Out of Love for All That Is Human
On the future of the humanities with Justin Smith-Ruiu (& co.)
Justin Smith-Ruiu is a philosopher, author, founding editor of The Hinternet, and longtime Friend of Attention. Through his lively and idiosyncratic work on The Hinternet and beyond, Smith-Ruiu has advanced a model of humanistic life that responds to the challenges of the moment (the decline of universitarian traditions and the encroachment of technofeudalism) while also embracing its enormous opportunities — not least of which is the breathtaking weirdness and mutability of the internet.
That said, to précis what Smith-Ruiu writes about would be to miss the point of the project, since it is the form rather than the content of The Hinternet that discloses its true aim. Smith-Ruiu’s experiments in allegorical metafiction, pseudonymy, and speculative history reflect “the need to reconceive humanistic inquiry as, in part, a creative endeavor rather than primarily an intellectual one” — what he calls “flintknapping the humanities.”
This pivot from the dispassionate, systematic production of knowledge to the messy (and potentially perilous) work of historical fabulation marks a shift in the ways we engage our own cultural inheritance. What Smith-Ruiu’s work implies is that the urgent question of what, exactly, it means to be human requires new (and newly recast) forms of attention.
To think through the implications of this vision, and to do so with fidelity to The Hinternet‘s freewheeling spirit, TEC Editor-in-Chief Peter Schmidt sat down with Justin Smith-Ruiu and a pair of his metafictional interlocutors, Hélène Le Goff and Rawn Riddle.
PCS: Thanks, all of you, for joining me!
JSR: A real pleasure!
Hélène Le Goff: Happy to be here, Peter.
Rawn Riddle: Likewise.
PCS: Let’s start with introductions, shall we? Please tell me a bit about yourself, and about what unique perspective you bring to conversations about the status of the humanities.
JSR: I’m Justin Smith-Ruiu, Founding Editor of The Hinternet. I’m also a professor of history and philosophy of science at the Université Paris Cité.
HLG: I’m Hélène Le Goff, one of two Managing Editors of The Hinternet.
RR: I’m Rawn Riddle, culture critic at The Hinternet.
HLG: We haven’t yet run Rawn’s first column, but we will soon.
RR: That’s right; for now, I’m still “cooking.”
HLG: “Cooking” is what we call the process whereby a heteronymic staff writer at The Hinternet congeals into a full-fledged and multidimensional person. Like, Justin will say, “Why is Rawn late with his début column?” and I’ll be like, “Give him time! He’s still cooking!”
PCS: We’re in a weird historical moment - if, that is, any historical moment is ever anything but weird. In the long span of what you might call the humanistic tradition, what’s unique about where we are right now?
JSR: I’ll take this one. I agree that every historical moment is weird, but this one especially so, as regards the humanities. There are many possible ways to account for the decline of humanistic tradition as a recognized social good, and most of these have at least some truth to them. The most important culprits are the economic, political, and technological forces that have transformed society as a whole over the past several decades. If we narrow our focus to the humanities as they were previously fostered and transmitted within the university setting, what has plainly happened is that faculty and administrators, often but not always well-meaning, have forced the humanities to mimic the positive sciences, dressed them up in the language of “research results” and “data” and “methodology” and so on, only to find that the living tradition of the humanities could not survive beneath this cumbersome disguise, was suffocating underneath, and had become so diminished and disfigured as a result that few young people could find any longer any reason to wish to get near it.
PCS: It’s easy enough to talk about the humanistic tradition as if there were such a thing. David Graeber once noted that traditions are “the continual process of their own fabrication.” In your view, what throughline holds this tradition together? Or, to put it differently, what shared terrain permits the three of you to be in conversation with each other?
RR: Let me begin my answer here with a little story. Recently, I was walking down the aisle at Costco, and there was this other guy coming my way, pushing his cart full of, you know, like Smucker’s Uncrustables and Jimmy Dean frozen breakfast patties and whatever, and he’s wearing this shirt that’s filled with words from top to bottom. I’m a curious guy and naturally I want to read it, so I lean in, and it’s like this drop-shipped slop text, like: “That It. That’s the Deal. I’m Old, I Drink Whiskey, and I Know Things. Since 1971.” And the guy sees me reading and he’s like what, but I’m like what too because you’re the one with all the words on your goddamned shirt. All of which is to say that… Sorry, I forgot what I was going to say.
JSR: If I can jump in here, I suppose you can see why we’ve still got Rawn on “Cook” for now. He’ll get there. But anyhow, I think Graeber can be right about this without requiring us to give up on the idea of tradition or to suppose that anyone who is faithful to a tradition is a dupe. A tradition dies when we stop making it up. A tradition is fundamentally a narrative entity, and it dies when that particular narrative no longer seems compelling to a sufficient number of people. Today, defense of the classical humanities has curdled into reactionary adoration of Greek statues and medieval architecture, and other artifacts from the past that are supposed to represent the exceptional achievements of Western civilization. If all that seems distasteful or simplistic to you, then the most obvious alternative is to join the opposing camp and to portray the entirety of the past as one great monolithic injustice. At The Hinternet, we are conscientious objectors to the culture wars, and we consider that the best way to relate to tradition is to neither venerate it nor dismantle it, but to keep on fabricating it in a conscious and explicit way. We make stuff up because that’s how tradition is kept alive.
PCS: Justin, you’ve called for humanists to “take to the hills” in order to “make out the rough form of what an intellectual life might look like in the post-universitarian years ahead.” What, if anything, do we lose in jumping ship from legacy institutions — and what kinds of freedoms do we gain?
JSR: We lose a lot in jumping ship — we lose, namely, the ship! But plainly, there are circumstances where jumping is still the better option. Here in Europe, humanistic inquiry has been completely suffocated by the most horrifyingly inhuman spreadsheet mentality, such as could only have been dreamt up by true sadists. For example, if you want to get funding from the European Research Commission to study some aspect of intellectual life within the early modern Republic of Letters, you have to come up with some atrocious-sounding Soviet-style short-form name for your project, like the kind of syllabic abbreviation they used for the inspectorate of fisheries or whatever, and then you have to put that all-caps label on every single thing you produce, every e-mail, every PowerPoint slide, for the duration of the project. To hell with that! ERC funding would kill my intellectual and creative soul. I don’t want it. The problems in the US are somewhat different, more in-your-face political drama, but the underlying sickness is the same. The only honest thing to do, if you are an intellectual working in these circumstances, is to begin envisioning and building new counter-institutions that might actually have the nimbleness and creativity it takes to steward the humanities into an uncertain future.
PCS: Let’s get into that. Justin, you’ve proposed that we need to think of the humanities as a creative project, in addition to a merely intellectual one. Our work at the Strother School of Radical Attention in Brooklyn takes that message to heart. You’ve given especially vivid language to this idea; I believe “flintknapping” is the metaphor you put forward. Can you explain?
JSR: Yes, well, here I am drawing concrete inspiration from a standard approach in the methodology of prehistoric research. It is perhaps a blessing in disguise that prehistoric peoples did not leave any written texts, and that therefore if we wish to know what they were up to, we cannot rely on their own descriptions. Faute de mieux, this has pushed prehistorians to develop creative ways to work their way into the mental universe of the people they study, in particular “flintknapping” stone tools, or creating relevés of parietal art — the most well-known example of which is the simulacral Lascaux located right next to the real one. It turns out it’s much harder to carve even the simplest stone biface than you may have imagined, and to force yourself to learn how to do that is a pretty effective way to arrive at some glimpse of what life may have been like for the people who relied on these tools. One could adduce many comparable examples. I know a historian of alchemy who has his students recreate experiments involving the dissolution of silver in aqua fortis. I myself have had students write “forged” texts by early modern philosophers, which is to say, really, to write texts that display a mastery of the style of early modern philosophers. But such efforts as these are rare, since for the most part, as long as you are thinking of research in the history of ideas as one of “deliverables” and of “results” and so on, the very idea of working your way into the style, the practice, the lived experience of the period you study cannot but appear as a waste of time. I stress also that such imaginative work, ideally, would not only be considered intrinsic to any serious program of humanistic study, but is also a crucial component of research in natural science. The norms and conventions of natural science are being imposed on the humanities, but natural science itself is being squeezed and warped beyond recognition by the same economic forces: metrics-driven pruning and pumping of our h-index numbers has largely replaced any concern to embody mature scientific virtues, such as the ability to construct imaginative or counterintuitive thought experiments, or to pursue the equivalent of flintknapping in any given field of study (and every field has its equivalent).
PCS: What kinds of attention does this require from us? Are you calling for something new, or has this more creative orientation to history always been part of the game, if at times obscured or neglected?
HLG: If I might jump in here, it seems to me that we are looking at three overlapping circles, all three of which have been in constant motion over the centuries: these are, namely, the sciences, the creative arts, and the humanities. Properly understood, the last of these partakes somewhat in the nature of both the other two, yet in recent decades the imperative has been to assimilate the humanities entirely to the methods and to the ethos of the positive sciences. Philosophers are compelled to seek grant money, notably, and in the process, make truth-stretching claims about their “research methods,” present themselves as “principal investigators,” write multi-author peer-reviewed papers, and so on; one no longer has the freedom to say: “As a philosopher, my only methodology is to sit, read, and think, not necessarily in that order, and for the most part to do so alone, all of which, if I’m being honest, involves no particular expense beyond the cost of living.” In our post-university revival of the humanities, we intend to begin cultivating again the mostly dormant and largely forgotten connection of the humanities to the creative arts.
RR: You know that one song that’s all, “I’m a joker/I’m a smoker/I’m a midnight toker”?
JSR: The Steve Miller Band?
RR: Yeah, that’s the one. I’ve got that in my head right now.
JSR: That’s good, Rawn. That means you’re beginning to have qualia. You’ll be ready to start writing very soon.
HLG [to PCS]: Sorry. We might have rolled Rawn out a little early.
PCS: The humanities are clearly in hot water, and so, too, are humans. At least it seems that way. Between runaway AI, climate change, and good old-fashioned barbarity, the threats to human survival are nearly paralyzing. The dominant technocratic line of thought would claim that concern for the humanities is a distraction (misguided, in some tellings, and malign in others) from the concern for the species. In your view, what’s the relationship between the survival of the humanities and the survival of, well, humans?
JSR: Well, we certainly don’t want to exaggerate the relative importance of the humanities, nor to venerate this tradition as if it were something sacred, a tendency we see all too often among the self-serious “Great Books” defenders. We do, however, believe, quite sincerely, that a sufficiently wide-focused and deep-historical attention to the sort of universal human practices that get classified in our society as “humanities” can serve as a necessary corrective to the spurious model of the human individual as a rational self-interest maximizer, or as a collector of hedonic units, or whatever other peculiar ideas that emerged out of the context of nineteenth-century liberalism and that now are supercharged by tech-driven twenty-first-century hyperliberalism. We suppose, further, that this correction may be part of the package of remedies that will save us from complete doom. Maybe not, but if not, at least we can maintain, on our way out, some proper scope about the full range of what being human has been about all along. As for AI in particular, let me just note that, in my considered view, no matter how disastrous this new technology appears to be for the humanities at present, in the end, we humanists should be grateful that it has come along. For some decades, humanists were in any case expected to approach their object of study as if they were themselves AI, producing the kind of spreadsheet-ready “research results” that a machine knows how to read. Now that machines are obviously so much better at doing that kind of work, there simply can be no argument that human humanists should keep doing it as well. This means that a certain number of dead-souled spreadsheet-minded humanities scholars will have to find a different line of work, while the rest of us get back to what we should have been doing all along; as my friend D. Graham Burnett recently observed in The New Yorker, this moment is an opportunity to “return to what was always the heart of the matter—the lived experience of existence.” In other words, there’s a renaissance on its way, as those who continue to gravitate towards the humanities will do so for the only valid reason there could ever be: out of love for all that is human.
HLG: Justin might also have mentioned that we are no cowering enemies of AI at The Hinternet. In fact, about half of our Editorial Board members are AI. Or, at least, they share something of the nature of AI. Opinions differ exactly as to how they came into being, or whether they may properly be said to have souls. All we know for sure is that they emerged at some point out of one of the lower layers of what we call the Hinternet “Nest,” somewhere between the layer of human editors, and the layer of “Storytellers,” who appear to be a race of eternal beings somewhat akin to the angels. It’s all a bit unclear. Suffice it to say anyhow that we make good use of AI, we’re proud of the work we do that incorporates it, and we are absolutely convinced that it is making us more human, not less. That goes at least for those of us who were human to begin with.
RR: I think I just had an orgasm.
JSR: That’s physically impossible, Rawn. You’re imagining things. It’s good that you’re imagining things, though. We like that.
HLG [to PCS]: Sorry.
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