8. The Oeuvre of the Humanities

Why do humanists often engage with books, artworks, arguments, positions, and events that are not part of the usual fabric of life? In the human worlds we know of, the enjoyment of the arts is, for most, and at best, a side activity, limited by labor, other social commitments, or the need for survival. Then, whatever we could think of labels such as “genius” or “masterpiece,” the study of the arts remains oriented by select creators and works. The existence of schools of theoretical thought, even when they produce in-group obedience and intellectual sterility, also indicates a departure from what others or “everybody else” believe in. While the discipline of history may be currently less concerned than it used to be with exceptional figures (the monarch, the champion, the president), the centrality of wars, revolutions, or acts of resistance, all extraordinary, is still hard to dispute. Should we attribute this enduring investment in the literally abnormal to a political conformation? Being made for, and sometimes by, the elite to bring up signs of distinction within social strata, the humanistic commitment to the exceptional would seem to mirror an inegalitarian prejudice. From the classical Chinese education of the literati to the ancient Greek paideia geared toward free male citizens, from the traditional poetic curriculum of the imperial Amharic court to the role of the high bourgeoisie in the American belief in liberal arts education, we do not lack examples of a profound connivance between humanistic studies and the enforcement of exclusionary and hierarchical power structures. Conversely, I implied, and will further develop, that the exploration of the extraordinary is also an epistemic mark, with decisive implications and consequences. But let us admit for a moment that the attention to the unusual could be explained as a mere political inscription. Were this true, one could say that the “humanities”—understood either as a local, Western, and mainly modern assemblage or as a more general category for the discursive disciplines of meaning (as I do in this book)—are too deeply embedded in elitism to be saved for the purpose of egality or social equity. This critique would be germane to the consolidation of generative AI, seen as a utopian instrument of knowledge redistribution and the last kick against the old symbolic order. Alternatively, one could strive for a democratization of scholarly practices. A seemingly easy fix would make room for authors, texts, problems, or situations that were generally overlooked because of their ties to subordinate groups. This is a very important gesture, but it does not correct the principle of exception, and, for instance, studying Toni Morrison, Frantz Fanon, or Charles Mingus does not change the idea of “great works” (whatever sense we give to the phrase). A more consequential response, if one considers the extraordinary to be an undue and adventitious obsession within scholarship, is to level the playing field and consider horizontally the diverse objects of study. Since the twentieth century especially, many historians have diversified their disciplinary habits in this direction. The inquiry on “mentalities,” the longue durée approach, the emphasis on social institutions, the mapping of connected histories, the care for everyday practices or for resistance from below all try to avoid an inegalitarian gaze. (Microhistories, if they were thought of as elements of a democratic method, remain to me more unconvincing in this respect, because of their actual magnification of the “small” and sometimes quasi-heroization of otherwise neglected characters, such as Menocchio in Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms.) Still, such attempts rely on archives or artworks that are said to perfectly exemplify the norm, on moments that are described as being emblematic, on behavioral shifts and practical ruptures. In other fields, typicality could be perceived as a concept that would partly dissolve the exception. That it would have previously served in the most conservative operations of canon formation (where discussions of what is Atticism, the baroque, or quintessentially Han are ubiquitous) might convince us to deny its revolutionary virtues. Indeed, typicality comes with the representation of a range and of varied positions in function of the most exemplary iteration.

Another democratizing strategy would treat the extraordinary as the ordinary through the imposition of an identical paradigm, therefore practically diminishing any dogma of exceptionalism and posing that if the same logic could be equally applied to a poem and to a tv commercial, the unusual quality of the literary text might be an illusion. This inference is disputable: not all semioticians would believe that a novel by Alessandro Manzoni and a magazine advertisement for pasta are equally rich or open to comment, which is a way to reassert the principle of exception within a leveling discourse. We probably find more avowed humanists today who admit that, within particular social-political parameters, all cultural artifacts, of whatever form or status, will comparably transcribe the position of their producers and consumers. Unfortunately, this axiom has little to do with research in general. It appears to work well with relativism (at least aesthetically), although it is an absolutism, always pushing for a repeated stance transcending all potential differences in the end. This, too, is close to what an automated generator would do. Finally, the equalizing claim is, in reality, a trivialization of everything. What would be democratic is not to turn different objects of inquiry into instantiations of the same and to share the minimum but to treat banal items as potentially exceptional, given the avoidance of absolute transgression as a counterproductive norm.

It is worth noting that, in the name of the (new) left and of putting an end to the repressive regime of exceptions, Franco Moretti advocated, some twenty years ago, what we would call “data mining” for literary texts in lieu of close reading.1 Unsurprisingly, the goal was to look for repetitions, regularities, and patterns—that is, exactly what our text generators “learn” from. If you search for nonrandom distribution in human texts, and in nature, you will find nonrandom distribution; this, we cannot doubt. The experimental sciences need statistics, baselines, generalities, which they favor epistemologically. Unexpected results could be dismissed or, if more insistent, viewed as indices of a necessity for theoretical revision or change. A quantitative approach to textuality should be apt to capture relevant features, but the risk is to forget that, in this case, regularities only exist to allow for something else to emerge. In poetry, “the true rule . . . is to know how to break the rules in time and place,” wrote Giambattista Marino in 1624.2 The hypothesis about the unexpected possibility springing from the status quo should appear as more in tune with the political left than is a creed in fixed patterns, which is additionally conducive to the globalized regimentation of life under Big Tech. Outside of the political realm, it is quite puzzling to encounter so many humanists abiding by the dogma of determinism in a period where so many scientists refrain from the sort of flat causal relationism one was once accustomed to, leaving away schematic views about genetic programming, questioning some processes of generalization in psychology on the basis of experimental subjects or even arguing for indeterminism in physics.3 A reduced view of cause and effect and of algorithm efficiency that is widespread in the engineering industry is dangerously close to the botched attempts by humanists to distance themselves from what they perceive to be their elitist sins. What I want is not another operation but an oeuvre.