Figuring and Reconfiguring the

Humanities and the Sciences

BARBARA HERRNSTEIN SMITH
I would like to begin with two observations to remind us of the somewhat
perplexing situation in which the humanities, understood here as a clus-
ter of academic disciplines, finds itself in relation to the sciences (plural),
similarly understood.
First, clearly, it is getting increasingly hard to work in the humanities
without having sorne traffic with the natural sciences, whether their find-
ings and theoretical elaborations or their associated technologies and social
and cultural interfaces. One thinks readily of the Human Genome Project,
the Internet, new reproductive technologies, new electronic media, psycho-
pharmacology, bioethics, and so forth. The extent and nature of that traffic
will vary, of course, from one humanities field to another, ranging from
the central and ongoing to the ad hoc and incidental. So too, and a point of
particular interest here, its temper will vary from one scholar to another,
ranging from the scornful and skeptical to the appreciative or downright
celebratory. It is also clear, I think, that traditional accounts and conceptions
of science (largely rationalist, realist, and positivist) are being significantly
challenged by recent work in the history, sociology, and philosophy of sci-
ence and by the emergence of increasingly well-articulated alternative ac-
counts and related epistemologies (largely constructivist and pragmatist).
1
One effect of both these developments is the unsettling of standard
ways of figuring-that is, assessing and representing-the relation of sci-
The author is Braxton Craven Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Duke
University and Distinguished Professor of English at Brown University. A version of this
paper was presented at the 2004 MLA convention in Philadelphia.
PROFESSION 2005 18
BARBARA HERRNSTEIN SMITH 111 19
ence (singular, understood as a body of duly established knowledge and/or
a duly privileged method for arriving at it) to its various standard others:
for example, religion; the arts; ideology; and indigenous knowledge, or, in
the old idiom, myth or magic. Accordingly, there is good reason to expect
the relations between science and the humanities-intellectual, institu-
tional, and ideological-to be significantly refigured in the future. Indeed,
the conceptual, rhetorical, and to sorne extent practica! articulation of such
refigurings-reassessments, redefinitions, and proposals for new connec-
tions, arrangements, or integrations-are, for better or worse, already the
focus of considerable energy in academic venues across the nation.
2
"For better or worse" is the crux here. Insofar as such new configu-
rations of the sciences and the humanities reflect empirically-includ-
ing historically-informed and conceptually spacious understandings
of knowledge and its practices, they may benefit all concerned: scholars,
scientists, and students working in the humanities or the natural sciences
alike and the larger intellectual community as well. Conversely, it would
be unfortunate for all concerned-most immediately for those working
in the humanities but, in the long run, for the entire educational and
intellectual community-if the design and direction of those changed
relations were dominated by narrowly scientistic views of knowledge (the
idea, for example, that the model for all knowledge practices should be
the aims, methods, and products of the natural sciences), especially where
allied with narrowly productivist views of education (the idea, for exam-
ple, that the central social obligation of the university and majar measure
of its success is the production of visible, palpable, countable, and more
or less instantly marketable products, human or other).l The perplexity
of our situation is that, while those of us who work in the humanities
have a considerable stake in how these figurings and reconfigurations are
pursued, we are not well positioned either to resist their domination by
scientistic and productivist views-that is, to resist that domination ef-
fectively as distinct from bewailing it among ourselves-or to register
either our own alternative figurings or our potential contribution to the
elaboration of alternative views.
Two key factors sustain this situation. One is the relative weakness of the
humanities vis-a-vis the sciences in the public imaginary. The other, which
is the focus of my remarks here, is the confinement of our own imagina-
tions by the operations of a residual two-cultures ideology that domina tes
the humanities as well as every other quarter of the American academy.
The durability of C. P. Snow's notion of "the two cultures" -now al-
most fifty years old-is a testament, no doubt, to the evocativeness and
20 111 FIGURING ANO RECONFIGUR!NG THE HUMANITIES ANO THE SCIENCES
apparent continued aptness of the phrase, but also, one suspects, to the
sense of scandal that has always attended it: its acknowledgment, that is,
of extensive ignorance and provincialism among the educated classes and
its image of the academy as divided into two mutually suspicious or in-
deed warring tribes. The intellectual map has shifted in majar ways since
Snow's essay was first published (we might note, for example, the growing
significance of the social sciences, which Snow famously overlooked, or
the emergence of such fields, disciplines, and nter-disciplines as women's
studies, environmental studies, or cognitive science), and the contrasts
he drew between the two groups he called "scientists" and "literary intel-
lectuals" appear increasingly dated and themselves quite provincial. Nev-
ertheless, basic elements of a two-culture divide-certainly the ideology
of such a divide-remain with us.
Indeed, the condition of mutual ignorance and disdain described by
Snow can be seen as even more extensive now and the institutional, es-
pecially academic, mechanisms of its perpetuation as even more deeply
entrenched. Thus it is currently believed by many faculty members in the
natural sciences that teaching and scholarship in the humanities consists
of idle opinion mongering and that humanities students-whose heads (1
have been assured) are "accustomed to mush" -are incapable of the hard
work and rigorous thinking required to do "real science." At the same
time, it is widely believed by students in the humanities that the aims and
operations of the natural sciences are intrinsically alen to them intel-
lectually ("mechanical," "numerical," "reductive," and so forth) and likely
to be personally alienating as well (aggressively patriarchal, homophobic,
complicit with imperialism and racism, dehumanizing, and so forth). To
round out the picture, virtually preemptive course requirements for stu-
dents majoring in the natural sciences leave them little time to explore
such fields as history, philosophy, or literary study, so that those who ar-
rive with such interests commonly cannot pursue them, while those who
arrive already (like many of their peers and professors) scornful of the
humanities-as, typically, "soft" or "useless" -are given little reason to
think or occasion to learn otherwise. The mutually confining and self-
perpetuating effects of these academic caricatures are, 1 think, obvious.
An important point needs emphasis here. By "two-cultures ideology" 1
do not mean the conviction that there are important, perhaps irreducible,
differences between the natural sciences and the humanities. Such differ-
ences-for example, of subject domain, epistemic stance, or broad social
functions-can certainly be observed and their general intellectual pro-
priety, if not specific historical fixity, defended. What defines the ideol-
ogy in question as such is its figuration of such differences dichotomously,
BARBARA HERRNSTEIN SMITH 111 21
hierarchically, and invidiously. Thus more or less divergent but conceivably
complementary and equally estimable aims, features, and values of the hu-
manities and natural sciences-for example, interpretation and open-ended
exploration as distinct from explanation and general-theory construction,
or the perspective of a sympathetic participant as distinct from that of a
neutral observer, or resonance and richness as distinct from numerical pre-
cision-are cast as superior and inferior, proper and improper, admirable
and contemptible. Specifically, we hear of what is "serious" and "rigorous"
about the sciences as opposed to "frivolous" and "subjective" in the human-
ities or, conversely, of what is "deep" and "enlightening" about the humani-
ties as opposed to "reductive" or "basically control-minded" in the sciences.
Oppositions of these kinds commonly draw force as well as substance from
other dualisms pervasive in the culture: deeds over words; serious work over
mere play; hard versus soft; and, it hardly need be added here, masculine
versus feminine-or effeminate. The relation of such loaded binaries to
the ideology of the two-culture divide is unmistakable and often unapolo-
getically explicit. Snow himself praised the tone of the scientific culture for
being "steadily heterosexual" and, in contrast to that of the literary culture,
free of "the feline and oblique" (Collini xxvi). The more recent identifica-
tion of the natural sciences with masculinism or so-called masculine ratio-
nality is not, to my mind, much of an improvement.
In noting aspects of the sciences that increasingly invite or require our
attention, 1 mentioned, in addition to their findings, technologies, and so-
cial interfaces, their theoretical elaborations. These can have considerable
bearing on current questions in literary and cultural studies, such as the
nature (and/or culture) of sexual individuation, the psychological and po-
ltica! operations of racial and other social categories, or the cultural and
cognitive effects of the new electronic media. (Psychoanalysis-which,
in the late twentieth century, became the official and exclusive science of
the humanities-may help explain much about human beings but does
not, it seems, explain everything.) To cite briefly one set of examples,
current theoretical accounts emerging from the fields of evolutionary bi-
ology, developmental psychology, and cognitive neuroscience offer duly
complex, dynamic alternatives to such classically problematic dualisms
as mind/body, nature/culture, genes/environment, or reason/emotion.
4
Experience indicates that these alternative accounts prove conceptually
congenia! and analytically useful to students working in, among other
fields, gender studies, media studies, and race theory: prove such, that is,
when they are made known to those students. For the most part, how-
ever, such theoretical work in the natural sciences is just not, as we say, on
their screens. lt is not there because nothing in their standard university
22 111 FIGURING ANO RECONFIGURING THE HUMANITIES ANO THE SCIENCES
training puts it there and because much in their specific training in liter-
ary or cultural studies writes it off befare it can even get there.
1 alluded to the variable temper of our traffic with the natural sciences,
ranging from the dismissive to the gung ho. What that temper should be, 1
think, is a compound of general wariness, specific skepticism, general inter-
est, and specific-and duly instructed-appropriation. What it should not
be, 1 think, is either of the two matched ideologies that currently dominate
our activities. One is the sort of ideological humanism-arguably theologi-
cal at heart-that views science (singular and monolithically conceived) as
intellectually irrelevant to the study of anything human and as otherwise
alien, exploitative, or detrimental to nature or society. Its mirror-image
counterpart is scientism, the indiscriminate and often minimally informed
veneration of science (again singular and monolithically conceived) as the
sole exemplar of both genuine knowledge and proper epistemic method.
A recurrent manifestation of scientism in the humanities is the un-
critica!, wholesale importation into literary studies or other humanities
field (art criticism, musicology, and so forth) of one or another currently
high-profile scientific or sometimes scientoid program (e.g., structural-
ist linguistics a few decades ago or sociobiology today) with the stated
aim of making our otherwise amateurish, impressionistic efforts intel-
lectually respectable. Another such manifestation is the conviction that
literary studies (or other humanities field), to cure its presumptive ills or
misfortunes, must become a science, a conviction commonly attended by
a dubious (certainly limited) idea of what it is to be a science and by a vis-
ibly dyspeptic attitude toward new or currently favored approaches in the
field in question. To literature faculty especially disturbed by the alien
concerns and idioms of contemporary theory or by the acrimony of much
feminist and other identitarian criticism, the salid, saber technicalities of
brain topography or Upper Paleolithic mating patterns, along with the
familiar universalist ideals and rationalist-realist commitments of tradi-
tional conceptions of science, may be especially attractive. It seems un-
likely, however, that any of these projects will cure or save the field. If the
idea of social construction disappears from cultural studies, it probably
will not be because it has been replaced by the idea of genetic hardwiring.
Nor does it seem likely that sorne new argument of neorealist or so-called
postpositivist philosophy will tame the radical epistemological implica-
tions of poststructuralist theory or undo the affinities of such theoretical
developments with the reconceptions of knowledge and science emerging
from contemporary social studies of science and from the more intellec-
tually mobile regions of philosophy. As for the idea that literary studies
can be redeemed from intellectual disrepute by finding, as has been said, a
BARBARA HERRNSTEIN SMITH 111 23
small but secure place for itself among the sciences
5
-I consider that and
related dubious proposals below.
1 wish to say a few words first, however, about the highly asymmetrical
operations of the two-cultures ideology outside the academy, particularly
in the public imaginary.
The science wars may be over and not much literal blood spilled in
them, but there certainly were damages sustained, and, as far as 1 can
see, they were all on one side-namely, ours. The reasons for this lop-
sided outcome are numerous and complex, and 1 won't attempt a full-
dress postbellum analysis here, but a few points are especially pertinent.
In retrospect, the wars in question can be seen as something of a mirage:
arising largely from ignorance and arrogance; amplified by opportun-
ism, both academic and journalistic; and fought against a largely phantom
enemy with much artillery fire but few strikes. The sensational charges
were clearly scattershot and often, on inspection, empty. The supposed
exposures consisted, on inspection, of misleadingly framed pastiches or
garbled accounts that exposed little in particular and nothing in general,
certainly nothing about the state of "intellectual standards in the humani-
ties" or the intellectual-or other-value of any of the ideas, movements,
or approaches ostensibly targeted, among them deconstruction, feminist
epistemology, and the sociology of science.
6
The question of interest here
is why those largely ill-aimed or empty charges gained such wide and
rapid credibility among members of the educated public.
One reason, clearly, is that the process of weighing the merits of
charges and countercharges in these battles was complicated by the cross-
disciplinary character of the battles themselves. Ordinary criteria and
mechanisms of intellectual assessment and control that opera te routinely
and relatively effectively within a field (one thinks, for example, of the
letters-to-the-editor columns in professional journals such as PMLA or
Science) tend to break clown or to function erratically when claims and in-
dictments concern matters outside the speaker's field, especially when laid
befare an audience of nonspecialists. lndeed, because the grounds, signs,
and measures of intellectual authority were themselves key issues in these
controversies (who were the "experts" and who the "ideologues"? who is
authorized to speak about science at all?), exaggerations, distortions, and
misrepresentations were not caught and detonated, as they might other-
wise have been in an intellectual controversy, but continued to operate as
live ammunition-that is, as supposedly authoritative reports or exposs,
available for recurrent citation, invocation, and amplification-in the in-
tellectually void no-man's-land between the warring cultures.
24 111 FIGURING ANO RECONFIGURING THE HUMAN !TI ES ANO THE SCIENCES
A second, related reason for the asymmetrical outcome returns us to
the two-culture stereotypes evoked earlier. Where the weight of intellec-
tual credentials is in doubt, the power of prevailing biases is likely to be
all the stronger. lt may be true, as scientists sometimes complain, that the
image of them presented in the popular media (as heartless, nerdy, and
so forth) is often unflattering. Nevertheless, the intellectual authority of
the natural scientist is rarely in doubt for a general public audience. "Ein-
stein," "brain surgeon," and "rocket scientist" remain vernacular reference
points for extremes of intellectual prowess and technical expertise, and
a Nobel Prize in physics is pretty salid intellectual capital in most ven-
ues. My point here is not that scientists enjoy an especially good public
press. lt is, 1 think, actually a quite mixed press-like that of politicians
and English professors. My point, rather, is that, when authorities clash
across the two-culture divide in the public arena, the benefit of the doubt
is likely to be given to the scientist.
The attitudes in play here clearly reflect widespread public ignorance
of the nature-or, indeed, existence-of specialized training and skills in
the humanities. They also reflect a growing tendency within the academy
itself to identify intellectual activity and achievement with the production
of visible, measurable, and more or less immediately applicable knowledge,
joined to a long-standing identification, in the academy as elsewhere, of
the production of such knowledge with the natural sciences. There are,
of course, more spacious ways to conceive intellectual activity and sub-
tler ways to calculate its value, and the image of the natural sciences just
mentioned can be seen as dubious in every way-historically, conceptu-
ally, and indeed practically. Such narrowly scientistic views of knowledge,
however, along with vulgar utilitarian or quasi-positivist views of science,
are in better accord with the increasingly "production" -centered ethos of
many universities (or of their boards of trustees or of the state legislatures
that fund them) than the alternative views elaborated in constructivist
epistemology and contemporary social studies of science. There is good
reason to worry, then, that when limited resources are allotted among the
different sectors of the academy, Alan Sokal's caper and other science-war
battle shows (many of them, we recall, directed specifically against con-
structivist epistemology and contemporary science studies) will operate
tacitly orbe invoked explicitly as evidence for the intellectual deteriora-
tion and relative institutional expendability of the humanities and for the
absurdity of just such alternative views of knowledge and science.
Given the range of problems indicated here, a number of responses
suggest themselves. The first, of course, would be for humanities schol-
BARBARA HERRNSTEIN SMITH 111 25
ars to confront the existence and consider the costs of our captivity to
a residual two-culture mentality, with its self-stultifying provincialisms
and antagonisms. Another response would be to press for the design and
teaching of two-culture-crossing courses that took seriously the interests
of humanities students in the sciences and that respected their general
intellectual abilities and specific skills and knowledge. A third would be
to articulate the distinctive intellectual and pedagogic aims and achieve-
ments of the humanities in terms that made sense not only to us but also
to faculty and administrators in other quarters of the university and to
members of relevant and potentially appreciative publics-for example,
education journalists, university boards of trustees, and (at least in sorne
states) state legislatures.
These projects, 1 think, are all to the good and, where pursued en-
ergetically, are often successful in affecting at least the local academic
culture. 1 would like to conclude, however, with a few words on a quite
different sort of project, one that has a strong following in many quarters
of the academy, including among sorne humanities scholars, but that 1
think is distinctly not to the good. 1 refer to the idea, currently made
popular by E. O. Wilson's book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, that
we should bridge the gap between the two cultures by integrating the
anarchic humanities and the floundering social sciences into the more
orderly and grown-up natural sciences so that all knowledge will be in
fact what it certainly should be and is clearly destined to become, namely,
unified. This is, 1 think, all pretty dubious.
First, what we speak of currently as the natural sciences, social sci-
ences, and humanities are only relatively stable clusters of continuously
emerging, developing, combining, and differentiating intellectual tradi-
tions and practices. lntegrations and disintegrations of these kinds appear
to be fundamental processes and phases of intellectual history. Accord-
ingly, the unification of all knowledge does not appear to be a plausible
or even meaningful eventuality. lt also does not appear to be a desirable
ideal. Everything we know about the dynamics of intellectual history in-
dicates that the play of differing-and, indeed, conflicting-perspectives
is a necessary condition for the emergence of new ideas and practices in
any field.
7
In view of the tendency of all established conceptual systems
to move toward self-affirming structures of ideas and of all disciplines,
including the natural sciences, to be at risk of stagnation from taken-
for-granted assumptions and habitual practices, the maintenance of this
epistemic multiplicity appears crucial for the continued vitality of any
intellectual community. That is why one would promote the vigorous,
ongoing interaction of different disciplines and disciplinary practitioners:
l
26 111 FIGURING ANO RECONFIGURING THE HUMANITIES ANO THE SCIENCES
the intertranslation of concepts and findings, the mutual exchange of
methodological reflections, the extension of models and theories into new
domains of application, and so forth. lnteraction, however, is not integra-
tion and certainly not incorporation.
Contrary to the claims of Wilson and other unificationists, there is
no reason to think there is any single best way for human beings to get
to know their worlds, or any ultimate state of full and totally integrated
knowledge toward which all minar, imperfect, and disparate knowledges
are tending or should be marshaled. There is also no reason to think the
human community would gain anything of intellectual, practica!, or eco-
logical value-truth, wisdom, individual effectiveness and productivity,
group survival, or the preservation of the biosphere (to name sorne goals
commonly cited)-if we banished all "soft" interpretations, subjective
impressions, and open-ended ponderings and replaced them with "hard"
causal explanations, objective descriptions, and application-driven analy-
ses-or, for that matter, if we declared a moratorium on technoscience.
On the contrary, there is good reason to think that all these forms of
cognitive encounter and knowledge construction, with all their interna!
differences and mutual frictions, are required for the maintenance and
flourishing of our natural-which is also to say cultural, which is also
to say ethical, aesthetic, and reflective-relation to our environments,
including one another and that which we have created. As the humanities
and the sciences get newly figured and configured, it is worth our energy
to ensure that such reasons and reasonings get registered in the process.
NOTES
Portions of this article are drawn from my book Scandalous Knowledge.
l. For a good account of these developments, see Golinski. They are discussed at
length in Smith.
2. For examples, see Brint; Wilson. Wilson is discussed below.
3. On productivist views of education, see Karp; Newfield.
4. See Damasio; Edelman; Lewontin; Oyama.
5. John Guillory suggests that we forego vainglorious claims of epistemic status
for the mere doxas of cultural studies or literary interpretation and seek, instead, "a
smaller but surer place among the sciences" (508), evidently (his explicit recommen-
dations are rather obscurely framed) by confining our activities to something like
historical scholarship.
6. I allude here to Gross and Levitt; Gross, Levitt, and Lewis; Koertge; and Sokal
and Bricmont. Like most other scientists (and sorne philosophers) issuing such charges,
Gross and Levitt give little evidence of extended firsthand contact with the work of the
theorists-Michel Foucault,Jacques Derrida, and Bruno Latour among them-whose
ideas they pronounce absurd and describe as "cryptic rituals," "convoluted cabalistic
BARBARA HERRNSTEIN SMITH 111 27
fantasies," and "conceptual freak show[s]" (37, 8, 88). The sources for these pronounce-
ments and descriptions, as indicated by the citations, consist largely of articles by unin-
formed journalists or by academic humanists with sizable axes of their own to grind.
7. For informed accounts and analyses, see Abbott; Collins.
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