the humanities as an export commodity

The Humanities as an Export CommodityAuthor(s): Peter BrooksSource: Profession, (2008), pp. 33-39Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25595880 .

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The Humanities as an

Export Commodity

PETER BROOKS

In proposing my title, I intended to reflect on three or so decades in which

the interpretive disciplines in the humanities, in the wake of structuralism and poststructuralism, with the revival of psychoanalysis and the invention of feminist theory, and with the expanding universe of culture as the play ground of study, did appear to generate paradigms of analysis and under

standing that began to move across the border, sometimes with fanfare, sometimes in unmarked vans. There was a sense in the social science and

professional republics at our frontiers that the humanities had developed methods (often themselves derived from such disciplines as linguistics and

anthropology) that enabled important questions about the nature of the human animal as sign-bearing and sense-making.

To my mind, these questions?posed in the structural study of myth, for

instance, or in the analysis of the narrative construction of reality?remain important today. A few weeks ago, some students in my introduction-to narrative class, itself a creation of the 1970s, told me it had changed their lives. But I think the more common reaction was expressed recently by one of my colleagues at Yale Law School, who said she no longer looks to the interpretive humanities for inspiration. History, yes, but after that it's political philosophy and economics again. The notion that the law and-literature movement, as it became known, was going to revolutionize the study of law through the incursion of the suspicion-laden methods of

The author is currently Mellon Visiting Professor at Princeton University. A version of this

paper was presented at the 2001 MLA convention in Chicago.

33 PROFESSION 2008



34 HI THE HUMANITIES AS AN EXPORT COMMODITY

reading associated with hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, feminism, and de

construction may have come to very little in the long run, as Julie Stone

Peters argued in the pages of PMLA three years ago. It's as if the body

eventually rejected the transplant. If you have to go to court today, it is

unlikely that your attorney will be citing Stanley Fish before the presiding

judge. And while interpretive method from literary and cultural study has

infected neighboring disciplines such as history and sociology, and farther

provinces such as economics and even medicine (there is, for instance, a

narrative-medicine movement), one nevertheless has the feeling that the

humanities' big day as a cultural exporter is over.

I don't want to try to assess blame for this, though I would mention in

passing that many who ought to have applauded and abetted the expor tation of humanistic concerns and paradigms were the loudest in their

denunciation of what the humanities had become: such guardians of the

official humanities as William Bennett and Lynne Cheney; the anointed

public intellectuals of Commentary, the New Criterion, the Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal; and those in our own ranks, from Camille Paglia to

Frederick Crews, from Andrew Delbanco to Anthony Grafton, who chose

to see academic humanists as having betrayed their commitment to trans

mit the great tradition and its values. I have agreed with certain critics of

the humanities that a facile politics often replaces critical thinking and

that critique aimed at the traditional father figures of Western thought is

often mindless, but I refuse to shoot the piano player. The piano player may not be playing his or her best, but he or she needs protection from

self-declared friends as well as enemies.

One of our problems, when we've seen the humanities as an export

nation, has been the tendency outside and even inside to offer a kind of

smarmy feel-good version of the humanities. Art, literature, and philoso

phy become value-added items, anodyne, enrichments of life, and they are

low-cost. One must begin by urging the distinction between the humani

ties and humanity. The humanities as we know them descend from the lit

terae humaniores, a product of Renaissance humanism's concern to restore

ancient texts and to learn to read them. The enterprise is human in that it

deals with human reflections on the human condition. Being human ought to make the enterprise humanizing but doesn't necessarily. We know the

reports of officers at Auschwitz who would listen rapturously to Mozart at

the end of a day of killing. We also know that much great literature and

art may be dedicated to false gods and carry in their current pernicious

ideological flotsam: think of Richard Wagner, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound,

Balzac, Dostoevsky, and a host of others. The student uprising at Colum

bia University in 1969 famously prompted Lionel Trilling to the response



PETER BROOKS ||| 35

"Modernism in the streets!" (see Diggins 267)?which I read as a recogni tion of the potentially violent and disruptive lesson of modernist writers.

So many of our most prized beacons of modernism echo in some manner

the old German Stein's advice to Jim in Conrad's novel: "In the destructive element immerse!" (246).

As secular scripture, literature is inadequate, subversive, at times dan

gerous. As Sartre put it in his autobiography, literature never saved anyone (211). The humanities can begin to make their address to the public sphere

only when their proponents speak with a clear sense of what their work can and cannot do. It is not salvific, it won't necessarily make you a better

person, it is not instrumental?it has precisely renounced the instrumental use of language and symbol in favor of something more reflective and me

diated. What the interpretive humanities have to offer the public sphere is ultimately and basically a lesson in how to read?with the nuance, com

plexity, and responsibility that we practice most of the time in our class rooms. The study of poetry, and the study of what we are doing and learn

ing when we study a poem, is a form of knowledge crucially important in the world now. I would inscribe myself in Shelley's camp, believing that

poets are the unacknowledged legislators of humankind. But to be in that

camp means to make an unremitting effort to say what poetry is and why its reading is a cognitive enterprise with real-world consequences.

Unfortunately the failure of responsible reading has put the United States into the camp of rogue nations, nations that are in violation of the

most cherished principles of international as well as domestic law. I re fer to the torture debate that has unfolded since it became apparent that the response to 9/11 included renditions, secret prisons, enhanced inter

rogation techniques. A host of commentators, not all on the right, not all

stupid, have come forward to justify, in casuistic scenarios of apocalypse, practices and ideologies I thought were universally if tacitly recognized as

wholly incompatible with the morality of American democracy. One of the most notorious documents to emerge from the hidden recesses of our Jus tice Department?only one among many, alas?is a memo dated 1 August 2002, addressed to Presidential Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, and largely drafted by Professor

John Yoo of Boalt Hall. It was eventually replaced but remains a monitory example of legal interpretive reading.

The memo expresses the interpretation of the Justice Department's Of fice of Legal Counsel, once a sanctum of authoritative legal opinion, of "standards of conduct under the Convention against Torture and Other

Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment or Punishment as imple mented by Sections 2340-2340A of title 18 of the United States Code." It



36 III THE HUMANITIES AS AN EXPORT COMMODITY

begins from the traditional premise that "when interpreting a statute, we

must give words their 'ordinary or natural' meaning" (Leocal 382). The

Supreme Court in 2004 reaffirmed this traditional commitment of statu

tory interpretation to the Plain Meaning Rule, affectionately known as the

PMR (see Sinclair). The Bybee-Yoo memo starts from the same premises. "The key statu

tory phrase in the definition of torture is the statement that acts amount

to torture if they cause 'severe physical or mental pain or suffering.' In

examining the meaning of a statute, its text must be the starting point"

(Bybee 5). But, says Yoo, the statute doesn't define severe. Absent such a

definition, he continues, "we construe a statutory term in accordance with

its ordinary or natural meaning." To find that ordinary and natural mean

ing, he turns to Webster's New International Dictionary (in the 1935 edition, for some reason), then to the American Heritage Dictionary and the OED, to discover that severe "conveys that the pain or suffering must be of such

a high level or intensity that the pain is difficult for the subject to endure."

But this definition, however ordinary and natural, doesn't suit his pur

poses. So he searches for other possible uses of the phrase "severe pain" in the United States Code and discovers, as he puts it, "Significantly, the

phrase 'severe pain' appears in statutes defining an emergency medical

condition" (5). "Significantly" is his own transition word here?and we

need to ask whether the use of "severe pain" in the medical context (for insurance purposes, for instance) is in fact more significant than any num

ber of other uses of severe, in statutes and in ordinary usage. This slide into

medical usage then allows Yoo to come up with his interpretation that the

severe pain that defines torture must involve damage that rises "to the level

of death, organ failure, or the permanent impairment of a significant body function" (Bybee 6). He now has us well into the emergency room.

Next, Yoo interprets the language used to define "severe mental pain or suffering" in the torture statute, which includes "the prolonged mental

harm caused by or resulting from (A) the intentional infliction or threat

ened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering" (6). To prolong, his Web

ster's (1988 edition this time) tells him, is to "lengthen in time," and this

definition permits him to segue to, "Put another way, the acts giving rise

to the harm must cause some lasting, though not necessarily permanent,

damage." This transition suggests to him that "prolonged mental harm"

(words not used elsewhere in the United States Code) might resemble

the posttraumatic stress disorder, lasting months or even years, noticed

in torture victims. This argument is thoroughly circular. It leads, over the

next three paragraphs, to the claim that torture, for it to be torture, re

quires a specific intent to cause prolonged mental harm by one of the



PETER BROOKS ||| 37

predicate acts listed in the statute, thus the good-faith belief of defendants

that the acts they committed would not amount to the acts forbidden by the statute constitutes a "complete defense to such a charge," of torture (8).

We may uneasily sense that we are witnessing a free play of the signifier, the sort that literary critics and philosophers are sometimes accused of

sponsoring. The truly "deconstructive" cast of Yoo's interpretation of USC ?2340

comes in the next section, which takes up "Harm caused by or resulting from predicate acts." These acts include, inter alia, "the administration or

application, or threatened administration or application, of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses

or the personality." Since these substances are not further defined, Yoo sets

out to make some distinctions. Here a longer quotation is necessary:

This subparagraph, however, does not preclude any and all use of drugs.

Instead, it prohibits the use of drugs that "disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality." To be sure, one could argue that this phrase applies only to "other procedures," not the application of mind-altering substances.

We reject this interpretation because the terms of Section 2340 (2) expressly indicate that the qualifying phrase applies to both "other pro cedures" and the "application of mind-altering substances." The word

"other" modifies "procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses." As an adjective, "other" indicates that the term or

phrase it modi

fies is the remainder of several things. See Webster's Third New Interna tional Dictionary 1598 (1986) (defining "other" as "the one that remains of two or more") Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary 835 (1985) (defining "other" as "being the one (as of two or more) remaining or

not included"). Or put another way, "other" signals that the words to

which it attaches are of the same kind, type, or class as the more specific item previously listed. Moreover, where statutes couple words or phrases

together, it "denotes an intention that they should be understood in the same general sense." Norman Singer, 2A Sutherland on Statutory Con

struction ? 47:16 (6th ed. 2000); see also Beecham v. United States, 511 U.S. 368, 371 (1994) ("That several items in a list share an attribute counsels in favor of interpreting the other items as possessing that attribute as well.")

Thus, the pairing of mind-altering substances with procedures calculated

to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality and the use of "other"

to modify "procedures" shows that the use of such substances must also cause profound disruption of the senses or personality. (10)

To use the "or" of "or other procedures"?which are of course supposed to

be of the same sort?to argue that "disrupt profoundly" somehow controls and limits the meaning of "mind-altering" seems to me far from common

sensical, a parsing of vocabulary and syntax that is arbitrary and even a bit demonic. Whether or not this meaning was intended by Congress, the way



38 HI THE HUMANITIES AS AN EXPORT COMMODITY

Yoo claims to find the meaning derives from an ungoverned and unscrupu lous reading that uses?very selectively?dictionary definitions to produce arcane and obfuscating interpretations. It's like a parody of a deconstruc tive reading written by Frederick Crews.

I refrain from citing the next paragraph, which takes us into the mean

ing of disrupt, as "to break asunder; to part forcibly; to rend"?here we are

back with the 1935 Webster's and a definition my 1975 American Heritage finds "obsolete": what about a more usual definition, such as "to upset the order of"? But Yoo needs to come out, at the end of his paragraph, with, "Those acts must penetrate to the core of an individual's ability to perceive the world around him, substantially interfering with his cognitive abilities, or fundamentally alter his personality" (11). Abu Ghraib doesn't make it on

this definition, though the destroyed tapes almost surely would have put the interrogation of Abu Zabaydah over the line.

Yoo is providing the interpretation he knows his masters want. It's in

terpretation untethered by any ethics of reading, interpretation as domi

nation, Humpty Dumpty style:

"When / use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it

means just what I choose it to mean?neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so

many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master?

that's all." (Carroll 186)

When dealing with the torture memos, I find it hard to get beyond moral outrage, which I think is necessary but hardly sufficient. I really want to stress two points. First, it is important that we humanists remind

the legal profession that legal interpretation stands in wider contexts of

understanding and meaning. The law needs to cleanse itself in the human

istic tradition. Second, those trained rigorously in the reading of poetry? those who have taken seriously, for example, William Wimsatt's old essay "What to Say about a Poem"?could not permit themselves so arbitrary and phony an act of interpretation as Yoo performs. We do not necessar

ily export the humanitarian, but we can promote and enforce responsible

reading.

Coleridge claims that he was taught a lesson by his "severe master," the

Reverend James Bowyer:

I learned from him, that poetry, even that of the loftiest and seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a

logic of its own, as severe as that of science, and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more and more fugitive causes. In the truly great poets, he would say,



PETER BROOKS ||| 39

there is a reason assignable not only for every word, but for the position of every word.... (Brower 7)

We humanists do have reasons assignable. We still can and must be export ers of a responsive and responsible critical reading that says no to cover-up and cant and that calls torture by its name.

WORKS CITED

Brower, Reuben A. "Reading in Slow Motion." In Defense of Reading. Ed. Brower and

Richard Poirier. New York: Dutton, 1962. 3-21. Print.

Bybee, Jay S. "Memorandum for Alberto R. Gonzales, Counsel to the President, Re:

Standards of Conduct for Interrogation under 18 U.S.C. ?? 2340-2340A." 1 Aug. 2002. The Bybee Torture Memo. TomJoad.org. Web. 13 June 2008.

Carroll, Lewis. Through the Loo king-Glass. New York: NAL-Signet, 1960. Print.

Conrad, Joseph. Lord Jim. London: Penguin, 1989. Print.

Diggins, John Patrick. The Proud Decades: America in War and in Peace, 1941-1960. New York: Norton, 1989. Print.

Leocal v. Ashcroft. 125 Supreme Court of the US 377, 382.9 Nov. 2004. FindLaw. Web. 17 Oct. 2008.

Peters, Julie Stone. "Law, Literature, and the Vanishing Real: On the Future of an

Interdisciplinary Illusion." PMLA 120.2 (2005): 442-53. Print. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Les mots. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. Print.

Sinclair, Michael. A Guide to Statutory Interpretation. New York: Lexis, 2000. Print.

Wimsatt, W. K., Jr. "What to Say about a Poem." College English 24.5 (1963): 377-83.

JSTOR. Web. 13 June 2008.



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