A Manifesto for Literary Studies by Garber Marjorie;

Author:Garber, Marjorie;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Washington Press

So, to restate the question with which we have been wrestling: why is it that today's scientists write about human nature, while today's humanists do not? My answer, at least in part, is that humanists do write about this question, constantly, but that neither they nor many of their readers—not to mention their critics—have been willing to acknowledge that that is what they are doing. Somewhere along the way, the concept of human nature became both stale and saccharine: a set of bromides or truisms, often inflected with religion and frequently invoked as a “so there” pseudo-explanation (“it's just human nature…”) rather than explored as a conundrum or a puzzlement.

I am eager here—or, to be franker about it, I am anxious—not to be heard as deploring the present moment in humanistic writing and research, and harking back, wistfully, to a time when men were men, women were women, and humanists cared about human nature. My point is really close to the opposite of this nostalgic and retrogressive thought: what I have been contending is that today's humanists are asking “human nature” questions all the time, when they talk about psychic violence, or material culture, or epistemic breaks, or the history of the book, or the counterintuitive. Many of the theoretical explorations and innovations of the last fifty years of humanistic scholarship have been aimed at demystifying a unitary and positivistic sense of “human nature.” But to aim to demystify something is tacitly to acknowledge its mystified status, and not only for others; also for oneself. Avoiding the topic of “human nature” is a mistake, one that has political as well as intellectual ramifications—a mistake based on underestimating what and how we read and write today. Like Edgar Allan Poe's famous image of the continental map, with letters so large that we cannot read the most overarching words (Europe, Africa) and focus instead on the legible terms in smaller print (Geneva, New Jersey), the terrain on which we work, the terrain inscribed by its own name and ours, is bizarrely unreadable to us. Yet “human nature,” as a term and as a field of inquiry, need not be solely the concern of social conservatives or of scientists, however well meaning and however well placed. In debunking all the illusions fostered under this ubiquitous term, contemporary humanistic scholars have sometimes failed to see in what ways we are working within it.

When I suggest that to discard a big and baggy idea like human nature is a political mistake, what I mean is that it has given aid and comfort to unthinking critics of the humanities. If we are willing to reflect seriously and critically, we will readily be able to demonstrate that fields like cultural anthropology, structural linguistics, women's studies, cybertheory, and posthumanism are indeed addressing the Big Questions: the Who Am I questions, the What Am I Doing Here questions, the What Lies in the Future questions that all attach themselves to the heritage of “human nature.” These questions, indeed, have never been more pressing—nor more “human”—than they are today.

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