I have been thinking a lot recently about the solitary humanist -- the ideal, derived from the Romantic Era, of the great mind communing with itself. That’s because we’re considering starting a humanities center at my own institution, and I’ve been asking what we hope to accomplish -- and with whom we’ll be working.
Humanities centers range from those that offer faculty members release time from teaching and administrative duties, so that they can pursue research, to those that bring scholars together to study and discuss a specific topic or intellectual agenda for the year. In all of the centers, collaboration of one sort or another -- whether through formal seminars or required attendance at lunches -- is considered valuable, both to the intellectual projects of individual scholars and to the humanities more generally. The centers strive to disrupt the solitary tasks of research and writing and to encourage humanists to talk to one another.
Why is such collaboration deemed so important? And why is it sometimes so difficult?
The answers to those questions are complicated and intertwined, perhaps because the ideal of individual authorship and genius, so prized in the humanities, often contributes to ineffective models of intellectual innovation and creates poor departmental and university citizens. A humanities center conceived with an even broader collaborative model in mind can help to resolve those issues.
I hasten to add that I am not arguing that humanists are intrinsically more disputatious than other academics. That cliche often arises in discussions of the humanities, and I don’t believe it to be true. I have been in my new job as vice-provost for interdisciplinary studies long enough to see that the humanities don’t have a corner on contention. Politics is politics, and scientists and social scientists don’t handle disagreements any better than humanists do. The news media sometimes seem more invested in covering disputes among humanists than among scholars in other fields, but it’s hard to think of a discipline that doesn’t have its share of intellectual disputes or office politics.
That said, the humanities do operate in ways that have an impact on how individuals interact with one another, as well as on how new ideas evolve.
First, treating knowledge as the preserve of an individual can foster nostalgia. The humanities are one of the few intellectual areas that offer enormous cultural rewards -- from both the profession and the larger public -- for hanging on to theories and methods 20 years out of date. In what other field would distinguished scholars be applauded for the tenacity with which they refuse to change an idea? It’s hard to imagine a scientist continuing to champion cold fusion or argue for the existence of the brontosaurus after such theories or classification schemes have been repudiated, and even harder to imagine the culture at large demanding the restoration of those outmoded constructs. (I, for one, miss the brontosaurus, but cannot imagine writing editorials in The New York Times accusing paleontologists of sinister motives and “scientific correctness” in banning it from our nation’s schoolbooks.)
Yet in the humanities, the public clamors for the intellectual equivalent of the brontosaurus: the stereotypical pipe-smoking English professor in his tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, making timeless pronouncements on high culture -- even when that professor has long since given up smoking and changed his pronouncements. Recent films attest to just how conservative public attitudes can be. For example, most contemporary scholars acknowledge that Shakespeare was inspired not only by the “Dark Lady” of his sonnets, but probably by a male muse (and possibly a male lover) as well. But in Shakespeare in Love, the love interest is none other than Gwyneth Paltrow. Flat earth, anyone?
Second, and conversely, the humanistic ethic of individuality helps to breed disputation and disrespect as the preferred model of intellectual interchange -- disrespect for what has gone before, what goes on in other fields in the humanities, and what goes on in the office next to our own. The culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s recapitulated earlier divisive moments in the humanities in the 20th century: Think of the manifestoes that urged literary critics in the ‘30s and ‘40s to move away from historical and sociological analysis, and that ushered in the New Criticism’s passionate attention to textual interpretation without regard to historical context. That revolution in the definition of the goals and function of literary criticism not only alienated dozens of prominent critics; it also summarily excluded several dozen writers (from Frederick Douglass to Meridel LeSueur), as well as whole genres (such as slave narratives and labor songs), from literary anthologies and the literary canon.
Finally, most scholars in the humanities have little contact with their colleagues, aside from departmental meetings or other administrative chores. The most frequent lament of humanists, “I have no time for my work,” often means “I have to spend too much time with other people and cannot concentrate on my individual research and writing.” A humanist often views collective academic life as antithetical to individual intellectual accomplishment. After all, it is the latter that gets one tenure, fame, and outside offers.
I remember a professor of rhetoric at another university saying, with wise bemusement, that he realized one day that he had gone a full two months without a single interaction with another member of his department. The first time he even saw his colleagues was at a department meeting where people voted on hiring priorities for the next five years. “I found myself hating my colleagues for voting differently than I did. I felt they were deliberately voting in a way that would undercut me -- then I realized most of them didn’t have a clue who I was, or why I wanted what I did. Nor did I have a sense of their motivations or desires.” He meant the anecdote as an extreme case, but he’s surely not the only person to realize the impossibility of our strange lives: creativity performed in isolation, punctuated by two- or three-hour meetings where the professional stakes are at their highest.
What if the humanities adopted a different model for intellectual interchange? Imagine if ideas in the humanities evolved not in response to public -- and adversarial -- diatribes in magazines, journals, and conference panels, but in a regular, even routine, manner, the equivalent of a science laboratory. In a lab -- or at least the platonic ideal of a lab -- discovery of one sort or another is the shared, overt goal. The very nature of a laboratory is antithetical to two of the humanities’ twinned weaknesses: the reluctance to change and the tearing down of what has come before. Rather, labs are built around the process of discovery, and discovery is rooted in the practice of what is already known (past experiments, lab technique). Sometimes the steps forward are small, sometimes gigantic, but they’re almost always built on the foundation of previous experiments and ideas.
A lab supports work that is new, and it concomitantly requires collaboration across fields and disciplinary subfields, as well as across generations. Senior investigators work alongside advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students. To be a cohesive unit (and to stay competitive for the next grant cycle), the principal investigator has to be attuned to the ideas and issues raised by the lab assistants. Itinerant postdoctoral students -- free of both their formative institution and the one in which they will eventually achieve tenure -- are a staple in many sciences; their role is to bring fresh perspectives to the lab, and then to take new, collaboratively gained insights to their next academic home.
The humanities could borrow from the collaborative aspects of the lab, where even the most senior and junior members count on one another, and where joint publication and grant applications acknowledge and formalize a structure of mutual dependency. The Oedipal “anxiety of influence” so championed by humanists is counterproductive for both junior and senior members of a science lab.
I am not suggesting that the humanities adopt the grant-based system that fuels the contemporary lab. (The high intellectual costs of experimentation driven by capital are the topic of another article.) I am suggesting that the humanities borrow the collaborative aspects of lab culture. In most cases, new knowledge would probably be produced by single authors; but in some cases, truly collaborative work might emerge. Certainly, the explosion of reading groups, faculty seminars, writing groups, multiple-author books, and, especially, collaborations using multimedia and new technology already suggests some welcome signs of new, more-collective models of authorship. More and more, the humanities are being transformed by such collaborative ventures as The Heath Anthology of American Literature, produced through a more genuinely joint process than are most anthologies, and landmark collections of essays such as The Cultural Studies Reader and The Cultures of United States Imperialism, which were collectively planned and edited. Before such writing endeavors can be widely embraced (especially by junior members of the profession), however, humanists will have to figure out how to evaluate and appreciate collaboration.
Even if collaborative writing wouldn’t always be the outcome of a humanities lab, collaborative thinking could be. Humanities centers set up like labs would be most productive in those situations where no solitary thinker -- no matter how brilliant or creative -- could think through a complex problem as comprehensively as a group of thinkers from different fields, with different areas of expertise, different disciplinary training and biases, and from different intellectual generations.
That kind of thinking, it must be emphasized, would require re-education, precisely because the humanities have been set up not to pool information, insights, and interpretations, but, more often than not, to express disciplinary contempt for one another. My partner, Ken Wissoker, editor in chief at Duke University Press, likes to point out that English types often dismiss historians as fact-finding positivists, while some historians despise literature scholars who make elaborate interpretations based on scant command of the facts. Yet knowing the details, finding the facts, and prizing accuracy are important. So is being able to interpret data boldly and imaginatively. A humanities lab would help us to appreciate and take advantage of the fact that someone else takes pleasure in doing well just those tasks that we ourselves are least equipped for.
In a humanities lab, intellectual complementarity might be cheerfully exploited. Consensus and agreement would not be the goal there. The kind of humanities think tank that I’m advocating would give scholars space to disagree safely -- and to learn from the process of disagreement. That’s how discovery happens in a lab. If the explicit goal of the collective enterprise were discovery, disagreement might not be so threatening. And it might not be so necessary to resort to the hyperbolic rhetoric that characterizes the humanities -- the language of vanquishment and obliteration that cannot take us far without generating a predictable backlash.
That thinking is what has led to the creation of the John Hope Franklin Seminars for Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities at Duke. For the next four years, eight junior and senior faculty members each year, plus five or six advanced graduate or postdoctoral students, will think together about an intellectual and institutional problem, which will vary from year to year. The constant throughout the years, which we hope will produce a long-term legacy, will be the issue of race -- in its manifold and subtle manifestations, in the United States and globally, in politics and social theory, in literature and the arts, in theories of the mind and in the history of ideas. Our humanities lab will substitute a model of “enriched time” for “release time” (a curious concept: release from what?). The first semester will be spent in discussion of an intellectual topic; the second in considering how that topic can be integrated into the wider institution.
For example, in the first seminar -- which will begin next fall -- scholars from a cross-section of humanities and social-science departments will spend a semester discussing race and nation-building in Latin America, the Caribbean, Canada, and the United States. In the second semester, those same scholars will consider designing an inter-American-studies program. That is a particularly interesting prospect at Duke because, although several of our faculty members (including myself) have served as officers of the American Studies Association (one, Janice Radway, is the association’s current president), we have never had an American-studies program. On the other hand, we have very strong programs in Latin American and Canadian studies, as well as in African and African-American studies.
Several questions need to be answered: How can an intellectual conversation about broadening the definition of American studies lead to the development of a new institutional model for inter-American studies? How is it possible to create a center that includes the United States as a subject of study without allowing this nation’s power to dominate all future discussions, and thus undermine our conversations about Latin American studies, Canadian studies, and ethnic studies? Is it possible even to deal with such issues without reliving past fears of hegemony and subordination?
I don’t know the answer to those questions -- and that’s a good thing. If I, or anyone else, had the answers, we wouldn’t need a humanities lab to discover them. To deal with issues as complex and as fraught as these requires humanists to rethink not only the specific issue (in this case, inter-American studies), but also to re-evaluate their own models of both collaboration and innovation -- and maybe to even leave behind their identities as solitary humanists.
Cathy N. Davidson is vice-provost for interdisciplinary studies and a professor of English at Duke University. Her most recent book is Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory (Norton, 1998), a collaboration with the documentary photographer William Bamberger.
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