More troublingly, however, is that the mantra of “personal responsibility” singularly assumes a level playing pitch for all members of society, with the concept concealing a dangerous assumption that everyone has the same level of social supports and economic security to help cushion them in a time of crisis. Not everyone can exercise personal responsibility by not exposing themselves to the virus when commuting to work on public transport, shielding a close relative, teaching or caring for unvaccinated children, or working in a meat-packing plant. Indeed, the mandates to work from home blithely assumed that everyone has an adequate home-space to work/learn from. Such narratives assume that “home” is a safe space and sanctuary from the viral dangers in the public sphere, instead of being a private space of harm for many in what has been regarded as a shadow pandemic of domestic violence.[9]
The assumptions behind the the phrase “personal responsibility” are therefore highly gendered, class-based, and politically structurally-biased; they make already inequitable social systems even more dangerous for many. These are just some examples of a highly problematicresilience narrative that has gained traction without sustained critique, and will undoubtedly re-emerge in future times. The failure to protect yourself and your loved ones, so the narrative goes, implies a moral failing on your part to “assess the risk” and act with “personal responsibility” to swerve and dodge that COVID-19 or climate wave coming your way.
We have much to learn from the necropolitics of the present in terms of how such resilience narratives will shape future crisis scenarios, therefore such narratives should be carefully tracked and forensically examined for what they ideologically assume and, conversely, what they dangerously conceal. Caught between the vice grips of the biopolitical crisis of the virus and the existential crises of climate change, we are living in a threshold decade, a pivotal time when decisions made now will set in train biopolitical tipping points that will determine the future of life to come, for better or for worse.
Nessa Cronin is a lecturer in Irish Studies, Centre for Irish Studies, and associate director of the Moore Institute at NUI Galway, Ireland.
[1] Quoted in Jerome Kohn, “Introduction” to Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism (New York, 1994), p. ix.
[2] Hannah Arendt, “No Longer and Not Yet,” p. 158.
[3] W. J. T. Mitchell, “Present Tense 2020: On the Iconology of the Epoch,” Moore Institute Webinar, 9 June 2021, National University of Ireland, Galway https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WFCen3FmbE, later published as, “Present Tense 2020: On the Iconology of the Epoch,” Critical Inquiry 47 (Winter 2021), pp. 370-406. I am very grateful to Professor Mitchell for discussions on this theme when I presented at this webinar as a panelist respondent to his paper, much of which gave rise to the considerations expressed here.
[8] Initial media reporting of the COVID-19 crisis in Britain made reference to the tenor of conversations in government circles in relation to the impact of the virus on the elderly population in particular and a policy of herd immunity: “The report claimed that at one private event at the end of February, Cummings outlined then government’s strategy at the time in a way that was summarised by some present as “herd immunity, protect the economy, and if that means some pensioners die, too bad.” https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/mar/22/no-10-denies-claim-dominic-cummings-argued-to-let-old-people-die And that the excess deaths of 125,000 people in the UK by March 2021 means that the Treasury will save more than £1.5 billion in state pension payments in 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/12/covid-crisis-social-care-elderly-people On Naomi Klein see, The Shock Doctrine (2008)
[9] I’m making the distinction here between home environments and living quarters to highlight the particular challenges that men, women and children who live in asylum and detention centers encountered during successive periods of lockdown in Ireland (known as Direct Provision Centers) and Europe more widely.
One of the first things I recall Leo telling me, as I was querying him about his intellectual influences, was the lesson he said he had learned from a Harvard professor as an undergrad: how remarkable it was that the seventeenth-century French theater gave us such smoldering tragedies as Racine’s Andromaque, where the crimes of past generations weigh heavily on the living, but also the tragicomedy of Corneille’s Le Cid and the giddy merriment of his Le Menteur. This was a forked opening to literary modernity: the combination of trauma intensities with the frivolous dismissal of all such anguished seriousness. It struck me some time later that this doubleness marks everything Leo ever produced. Early on, he found it in Proust. The Proustian subject desires unfathomable difference: his gaze is riveted to the beloved’s enigma, which it is his task to crack, a revelation that, he thinks, will enable his self-relation. But then, still in Proust, we have the buttercups: the field of yellow that, even though the flowers look like egg yolks, cannot be “known” through the consumption that is the fate of Marcel’s beloveds; rather, they can be merely contemplated with a dazed aesthetic pleasure. We cannot but be enthralled by the world’s fateful messages; but having been thus fascinated, different interests can distract us from our interrogative projects, our will to know.
The Freudian text carries the same doubleness. Leo agreed with Foucault that psychoanalysis was one of the discourses that have trained us into Proustian subjects: we seek hidden knowledge about our selves in the world; we are ready to pull this world apart to get our hands on the treasure. Yet Freud’s rhetorical performance also suggested that our aggression is stymied by other—dissipative, masochistic—pleasures. Freud theorized our loving hatred of the world, but he also exemplified the movements where the inquisitorial self is dismissed in favor of shared frivolities.
***
Leo sought in such frivolities the possibility of—in the phrase he borrowed from Foucault—“new relational modes.” Like many a true thinker, he only ever thought about one thing. He knew that time is short. I admired his ability to cut through the bullshit, to pay no deference to whatever were the moment’s pieties: he refused to regurgitate what an instant earlier may have been a delightful provocation but had already ossified into yet another phantasm in our dogmatic slumber.
***
At a dinner, Leo told me of his earliest memory: his family fleeing the Bronx in the night because the father, a restaurateur, had run afoul of the local mafia. Is this why he often repeats in his writing that, rather than submitting to (what Adam Phillips might call) protection rackets—by, say, “subversively reiterating” their demands—we “simply leave” the family or “simply desert” the fortress or “simply disappear” from the scene of our subjection?
***
From the social-media tributes to Leo I happily gleaned that the days when he was interpellated as the daddy of “the antisocial thesis in queer theory” are behind us. In the “debate club paradigm” of queer theorizing, his arguments in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” and Homos were frequently contrasted with those of various “queer utopianisms.” As is inevitably the case in such models, the juxtaposition is neither incorrect nor adequate. Leo’s thought was always, from its beginnings sixty years ago, invested in the two seemingly incompatible orientations he found in Proust and Freud: our “intractable” antagonism to the world and the ways in which we are greeted by the world’s forms upon our arrival. Riffing on Baudelaire’s horizontalized Swedenborgianism, he suggests that we are, before we are, already out there; the world waits for our arrival with its network of correspondences.
***
Just as Thoughts and Things had been published, I attended a reading group at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, the one remaining gay bookstore in New York City. There were perhaps six of us, and I was preparing to enlighten the crowd (I mean, I was obviously the most widely read) concerning the Cartesian complexities of the book’s title. Before I could do so, a dashing young man said that he found it interesting how, at some point of their career, a writer can begin to title his books however, calling them, you know, like, “thoughts and things.” It struck me immediately: Leo would have loved this.
***
For many of us, Leo Bersani was a foundational figure not in terms of foci of interests but in terms of how thinking can move. He showed us what is available to thought.
***
I wish Leo had had time to write about Ingmar Bergman. Or Woody Allen’s and Pedro Almodóvar’s later work, the saturated melodrama of Café Society and the boisterous silliness of I’m So Excited. He really should have written about late ABBA, the darkness of The Visitors and “The Day Before You Came.” It wasn’t to be. Long-awaited darkness fell.
***
The last time I saw Leo, he couldn’t take his eyes off the sky. “What an astonishing day,” he kept saying, riveted to the cloudless Arizona expanses, as we—he and Sam and I—were having a wet lunch outside. I think he was, as he would have put it in his analysis of Bruno Dumont’s film Humanité, staring: immobilized by a fascination with the irredeemable world. This was a fascination that did not seek to dismantle the object so as to plunder its secrets. It was an availability to a fathomable otherness, what on the last page of Thoughts and Things he calls “nonfamilial familiarity.” He was always throwing his arms around the world.
Mikko Tuhkanen is professor of English at Texas A&M University.
“Nothing is more ominous than the unanimous reverence with which Volumes 2 and 3 have been received in France, or the hagiographical industry already at work on—really against—Foucault’s life and writing.” This sentence, written by Bersani following Foucault’s death as he reflected on the final installments of The History of Sexuality, came to mind when I heard that Leo himself had died. The temptation of hagiography is never more beguiling than in the wake of a great thinker’s death. What struck me when I first read that sentence over thirty years ago was the notion of a “hagiographical industry” gearing up to preserve—but only by reducing, embalming, and fossilizing—a profoundly recalcitrant body of thought. The noble beneficence of the industry cloaks its destructiveness. Bersani named, as if in anticipation, the risk of the present moment in which we seek to memorialize him and his work, spurred on by that relentless pressure to idealize the newly dead.
If one of the things I most admire about his writing stems from its resistance to all our idealizing impulses—impulses he analyzed under the rubric of “the culture of redemption”—then I also appreciated his characteristic irreverence in conversation. Once, when running late for dinner with Leo in San Francisco, I made the mistake of trying to outpace California Highway Patrol on Route 101. Relishing my tale of an encounter with the officer who caught me, Leo began to improvise a set of facetious remarks he’d deliver at my funeral, “because your speeding will surely send you to an early grave.” For him, now as much as then, it was never the time for sentimentality, no matter how serious the subject.
His irreverence toward the orthodoxies of queer theory meant that he could be a part of that field of inquiry only by being permanently outside it. In 1998, after reading one of my manuscripts, Leo remarked, “You’ve become very queer, haven’t you?” It was not meant as a compliment. We spoke on the phone while he was writing Homos, but I had no opportunity to read that book until it reached print. With the subsequent book, Caravaggio’s Secrets, Leo began sending me the manuscripts of everything he wrote. I was never his student, never his lover, and never his colleague; our friendship evolved independently of those relational structures, simply through the repeated exchange of writing and conversation. Though he was older than my father, we somehow spoke as equals about sex, about psychoanalysis, about aesthetic subjectivity. That ongoing exchange—some of which appeared in print but most of which occurred in restaurants or cafes and on park benches—has been my primary intellectual relationship of the past quarter century. Does it go without saying that the conversation hasn’t ceased with his death, that the back-and-forth continues inside me?
Two days after Leo died, I received author copies of Hatred of Sex, the book I wrote with Oliver Davis. As its title suggests, Hatred of Sex may be read as an elaboration, in different contexts and idioms, of the sentence that opens “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” Bersani’s famous essay from 1987 (“There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it.”). It would be an understatement to say that my joy in the book’s publication is tinged with sadness that Leo will never be able to read it. Yet the book remains part of my ongoing dialogue with him, even as it is also the result of dialogues with Oliver Davis, another intellectual whose home discipline is in French. Hatred of Sex endeavors, in part, to historicize “Is the Rectum a Grave?” in the context of 1980s debates about sexuality—to put Bersani’s essay in its place, as it were—at the same time as it tries to reanimate his best insights for our contemporary political moment. Beyond anything it says about his work, our book is inspired by Leo. And there is comfort to be taken in the circumstance that I now have Oliver to assume Leo’s role of expressing exasperated amusement at my execrable French. He lives on through his published work but also through the echoes of his voice in other conversations. I continue to hear Leo, as well as to read him.
Now I think back to an afternoon in October 2016, when we sat in his Philadelphia living room discussing drafts of two chapters from what would become his final book, Receptive Bodies. Later, in notebook pages containing my scribbled thoughts about “Staring” (that last book’s stunning final chapter), I found I’d written, in large capital letters, LEARN FROM LEO—a reminder to the part of myself which had yet to fully grasp that learning from Leo was what I’ve been doing all along (never his student, I am always his student). From my notes I gather that what I was instructing myself to learn was the distinctive way in which he put an essay together, his mode of composition. Yes, he wrote everything by hand in notebooks; and, yes, his prose style was always a singular pleasure to encounter. But in that last chapter of what turned out to be his final book, he reflected explicitly on a style of thinking that he calls “essayistic” and “inconclusive.” It is not only a style of writing and argumentation but embodies an ethical relation to the world, one less concerned with mastery. Because the “essayistic” refuses the systematization that modern philosophy demands, it goes some way toward defeating the monumentalization of thought that hagiography produces once it sets to work on a major thinker. For me Bersani’s thinking remains valuable precisely insofar as it resists memorialization. So, what I want to say is: I love him, I miss him, I can’t believe he’s gone; but please let us not have, now or ever, Saint Leo.
Tim Dean is the James M. Benson Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
In May 2010 my visit to the University of Chicago overlapped by chance with that of Leo Bersani. Told I was on campus, he emailed to ask if I’d like to have dinner with him. Profoundly flattered, I accepted almost immediately, for I had first to set aside a flutter of trepidation. Leo and I came to know each other professionally in the 1980s when I was an editor of October and he was one of the journal’s favorite and loyal contributors. Beyond this, however, I shared with him a commitment to psychoanalytic thinking. The trepidation that held me back was rooted in the enormous admiration I had for his work, which manifested itself most dramatically in a specific encounter with it.
I do not recall what month it was in 1987 when I walked into the tiny October “headquarters,” slightly late, expecting just another day at the office. The issue we were putting together was number 43, which was devoted to the AIDS crisis, a topic outside my intellectual expertise, or so I thought. It was Douglas Crimp who proposed the issue, and so it was he who was primarily responsible for it; all I had to do was assist him with the editing and layout. When I walked in, Douglas was absorbed in reading the most recently received contribution, Leo’s “Is the Rectum a Grave?” “That’s the title?,” I asked as I went into the enjoining cubicle to read the text myself. I do not feel adequate to describe my response to Leo’s essay. I had always in my own way fought back hard against those who dismissed Freud and psychoanalysis as irrelevant—or worse: pernicious—as if it were some ornate, antiquated machine with an excessive number of bells and whistles that served no purpose, or—worse—a Trojan horse sent in to undermine the polity. The unforgettable opening line of Leo’s essay, “There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it,” seemed to me to put paid to all the vague grumblings against psychoanalysis, which in this essay shows up—in the flesh, as it were—to grapple with the real world.[1]
Part of the fascination of the essay’s declarative opening is the way it accommodates the seemingly delicate “do not like.” The quotations that mark the essay’s threshold betray a much stronger reaction: a violent disgust or revulsion, which sex is capable of eliciting and must be swallowed, overcome, or made use of by those who engage in sex. The intent of Leo, however, is to leave no one off the hook. His choice of the word like, cannot be read as it were merely borrowed from the vocabulary of prudes or those who wish to hide their lasciviousness behind a prudish or proper facade. The reference to a milder form of reserve toward sex serves instead a blanketing function. It spreads itself over everyone. There is no one who likes sex, but this not due to a mere or occasional squeamishness. The AIDS crisis forces us finally to confront the fact that sex is something no one likes. Or: it is not something anyone can cozy up to.
The argument only appears to depart from Freud when it insists that the problem of sex is not merely that the discomfort we all—in large or small part—feel toward it leads to a subjective or cultural repression of it. At play here is what Freud called secondary repression, which reacts to what it wishes not to confront by pushing it out of consciousness, that is, by negating it psychically. Leo’s point is much more profound: the difficulty of sex stems from primary repression, that is from the fact that human existence is not propped up by any foundation or ground. The crucial negativity associated with sex is not the one that fends it off by pushing it away but the negativity of this primordially withdrawn ground. For, sex can be defined as the affirmation of this latter negativity. Sexual pleasure is directed not at persons or objects but at this breach in existence. This sounds, I know, like an abstract argument – and all the more so because it is impossible, and not my point, to flesh it out here. My point is that “Is the Rectum a Grave?” is unprecedented in the way it makes the case for this seemingly abstract argument by identifying the ways it was manifesting itself during the crisis AIDS. It is one thing to point out what many could already see, the way official policies and proper people fended off scenes of sexual debauchery conjured in their febrile imaginations, another to see what others could not. Namely, that a whole “culture of redemption” was more than happy to celebrate sex as long as sex—the negativity it affirms—is removed from it. If a multiplicity of sexes had begun to emerge it was to fend off the damage sex visits on identity.
“Is the Rectum a Grave?” forced me to reread all of Leo’s work. I had learned a great deal from it in my first reading, but this time I knew how to look for the “clinical” element in it, the way it approaches and responds to the world in which we live. In his work Leo accords sex an ontological dignity, not in some idealizing sense, of course, but insofar as he conceives it as an act of dispossession from which something unprecedented can be brought forth.
My Chicago dinner with Leo lasted hours. As our conversation ranged over various outrageous topics, I lost my trepidation but not my awe. Many more dinners followed, as well as a trip to the ballet, and a conference at which I obliged Leo to come up with a theory of fatigue (which he did). Like many others, I would have preferred that these delightful encounters continue indefinitely.
Joan Copjec is professor of modern culture and media at Brown University.
[1] Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?”: and Other Essays (Chicago, 2010).
Leo Bersani’s thought was ill-served by its association with mine and its specious categorization as antisocial or antirelational.[1] Excepting our late friend, Lauren Berlant, no contemporary critic more brilliantly engaged relational possibilities or more thoroughly invested in the utopianism of the inaccurate replication that Leo registered in homoness. What Leo resisted was neither relation nor sociality per se but the differences policed by categories, knowledges, and communitarian norms.
Characterizing the aim of his writing as “a type of reflexiveness—a type of blocked thought, of speculative repetition—to which the notions of areas and boundaries are profoundly alien,”[2] Leo discerned a similar resistance at work in the aesthetic, which, as he wrote in The Freudian Body, “moves away from, or ‘back from’ the very capacity to institute the categorical as a relevant mode of differentiating and structuring our experience of reality” (F, p. 5). He returned to this figure of moving back in his essay “The Will to Know,” where the “aesthetic adventure” entails “moving backward” to the moment when the work of art exists as no more than a possibility, as “the Mallarmean page blanche that precedes and, more profoundly, defies all realized art.”[3] In this blankness he found a space of “experimental initiation” where forms of being would emerge as expressions of being’s multiplicity, giving shape to the unintelligibility of being’s infinite future potential (“W,” p 166).
If I linger on this backward movement in looking back on my bond with Leo, it’s to think its temporality with regard to his “emphasis on the future” and his investment, with Adam Phillips, in what they called an “impersonal intimacy” demanding, as Phillips put it, “the most inconceivable thing: to believe in the future without needing to personalize it.”[4] While this attachment to futurity might seem to put Leo at odds with the author of No Future, it actually sustains what Leo would call an “incongruous connectedness,” one where affirming and rejecting the future would differ less than one thinks.[5]
For Leo, moving backward meant eluding difference by retrieving the before of thought. He imagined this “before” as “impersonal intimacy,” like the mother-infant relation that Phillips adduces, citing Christopher Bollas, as a “‘being-with, as a form of dialogue’ that enables ‘the baby’s adequate processing of his existence prior to his ability to process it through thought.’”[6] Because language articulates thought through difference, this scene of utopic adequation stresses the infant’s exclusion from speech; but since the stake in the scene is relation, the infant must nonetheless enter what Bollas can only figure as “a form of dialogue.”
Does that phrase do more than pastoralize the incommensurability of two experiences? The mother, as subject of language, invariably personalizes the infant that, as yet, is not a subject, while the infant impersonalizes the mother it can’t, as yet, approach through thought. The aesthetic, for Leo, moves back toward the potential, always as yet unspoken, of that primal impersonalization, which can only touch infinity insofar as it’s infans.
For Leo, encountering this pure potential requires “a lessening of psychic subject-hood” and a “willingness not to be.”[7] Unlike the infant, the subject “mov[es] backward” by submitting “to the dissolution of the self [,] . . . to the loss of the very grounds of self-knowledge” (“W,” p 161). Leo may argue that this “retreat from the seriousness of stable identities or settled being” (FB, p. 9), “far from negativizing or simply erasing the finished being it leaves, actually expands it by potentializing it,” he acknowledges, nonetheless, its implication in the negativity of dissolution (“W,” p 165).
The hope of returning to the blank page of sameness after language has codified difference—so that difference, as Leo wrote in Homos, would be a “nonthreatening supplement to sameness”—thus depends on a break from the world as we know it and from ourselves as subjects of knowledge.[8] Moving backward toward an “unripe, virtual being” replete with futural possibility requires the undoing of organization, the unbinding of our cathexes, with the following consequences: “What all the different stimuli mentioned by Freud have in common is their ability to set affect free from psychic organization; unbound affect produces the excitement of jouissance” (“W,” pp 167, 159). This unbinding, as Leo reminded us, is also called the death drive.
While continuing to affirm the death drive as the key contribution of psychoanalysis, Leo hoped to “play to the side” of itin an effort to think “how . . . the problem of evil [might] be defined—and, to a certain extent, perhaps even resolved” by turning away from “the destructive drive” (FB, pp. 127, 128). Understood, however, as dissolving the differences required for categorical thought, as returning psychic energy to the mobility of the primary process, the death drive enacts the movement back to the blankness of pure potential that marks the impersonalization intended by Leo’s “emphasis on the future.”
With this the incongruous likeness of our projects comes into focus beyond their classification as antisocial theory. Leo’s “emphasis on the future,” like my rejection of futurity, opposes the fatality inherent in maintaining the identity-securing boundaries that let the world be “known” through difference. At the end of “Being and Notness,” an account of Pierre Bergounioux’s La Casse, Leo proposes the unlikeliest of social possibilities: that the narrator’s father takes on a role “analogous to maternity” and thus “help[s] to forestall the projection of dangerous difference into the world beyond the family, and the consequent temptation to return to the ambiguous protection of the family as retreat.”[9] This vision of unthreatened being before the introduction of “dangerous difference” leads Leo to conclude as follows: “If against all probabilities this did come to pass, much time will have gone by and, I suppose, like Bergounioux’s narrator—except that in disappearing he will have escaped from a world in which matter resists being different from itself, and I will have missed a utopic reality—I will no longer be here.”[10]
Were we equal to the aesthetic adventure of his texts, were we capable of “moving backward” to a future where we ceased to resist our self-difference, then the utopic reality to which Leo refers—inconceivable except at a cost whose statement must move us to mourn our loss of the Leo capable of writing, as if impersonally, “I will no longer be here”—that utopic reality would require this equally inconceivable predicate to regain the “promiscuous mobility” of being that, for Leo, is the infans: our not being here too (F, p. 54).
Lee Edelman is Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University.
[1] As I’ve argued elsewhere, these terms misname my own work’s engagement with a fundamental antagonism that might lead it to be seen, more precisely, as non-reparative or non-redemptive. But that’s a topic for another occasion; see Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (Durham, N.C., 2014), pp. xii–xiii.
[2] Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York, 1986), p. 5; hereafter abbreviated F.
[3] Bersani, “The Will to Know,” in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” and Other Essays (Chicago, 2010), p. 164; hereafter abbreviated “W.”
[4] Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies (Chicago, 2008), pp. 122, 27, 117.
[5] Bersani, “Illegitimacy,” in Thoughts and Things (Chicago, 2015), p. 29.
[6] Leo Bersani and Phillips, Intimacies, p.123; my emphasis.
[7] Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (London, 2004), pp. 6, 165; hereafter abbreviated FB.
[8] Bersani. Homos (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), p. 7.
[9] Leo Bersani, “Being and Notness,” in Thoughts and Things, p. 114.
I have been reading, rereading, and teaching the writings of Leo Bersani for a very long time but never with the intensity with which I have returned to his work over this last while. It has been my silent tribute and a way of insisting I have a connection—as much to the words on the page as to who he was—that will never die.
In fact the separation of the two—his words and his person—was always well-nigh impossible. First, because I can think of no one else who was so loyal to his theoretical and political principles in his lived life. I am not referring here to time spent at the gay baths, seized on by one commentator over this past month as the sign of “aesthetic frivolity,” relegating him to the world of light entertainment (he was never more deadly serious). Nor am I alluding to the way his loving relationships, full of care and kindness, managed to escape the most proprietorial of bourgeois, family norms. Rather what I am describing is the way his writing endlessly circles around the same limit—or off-limit—zone of human subjectivity where the ego shatters, to use one of his favorite words, and the coherence of selfhood is utterly undone. The more I have read, the more it has struck me that tracking this moment was, for Leo, a theoretical task which implicated him at the deepest level of his being. I would say that this task was at the core of his life, provided we add that death was no less in the frame. Living your life at its most sexually intense and psychically risky, I now hear him saying, is a way—the only way—to be able, or allow yourself, to die (to die one’s own death, which is the aim of all life according to Freud.) He was a visionary. To relinquish narcissism, to challenge the pseudo fortifications of a violent social order, means going beyond the edges of the knowable world.
Over the past couple of weeks, one moment from his writing has struck me with almost overwhelming force in this regard. It comes in the middle of his book on Caravaggio. Discussing St John the Baptist with a Ram (1602), Leo points to the provocative erotics of St. John’s look and his body, only to insist—through his unique form of meticulous attention—that the painting invites and forestalls that very seduction by means of the “multiple fanlike” structures of the image which implicate each limb and gesture in shapes and a space beyond itself, “opening out centrifugally, countering the centripetal pull of the youth’s gaze.”[1] Ventriloquising the boy, he writes: “Join me, although where I am is somewhere between two realms of being, between my physical, individuated existence and my being as a disseminated connectedness throughout the universe.” We are talking about a “metaphysical fantasy” that leads this figure into a world beyond the world (C, p. 82). And then, in an unexpected gesture only Leo could have got away with, he grounds that otherworldly nature in the painterly detail and precision of the boy’s face or, rather, in one particular detail, the “anomalous creases under his eyes”—anomalous because he is a still a boy and he is perfect—which he reads as the sign of the time it has taken him to reach these other forms of metaphysical belonging. It is 1998, and this is one of his coauthored books, but, whether this is my metaphysical fantasy or not, I believe these to be Leo’s words. As I was reading them, a scene resurfaced in my mind. It is sometime in the 1990s and Leo and I are sitting in a café in Paris talking about eyes and aging (eyes being the giveaway), whereupon he pointed at the intense creases under his own eyes, creases that no one could miss, which indeed spoke of his age but which also accentuated his not inconsiderable beauty.
So, I find myself asking, might not this be one of the rare moments in his writing where, with all due equivocation, he is talking about himself? Is he not laying out the price, and value, of the struggle to go beyond oneself into more expansive and generous forms of affinity? Already in 1998, I see him as anticipating, if not embracing, his death. These are the last lines of the chapter: “The creases under the eyes of Caravaggio’s youth are the anticipatory effect of the time it would take him to join his metaphysical being, a journey to which he must sacrifice his youth, and perhaps even his very life” (C, p. 83). I think Leo knew exactly what, in his writing and his life, he was asking of himself. Just as he knew that the casual encounter in the bath house, far from being glib or merely pleasurable, was freighted with death (the very point of his most infamous essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?”).[2] To put it another way, he was always on the journey that would end but that would also begin—while refusing any glimmer of denial or false comfort—with his own death. Or perhaps, this idea just helps me to think that he had always been preparing for the day he would head off into the far distance, leaving the rest of us grief-stricken on the shore.
Jacqueline Rose is professor of humanities at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.
[1] Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), p. 81; hereafter abbreviated C.
[2] See Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?”: and Other Essays (Chicago, 2010).
On hearing of the death of Leo Bersani (1931-2022) we asked the University of Chicago Press to provide free access to the essays that he published in Critical Inquiry, which began with “‘The Culture of Redemption’: Marcel Proust and Melanie Klein” (1986). We are also hosting a small number of tributes to him.
We hope that these memorial tributes, along with ready access to Leo Bersani’s Critical Inquiry essays, will prompt our readers to revisit his work and renew their sense of his contributions to their understanding of the critical project.
In the Moment 