In an essay which is also a manifesto, Yves Citton aims to reestablish the link between
research in the human sciences and city life. He proposes to establish interpretation – distinct from information and knowledge – as a model, not only for research, but also for a social project.
Between essay and manifesto, Yves Citton’s work aims to relegitimize literary studies. In times of economic crisis, the humanities are often presented as a luxury. If the entire French university community may have felt attacked during the 2009 reform, the human sciences had the dubious advantage of not even being mentioned in the insulting speech which ignited the powder. However, the issue goes beyond the national framework: catastrophic budgetary restrictions, in the United Kingdom or the United States, threaten to completely strangle the labor market in human sciences research.
If the 2009 movement showed a certain inability of researchers to invest the media space to make their arguments heard, in 2010 several defenses and illustrations of the humanities appeared – from Martha Nussbaum to Vincent Jouve and more recently Jean Marie Schaeffer. But it is in Yves Citton’s essay that the political value of this defense is most affirmed: it seems appropriate to return to it as we enter a moment of political debate, which could offer the opportunity to overthrow the undermining logic at work in recent years.
Yves Citton’s argument aims to reestablish the link between research in the human sciences and the life of the city: this crisis in the humanities reflects a crisis in society (p. 9). Hence the choice of committed writing, which aims to take the opposite view of a doxa economic and political. Citton begins by defining theinterpretation by opposing it to information and knowledge, in order to constitute it as a model of thought. He then describes the conditions which would allow interpretation to be deployed, and interpreters to be trained, by suggesting a research and human sciences policy which would provide researchers with the freedom to devote themselves to interpretation. But the issue goes beyond the world of research: Citton bases a utopian model of society on “ cultures of interpretation “.
Interpretation as a method of thinking
The literary critic is the first incarnation of the interpreter. Interpretation is defined in opposition to knowledge, conceived as pure assimilation of information. Where a reading “ passive » is content to assimilate content, an interpretation allows the reader to resolve the problems he detects in the formulation, accuracy or relevance of the text. Where scientific knowledge seeks to progress in a logical and irrefutable manner, the human sciences can be attacked for their character “ tamper-proof ”, in other words unverifiable. This is because interpretation relies on intuition: as opposed to knowledge, it can progress by “ jumps » anticipating the rigor of complete reasoning. She pulls out all the stops, between interdisciplinarity and indiscipline. This is also an approach to which the exact sciences also resort: the interpretation of data on global warming for example, without yet being above all objection, can nevertheless dictate urgent action on our ecological practices.
In short, adherence to interpretation is a matter of belief. This way of thinking jumping and frolicking » establishes hypotheses more than it provides evidence. Interpretation is accompanied by necessary caution and skepticism: its strength lies only in its capacity to be validated or recognized as relevant by a critical number of interpreters, “ while knowledge can claim to be supported by its sole truth » (p. 67).
The performer, ultimately, resembles the jazz pianist who improvises, to the extent that “ “artistic creation” represents in its purest form the situation in which we seek without knowing what we are looking for, and in which we strive to interpret in an inventive way an already given reality (a melody, a theme , an object, a feeling, a practice, the world, one’s own life), for which the meanings proposed by the inherited culture are perceived as unsatisfactory. » (p. 141). The rapprochement between interpretation and artistic practice thus makes it possible to reestablish the part of creativity inherent in all research, but perhaps more evident in the humanities.
The distinction between human sciences as a paradigm of interpretation and exact sciences as a paradigm of knowledge must be overcome, since all research, whether in human sciences or in exact sciences, consists of constructing paradigms and submitting them to the test of the facts. The goal is not to confirm an essential difference in functioning between the human sciences and the exact sciences (which could justify the political evacuation of the humanities), but to assume that interpretation and knowledge are inseparable in both fields. It is a question of guarding against the political exploitation of the exact sciences, by relying on the study of the human sciences.
For a citizen-interpreter
Yves Citton highlights the vacuity of the productivist model, based on industrial capitalism applied to research management (p. 101-115) – but extends his counter-proposals to the whole of society. It shows that the conflict between current governments and the university can be thought of in terms of opposition between right and left, and sets out proposals for a new left politics, favoring interpretation. He compares the citizens that the right seeks to train to passive readers, incapable of questioning existing frameworks. Conversely, the “ LEFT » should attempt to encourage the emergence of citizen interpreters, capable of inventing new ways of living together. The third chapter and the conclusion propose parallel directions to promote the training and emergence of researchers and citizen interpreters.
The researcher must first have time and personal space, free from external pressures. It also implies being freed from material constraints through financial security. Likewise, a left-wing policy would provide for its citizens “ protective vacuoles “. The corollary of this first condition is the possibility of an otium essential for reflection (p. 76) – and, on a societal scale, a revalorization of unproductivism. Thanks to these spaces favoring hindsight, it would become possible to establish a questioning on theimportance or the relevance of knowledge – which implies for the researcher to question not only collective frames of thought, but also their own approach and their own motivations (p. 83). Society must also not consider its priorities as imposed, but question them.
Finally, literary criticism and the exercise of democracy could come together in that the interpreter rarely speaks in his own name, preferring to bring together several sources and several frameworks of understanding, which he brings together on the common ground of reflection. . There is a fundamental polyphony, as well as a staging of the performer’s words, which Citton would like to transpose into the political debate. Welcoming other voices and other points of view would make it possible, from the classroom, to learn ambivalence and to move forward cautiously, thanks to the indirect utterance » (p. 88).
What can the human sciences bring to society? ?
In the age of the Internet, the challenge of humanist education is no longer so much the accumulation of knowledge as the ability to select, prioritize and interpret it. Far from being “ free “, the humanities must first of all be “ applied » to the news, suggests Yves Citton, by helping to decipher media representations and official speeches, so as to produce meaning in the face of the event (p. 128-129). The development of discourse analysis in literary criticism effectively assimilates all types of text as potential objects of study. Citton states it in these terms: “ it is through its ability to make one feel the arrangement of the multiple layers of discourse (and silences) which overlap and sometimes collide within any word of expertise that literary interpretation can play the role of a platform interdisciplinary where the different discourses of knowledge that each era develops meet. » (p. 95). The humanities must also play a critical or demystifying role, questioning the relevance of the speeches we hear – even if they occupy an institutional position. According to Citton, “ moving the questioning from the terrain of “knowledge” to that of “interpretations” could rightly be considered the political gesture par excellence, that by which we question not the “truth” of knowledge but its “importance”, not its content but the framing of the practices which condition its status and its possible uses. » (p. 30).
Finally, more surprisingly, Citton calls for humanities “ postcritics ”, which would assume the emergence of new beliefs: “ The most important thing is no longer to avoid illusion or error, nor even to say “the truth”, but to use our capacities for fabrication to contribute to creating new beliefs, which will draw the given towards a present fiction. , translatable into future reality » (p. 133). Citton’s thought indeed includes a utopian element: fiction is conceived as a means of inventing a new society, by opening up new avenues of communication between creative and interpreting citizens. It’s about breaking the clichés “ to allow the emergence ofother pictureswhich do not correspond to anything existing, but whose force of aspiration and inspiration can lead us to reconfigure the given » (p. 134). As in his previous essay, Mythocracyemerges a faith in the social use of stories, in the central place of literary studies in the political learning of the community.
The scope of a plea pro home
Against the reproach of immobility, so often addressed to a university and an education deemed impossible to reform, Citton proposes to improve both the verification and the accessibility of the interpretations produced by the human sciences. The evaluation of research would be improved by interdisciplinary confrontation, which would require reporting on the relevance questions in front of a circle of “ peers » wider than an audience of specialists. The dissemination of interpretations would notably involve introducing students to the interpretation of research content, which would be submitted to them during a multidisciplinary degree course. Against the inevitable specialization of scientific disciplines, the human sciences would impose an increasing and fruitful sharing. But how far can this sharing go? ?
The debate on the relevance of the humanities remains profoundly unequal: where official deception can convince in a few blunt sentences, the theoretician must hold a difficult position to negotiate, between openness to new interpreters, and an irreducible complexity of thought. Citton demonstrates the possibility of writing a text of very broad scope, drawing on philosophy, economics and sociology as well as literary theory: through its accessibility, the essay demonstrates the interdisciplinary capacity desirable in any practitioner of the humanities . But the density and complexity of this reflection, based on all-round erudition, raises fears that its readership will not go beyond the actors in the conflict it describes. It would be a shame if this refreshing approach, with its humor and philosophical rigor, innovative, very rich and very fair, only convinced the convinced. The question of reconquering media space remains unresolved.