Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism
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Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism
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| ISBN-13: | 9781478005629 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/16/2019 |
| Series: | Thought in the Act |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 573 KB |
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CHAPTER 1
THE HUMAN(ITIES) IN CRISIS
As any reader of this book will know, we are living through a long moment now when the humanities in general, and perhaps literary studies in particular, are said to be in crisis. This so-called "crisis of the humanities" seems thoroughly entrenched in a polarized debate between sides offering what seem to me to be boring platitudes. On the one side, some claim that the humanities are inefficient, requiring more energies than are justified in the contemporary moment of neoliberal market capitalism. This position seeks to close, consolidate, and de-emphasize humanities programs at the university, leading to some very high-profile closures (and near closures) of literature and language programs. Those on the other side claim that the humanities are the core of the university, transmitting skills that are indispensable for any worker or even citizen in today's world. Although I don't want to give specific enunciations in this debate any more interpretive energy than they claim in the opinion pages of newspapers and the Chronicle of Higher Education, I thought it noteworthy that Michael Bérubé could tell CNN that humanities skills even make for good military and corporate leadership. To put this most schematically, one side sees the humanities as a waste of energy (intellectual, instructional, and especially institutional) while the other side expends enormous amounts of energy legitimating their existence in terms that are almost always entirely friendly to neoliberal capitalism. Reframing this in terms of energy and its circulation allows me to pose two questions that I'll dwell upon in this book. One, what would happen if we redirected energy from this tiresome treading in place (one that could not be more stuck in a rut)? And two, what possibilities might open for us if this reframing of the humanities in terms of energy allows us to see how the humanities is an assemblage that articulates energies across a wide variety of actants, many (or most) of whom are not human? What I am ultimately interested in here is pursuing a nonhumanist reconceptualization of the practices formerly called "humanist."
As an initial shock to our presentist sense of this crisis, I want to note that almost thirty years ago Terry Eagleton wrote that the crisis of the humanities is permanent, resulting from their structural "marginalization." He speculates that the role of the humanities is to produce the commonsense understanding of the human that allows for the relatively smooth functioning of social and economic life under capitalism. At times when this concept is in crisis, the humanities have to step in to clarify, critique, and shore up the human, but at moments of relative calm this crisis management role is less necessary. I'm not going to spend too much time on Eagleton, and I want to take his assessment with more than one grain of salt. Still, his speculations prompt an interesting question: Is it possible that in our time, the receding of support for and interest in the humanities stems, counterintuitively, from the taken-for-grantedness of the human today?
In one sense, this is an almost absurd, Pollyannaish question. Given the completely unworked-through grappling with evolution and climate change, the ongoing insufficiency of human rights law as a global political framework, the clusterfuck of genetic technologies and myriad other forms of biopolitics, and the increasingly well-known critique of the very notion of the human issuing from the so-called "posthumanism" in the academy, it seems like nothing today is less certain than the human. And yet — and this is a big "yet" — there is something sublime about how little these erosions at the edges of the human seem to disrupt the daily march of neoliberal capitalist empire articulated around a certain version of the human, one Sylvia Wynter calls "Man." Coursing through the entire complex of global relations in the wake of 1492, Man functions as a diagram: "a non-unifying immanent cause that is coextensive with the whole social field: the abstract machine is like the cause of the concrete assemblages that execute its relations; and these relations between forces take place 'not above' but within the very tissue of the assemblages they produce" (Deleuze 1988, 37).
This version of the human — Man — is the object of critique in the linked but divergent discourses of postcolonial and decolonial studies, critical studies of race, posthumanism, queer inhumanism, new materialisms, critical animal studies, nonanthropocentric ecologies, and biopolitics. And yet as long as they operate in the mode of critique alone, they don't seem to offer anything substantially different in relation to the operative model of Man. That is, they, like the antihumanist discourses they inherit and metabolize, end up being able to flourish in the neoliberal university of excellence. But, and here's where I begin to wildly speculate, I think the most interesting thing about these discourses and the ways that they can potentially coalesce is their capacity not for critique but for spurring experimental forms of thinking and being (or, still better, becoming, moving) together. It is not only possible but necessary — and indeed I put a great deal of energy into this in the first chapters of this book — to offer posthumanist critiques of educational institutions and the ways they produce Man as the only permissible mode of being human. What would be far more exciting, though, is to redirect this critical energy to articulating new, nonhumanist ways of thinking about how we learn, together, remembering that this "we" will not be coincident with humanity as a collective, or — and especially not — with some subset of this humanity (Man) pretending to represent the whole.
I have been disciplined to think about the labor of reading, writing, and teaching as a humanist. Without downplaying this, I will argue that we need a significantly enlarged sense of affective participation in the events of literacy if we are to track how literacy gets articulated in relation to a particular conception of the human (Man), and in relation to imperialist states during the period of modernity. Humanists have long claimed that unlike the natural and social sciences that strive for parsimony, they reveal the importance of complexity and overdetermination. And yet, humanism itself — as the disciplined restriction of attention to properly human concerns — disavows most of the material conditions for the emergence of its objects (human societies, practices, cultures) and its own functioning. To play with Paul de Man's phrase, all the insights of humanism are predicated on an unquestioned blindness to virtually the entirety of what matters. That doesn't mean those insights haven't been important — in a wide variety of ways — but it does mean that the whole affair has been restricted and restrictive (this is what "discipline" means, after all).
Rather than take for granted the boundedness of literature as it is humanistically framed, Animate Literacies reinserts literature into a much wider field of literacy practices. I attend to how a whole host of actants and agents animate literacy in scenes of pre- or aconscious collision and affective contact that I call the literacy situation. This situation is where intrahuman politics of race, class, gender, sexuality, and geography shape the conditions of emergence for literacy events that animate subjects and the political relations with which they are entangled. Bringing together sustained attention to dehumanizing violence with an attunement to what is often called the "more-than-human," this project is at once backward looking and critical (offering an account of how our present situation has emerged) and speculative — oriented toward dehumanist, nonstatist futures not just for the study of literature and literacy, but for politics more generally.
Back to the erosion of the human. There are a lot of problems today (decolonization, global warming, biotechnologies, factory farming, deforestation, etc.) that simply can't be thought in traditional humanist frames. So, maybe, it's time to stop looking for the human. Rather than trying to justify the existence of the humanities by positioning humanist education as a crucial piece of the narrative formation of Man, we might put our energies elsewhere: into seeking out narratives that, in not automatically restricting themselves to humans, take every thing as potentially actant, potentially imbricated in change and growth, potentially at stake even in literacy events (reading, writing, teaching). Learning from Wynter's claim that we have been sociogenically produced as Man (or in relation to Man as inhuman or less-than-human), I think we have to turn toward narratives that don't presume Man and which enable creative, experimental practices of performing the human differently.
Let me propose now a somewhat polemical, extremely speculative project. Instead of seeing literacy events as the signs of a human rupture from all other beings (which is what the humanities propose: literature is uniquely human, so studying literature is ipso facto studying what the human is), I am going to take literacy as an animate practice. That is, some animals make marks that circulate in various media with affective agency, and that are in turn attended by other animals. At least among human animals, some animals are charged with overseeing how other animals develop their attentions to these marks. The particular ways in which these animals do this always require energies from a variety of nonhuman (and nonanimal) actants: soil, trees, power grids, computers, blackboards, eye glasses, Amazon.com, and so on. This description, which is, perhaps, a much more distant form of distant reading than the ones envisioned by Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova, calls for an ethological and ecological account of literacy, one that does not necessary destroy the particular actions (reading, writing, teaching) that we associate with the humanities. But it inserts these actions into other networks and other narratives. And in doing so, one hopes, it releases us from spending so much energy arguing about the humanities and their importance, freeing up energies to begin making sense of this bizarre, extensive, and extremely fragile ecology of things, events, and actants making up what I call anima-literature.
This will involve a refusal to be disciplined. Rather than taking disciplinary borders — or, as will become clear, any borders — as given, I want to think about them as a form of membrane. As Samantha Frost details in Biocultural Creatures, "A permeable cell membrane produces a continuously variable chemical or energetic imbalance between inside and outside the cell, a disequilibrium that in turn creates the conditions for the movement, flow, or dispersion of molecules and their transformation from one kind into another" (2016, 55). Although there is a risk in moving from the molecular level to the molar too quickly, Frost's account gives an extremely rigorous way of thinking about what Nancy Tuana (2008) calls the "viscous porosity" of borders. Borders are not things, per se, but activities, and they are particular activities that exist in order to enable the incomplete but functional separation of other activities. As Frost puts it, "What makes a living body separate from its environment are not the substances of which it is composed ... but rather the activities and the processes that occur within and by means of that body" (2016, 75). I would like to hazard seeing this relation at all levels of my analysis: borders are not stable, given, or solid. Bordering is an activity, a process, and it enables certain things. All of the things I track in this book — literature, literacy, academic disciplines, the human — are processes, actions, movements of energy. Indeed, to the extent that this book has a method, I believe it is something like trying to cobble together insights from a range of disciplinary standpoints and projects in order to construct a machine that asks questions — What is literacy? What is the human? What is a collectivity? What is politics? — and fails to answer them in definite ways. Or rather, like the stoner alone in her room who says a word so many times it loses its ability to signify, I try to look at these things over and over from different directions and distances so that they lose solidity, become uncertain, start trembling. Answers don't really interest me, but questions can disperse energy.
In Animate Literacies, I am trying to love literature by failing to understand what it is within the disciplined parameters of my humanist education. As Jack Halberstam has argued, "Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world" (2011, 2–3). This book is a record of my failure to be properly humanist, or perhaps it is an archive born of my loving desire to become untrained, undisciplined. Halberstam again: "In some sense we have to untrain ourselves so that we can read the struggles and debates back into the questions that seem settled and resolved" (11). As a thoroughly situated subject, one whose attentions have been disciplined over decades in schools at various levels, I cannot simply break free from such discipline (although I can begin to imagine alternative modes of education that would not discipline others in the same ways!). Rather, I am actively seeking to lose my way, to fail to stay on that paths I am supposed to take as a humanist. I will try to stay not with the disciplines but with the trouble that is "literature."
Wandering off of the disciplinary track, though, doesn't mean a rejection of axiomatics. Indeed, as I get lost, I am doing so only by following my gut, my feelings, my attraction to the affective magnetism of what I love. I would call this affective attunement politics, since it concerns how I am touched and how I touch things (and, indeed, how I am a site of touching that is not reducible to a liberal subject). Animate Literacies asks both what animates literacies, and how literacies animate particular forms of personhood and politics. In asking this double question, and in proposing anima-literature as a neologism for understanding this thing that I love (and that perhaps we love), I am drawing on Mel Y. Chen's analysis of animacy as it moves between linguistics and politics. Rather than a binary between the animate and the inanimate, Chen attends to how "stones and other inanimates definitively occupy a scalar position (near zero) on the animacy hierarchy [but] they are not excluded from it altogether" (2012, 5). In the chapters that follow, I try to feel my way into the presence of a whole range of agencies — many of them nonhuman — participating in this thing called "literature." Many of the chapters begin with the relation between a reading mind and a signifying text — the relation presupposed in the overwhelming mass of scholarship on literature and education more broadly — but then my attention shifts, either pulling back the frame to see these literacy events within much wider networks of relations among entities and agencies, or zooming in to track the microrelations taking place beneath or alongside conscious attention. Sometimes I pan horizontally, following a particular cluster of ideas as it moves through a range of different sites or scales distributed rhizomatically. My aim is not to provide a systematic account of the forces and entities animating literacies as much as to attempt to pressure the borders around literacy that many assume are much more tidy than I do. In this sense, the book has a speculative and polemical edge to it, as I foreground some aspects of literacy (such as its smell) simply because they tend to be significantly disavowed or ignored in humanist scholarship.
As I track the animating participants in literacies, I am aware that not all participation is the same (I do not propose, as do some speculative realists, a "flat ontology"). I draw extensively from feminist and queer new materialist scholarship and theories of affect to consider how these actors (or, as Latour might say, actants) have a share in literature, but I also keep my focus on institutions of education where we have a determinate political responsibility to think through intrahuman politics. Indeed, a fair amount of my attention is given to how these institutions shape our perceptions of animacy and, hence, of politics.
I attend, in what follows, to how the questions I ask about literature, literacy, and the human effect and affect those people excluded from political protection as human during modernity. That is, my approach to literature is not humanist but what Julietta Singh (2017b) calls "dehumanist": my attention to literature is focused as much as possible not on the triumphant stories that disciplined academics tell about it, but on its messy entanglements with dehumanization, ecological devastation, and the material-political generation of impoverishment of all kinds. Accordingly, to the extent that this is possible, I am constructing my account by foregrounding the knowledge produced about literature, literacy, and the human by scholars situated at a remove from Man, primarily in feminist, queer, postcolonial, black, brown, and decolonial studies. I thus always attempt "to recollect and foreground the very histories of dehumanization too often overlooked in celebratory posthumanisms" (Luciano and Chen 2015, 196). In doing so, I follow Chela Sandoval's affirmative "methodology of the oppressed," which responds to a moment of postmodern crisis: "The citizen-subject's postmodern despair over experiencing this condition can be released when the practitioner looks to the survival skills and decolonizing oppositional practices that were developed in response to such fragmentation under previous cultural eras" (2000, 33). That is, when confronting the crisis of the humanities, instead of responding with angst and a defensive desire to shore up this formation, I want to explore alternative, subjugated, fugitive modes of linking literacy, aesthetics, and modalities of being human. As Judith Butler has noted, "There is a certain departure from the human that takes place in order to start the process of remaking the human" (2004, 3–4). Animate Literacies is structured according to a series of such departures, and it is organized into sixteen chapters, each of them shorter than is common in most academic books today. This book's somewhat unusual structure is motivated by my sense that Animate Literacies is less about specific conceptual and political arguments (although there are many) than about a pedagogical desire to produce affects in the reader.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii1. The Human(ities) In Crisis 1
2. Beloved's Dispersed Pedagogy 11
3. Haunting, Love, and Attention 19
4. Humanizing Assemblages I: What Is Man? 28
5. Slavery, the Human, and Dehumanization 38
6. Literacy, Slavery, and the Education of Desire 48
7. What Is Literacy? 55
8. Humanizing Assemblages II: Discipline and Control 66
9. Bewilderment 77
10. Toward a Literary Ethology 86
11. What Happens When I Read? 99
12. The Smell of Literature 115
13. Pleasures of the Text 124
14. Those Changeful Sites 134
15. Literacies against the State 145
16. Futures of Anima-Literature 153
Notes 165
References 193
Index 209
What People are Saying About This
“Challenging us to discover, create, and practice modes of literacy that depart from the conventional paths that have disciplined us, Nathan Snaza puts forth significant and bracing provocations about the relationship between reading and the production of Man. In his brilliant formulation, literacy is no longer exclusively human—it happens within a thick web of animating entities that affect and bewilder. An outstanding work.”
“Offering stimulating readings of familiar literary texts, Nathan Snaza recasts literacy within a field of material objects and conditions by weaving new materialism together with postcolonial and posthumanist thought into meditations on literacies within and beyond the human.”