THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH vs Joseph McAlhany

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#18, DEC/2015-FEB/2016

Joseph McAlhany is Associate Professor and Chair of the Classics Department at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He has published a translation, with Jay Rubenstein, of Guibert of Nogent's Monodies and On the Relics of the Saints (Viking/Penguin 2011), and is currently completing a 2-volume text and translation of the collected fragments of Marcus Terentius Varro for the Loeb Classical Library (forthcoming 2016). He has published in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece & Rome, Exemplaria Classica, and Educational Theory, and has articles forthcoming in The Classical Journal and the Journal of Medieval Latin.

Brotherwise Dispatch - EDUCATIONAL THEORY published an essay of yours entitled, “Crumbs, Thieves, and Relics: Translation and Alien Humanism”, which engages in an epistemic genealogy of ancient Roman playwright Terence’s humanistic motto: “homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto/I am a human being: I think that nothing human is not my concern.” What is it about this fragment in particular that discloses a persistent vitality of meaning inherent in humanistic discourse?

Joseph McAlhany - This fragment, I think, exemplifies both the problem and promise of humanistic discourse, as well as our notions of humanity. The promise is withheld until the final word in the Latin, puto (I think), which to me is the essential component, for without it this famous humanistic motto is reduced to a dangerously universalizing declaration. The irony is that the puto is often left untranslated by those who claim to be most committed to the ideals of humanism, maybe because it seems inessential to the meaning, or because “I think,” which turns the assertion that “nothing human is not my concern” into indirect discourse, seems a hedge on their humanistic truth, weakening the force of the sentiment into an opinion. However, the reason this line should be central to the discourse of humanism is not the apparent truth of its content, but rather the power of the neglected “I think,” because it generates tension between the two halves of the line, between the direct statement of fact in the first half—“I am a human being”—and the expression of thought in the second—“I think nothing human is not my concern,” a precursor of sorts to Sartre’s “existence precedes essence.” The “I think” is intrinsically linked to the “I am,” the inverse of the Cartesian cogito: the thought is the consequence of the assertion of existence. Yet there is no explicit logical connective, no ergo (“therefore”) between the two halves, only a break, a pause, usually marked by a colon, and this admits another opening: what is the connection between thinking and being human? It is a question that does not admit dogmatism, and if there is an essential attribute of humanistic discourse, it is the absence of any dogmatism, a perpetual openness even to the value of such openness. The “I think leaves open the possibility that despite the claim to a common humanity (or because of a common humanity), there remains an insurmountable distance between us. What is essentially human is the act of thinking, and in particular, thinking as an antidote to knowing, or at least knowing in the sense of epistemological certainty and closure. This distance created by the “I think” what maintains the humanism of the fragment in its resistance to the universal: I don’t think it is difficult to hear ominous overtones in the declaration “nothing human is not my concern,” particularly by those who have been victimized by empires and economies or suffered under colonialism or corporatization, and these are the quiet echoes to which the most vocal proponents of a universal humanism deafen themselves. (Imagine if Google adopted this as its corporate motto!) The vitality of humanistic discourse lies in the resistance to closure guaranteed by the “I think”: resistance to closure is a resistance to death. Just as the closure of texts is their death, conclusion and certainty kill something integral to our own existence as human beings, not simply as biological creatures.

The loss of the “I think” in translations, well-intentioned as it is, reveals a tendency (even unconscious) towards closure, and even if motivated by ideals of humanism, a quest for truth, the pursuit of knowledge unaccompanied by resistance can generate terror. In chapter 7 (“Cosmopolitan Contamination”) of Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, Appiah uses the example of Terence of the virtues of cultural “contamination,” and notes that the famous line, in its original context, was not meant to be an “ordinance from on high,” but “a case for gossip.” I’d suggest the two are not mutually exclusive. In a late-antique report on a performance of the play from which the line is taken, the audience rose to its feet and applauded when it was uttered, bringing to production to a halt—whether this story is true or not, it reveals that the line, even in its original context, could be heard as more than only a case for gossip. Appiah ends his chapter by quoting the next lines of the play, with the claim that they are as important as a homo sum line: “Either I want to find out for myself or I want to advise you: think what you like. If you’re right I’ll do what you do. If you’re wrong, I’ll set you straight.” I can well see how Appiah’s humane impulses lead him to hear a “tenable cosmopolitanism” in these lines, ignoring the sinister echoes of discipline and authority they contain, and I wonder if that deafness is related to his blindness, like so many before him, to the “I think,” which does not appear in his translation.

BD - After reading that fragment by Terrence, Fanon’s assertion in Black Skin, White Masks that – “None the less I am a man, and in this sense the Peloponnesian War is as much mine as the invention of the compass.” – immediately came to mind. How might revisiting that fragment from Terence illuminate the false dichotomy posited by those who are intent on closing the emancipatory humanistic discourse introduced by asserting that “Black Lives Matter”, by counter-suggesting that “All Lives Matter” as a supposedly more inclusive humanistic rallying point?

JM - The juxtaposition of Fanon to Terence adds another layer to the reading of the Terence I suggested above, in which I wanted to put the halves of the quotation into a dialogue; specifically, Fanon problematizes my reading by calling into question any claim to humanism, which is too often a well-intentioned and thoughtful, but ultimately blind impulse to inclusiveness, a desire to embrace (and thus enclose) diversity and in include everyone under the umbrella of “human.” What human means in this formulation, however, remains unstated, a given for those who might not be inclined to accept it, and “being human” carries hidden freight, even for the most self-aware neoliberal post-colonial creatures. As generous as the offer seems, as much of a progressive step as it seems to something more liberating and freeing, the push for inclusiveness is still a movement towards something—someone—else. Should the reasonable humanists be shocked when the act of generosity is received as paternalistic condescension, or when the search for a common ground might activate a territorial defense?

“All Lives Matter” is an aggressive, or at least passive-aggressive, reaction to the assertion of the importance of Black lives in the guide of humanism, and I hesitate to accord it the possibility of good intentions: it is a thinly veiled attempt to delegitimize a claim to a separate identity via a specious appeal to equality. The slogan only serves to justify the moral outrage when humanistic appeals to universal inclusiveness are rejected, and when the cries for everyone to be reasonable are ignored. (In the opening of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon noted the colonized would be called upon to be reasonable during the period of decolonization.) The common sense of civility is shocked when the question, asked in all innocence, “Why do you feel that way?” is heard as an implicit challenge, a gentle demand for self-justification, with an implicit adjoinder “Because you shouldn’t really.” I wish it were remarkable that a simple plea for the importance of a people’s lives elicited such a powerful counter-reaction, especially since none was called for. Why was the response not acquiescence, not a simple affirmation, “Yes, they do,” but instead a co-optation, an affirmation that masks a denial, “Well, yes, but so do ours”? I read in Nicholas Kristof’s judicious and oh-so-reasonable column on “Mizzou, Yale, and Free Speech” a quote from an aggrieved student: “I don’t want to debate. I want to talk about my pain.” The comment was savaged, as Kristof noted without comment, and criticism was easy to do in the ignorance of the quote’s original context. But even as a fragment, ripped from its context, that plea from someone who feels ignored, like the line from Terence, contains within it a powerful tension: the cry to be heard is set in opposition to debate: a reasonable conversation among tolerant participants is precisely the arena in which this individual feels her pain cannot be expressed. Her perspective was dismissed by many, as Kristof noted, as childish (and by implication, as unreasonable). Even if a comment or behavior might “reasonably” be labeled childish, we might wonder why someone, especially a student admitted to an elite university, would react in ways we regard as childish. Instead of asking the other “Why won’t you be reasonable?” (as one might reasonably do), which carries with it the implicit demand for justification, we might ask ourselves “Why do we expect her to be reasonable?” Why isn’t her response, in fact, reasonable, even if we also regard it as childish? We easily resist challenges to our claims to humanity and rationality (“Maybe our open debates are not really open.” “Maybe my idea of ‘childish’ is problematic.”) and turn such challenges into further self-justifications of our own beliefs (“Because she’s immature.”)

“All Lives Matter,” in the same vein as a claim to universal humanism, is an attempt to end debate by assimilation, and close off the possibility that all lives might not matter in the same way, or that all humans do not have the opportunity to be human in the same way. The humanistic drive for inclusion is perhaps far more inclusive than we imagined, and has enclosed us within a hermeneutic horizon we can’t see beyond. It is easy for those committed to humanism to forget the perspective of those who are embraced, like children, and then to be surprised when this move might elicit a “childish” reaction (in those terms, not surprising to see parallels between students on US campuses and Fanon’s colonized).

I’m not sure if anyone has juxtaposed Fanon and Terence before, or why they would: but such an “unreasonable” act of reading resists our own received forms of humanism, and challenges our own self-understanding. In fact, Fanon’s text generates its own internal resistance by co-opting the compass and Thucydides, and as an embodiment of disalienation, sets in tension man and Black man (Fanon is not interested in women, at least not as subjects). Scientific and poetic, Fanon’s style is frustrating and unreasonable, which is why it is, in parallel to Terence, an exemplary humanistic text, at least in terms of what I see as paradigmatically humanist: perpetual resistance to closure, to conclusion, to inclusion Humanism always seeks a way out, and its engagement with the world is a means to escape it, to generate a howl. And as the Terence line ends with the problematizing puto, Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, ends in a deeply reasoned howl, with a prayer: “O my body, always make me a man who questions!” I’m not sure we can always answer this prayer, but at the very least, the prayer can poke a hole in the seamless garment in which we’ve enveloped ourselves.

BD - For those of our readers unfamiliar with your work, what is it about the epistemological relation between fragments and translation which sustains the continuing relevance of humanist discourse? Based on your response, which of the numerous translations of The Iliad and Prometheus Bound do you recommend?

JM - Fragments are revelatory of our lived experience, in that even those things we consider as wholes, in their entirely, are in fact only parts of something else. A fragment merely makes this condition obvious, and leads us to consider everything, and everyone, as both fragment and whole. A textual fragment is a part of something larger, usually lost and often unknown, and it is the loss of the whole, either permanently by accident of history or temporarily by an act of quotation, that creates the fragment. The removal of an original context, which would be presumed to guarantee the fragment’s real meaning, creates a fruitful problem: how do you make sense of something incomplete, that has a new life far removed from the home in which it was first given life? In one reading, a fragment is liberated and can be liberating, since there is no constraint of context to define the its meaning, and thus the loss become a real gain: the fragment can be treated as a whole, as something complete. To translate a fragment, which is to make some sense of it (even as a piece of nonsense), is to suggest, if not create, a context. And then one wonders is of the way we explicitly are forced to translate and make sense of fragments is in fact how we treat and make sense of all things, operating under the illusion of a closed and complete system, in a world that is composed of wholes, and not parts? If a fragment is always incomplete, it contains qua fragment an element of uncertainty, and by necessity holds within it the “I think” of Terence’s quotation and answers the prayer of Fanon. And it is this which can give texts, and people, their vitality: what we need to share is resistance to completion.

There is no one best translation. Rather, the best translation is all of them. Notions of fidelity or accuracy in translation are usually misguided, and place our demands upon both source text and translation (faithful to what exactly?). It is not that one translation best captures the sense, but each captures a sense. There is often anxiety about what is missing or what is lost in translation, but if a reader is liberated from adherence to a faith in the original, loss and gain become interchangeable, which is to say meaningless. In truth, the judgment of translations, beyond the aesthetic pleasure of them as texts in their own right, is an act of hubris.

The Iliad and Prometheus Bound are exemplary in this regard, especially as notions of authorship, originality, and even of text are contested in both cases. In regards to the Iliad in particular, Homer may or may not have existed, but even if he did, the translations we use today are based on modern reconstructions of Greek texts that have their origins in the Library of Alexandria, and these texts were already four or five centuries removed from the time during which the Iliad as an oral poem-in-performance came into being. What is really being translated when someone translates this ur-text of the Western literary tradition? What would count as original in this scenario? I do not think this question is considered most of the time—we simply enjoy the Iliad that we have in a sense created, though this is not to say the poem is not a genuine artifact of ancient Greece. But note that the recent translation by Stephen Mitchell does not contain the Book 10 of other versions; the translation is not “abridged,” as some readers complain, but is based on a scholarly Greek text which considers that portion of the text a later interpolation, not original with Homer (though again, what counts as original with such a text, and what counts as Homer, have their own complicated history). Fragments and translation are at the heart of humanistic discourse, for while even scholars blithely speak of Homer, underneath the name and the text we read lie difficult problems and questions, which cannot answer or solve, because an intense philology always ends in openness rather than closure. The problem with scholars is not that they pursue a question in too much detail, but they never pursue it enough: they want, and maybe need, for the discussion to end, whereas translators know they are always lacking by the nature of what they do.

BD - In your work, why is it that the discursive contributions of the ‘relic thief’ have more worth than those of ‘the commentator’?

JM - Akin to what I just said about scholars, commentators take upon the role of explicators, and seek to explain the text: to provide its proper understanding, to complete its meaning, and to provide the final word. A commentary fulfills its aim when it can claim to be the ultimate authority, impossible to supersede. A relic thief, however, acting in a very different spirit, confuses claims to originality and authority, and thus generates a different type of conversation. I do believe the spirit in which something is done—I suppose one cold even refer to intentions—determines its humanism, and this it not always evident from the final product itself: texts can be unintentionally humanistic, and humanistic impulses can lead to inhumane products, but humanism is often reflected in the style. Reading a commentary sequentially is not an attractive option, and they are rather consulted, as one would a doctor or lawyer, seeking a cure or a settlement. The thief, on the other hand, creates the problems the commentators seek to solve, and I suppose even in an Aristotelian way of thinking this would give him primacy. Literature itself began in allusion and quotation, borrowing and recontextualizing (plagiarism is not an ancient concept, and originality is relatively modern), and we ought to think of some literary thieves as creators and as poets, not necessarily to valorize them, but to question our own commitments to our literary values.

BD - What is it about the intellectual trajectory of Marcus Terentius Varro that lends itself to serving as such a potent allegorical example and critique of the contemporary state of the humanities in the Academy?

JM - Not long after his death, Varro became figured as the prototypical scholar, despite the rather remarkable life he led in the political arena and on military campaigns. And in his texts, as far as we can tell from their fragmented state, he had tried to do something more than be a collector of facts, compiler of texts, and commentator, yet that is exactly what he became to posterity. Despite the evidence of Varro’s writings, it was the one-dimensional portrait of his personality that determined the reading of those texts, and not even the odd satiric poetry from his younger years could complicate the idea of him as something other than a pedant. It was not that his texts had no vitality, but rather scholars who saw their own ideals of dispassionate diligence embodied in him drained the life out of his texts, and made him a mirror of their own concerns. The way in which Varro has been read and reconstructed our to be a lesson in our particular blindness: our tendency, even at our most thoughtful, to embrace an otherness only because we want to see our own reflection. In this way, his trajectory mirrors that of humanism, which was become a way of seeing in others what we want to see in ourselves.

Varro was, to use Fanon’s term, instrumentalized: a means to knowledge, a repository of data, the authority against whom no further appeal could be made. Another way of expressing what happened to Varro is that he was dehumanized: he himself became his writing, which were a fragmented collection of facts. (Often forgotten is that the most well-known “facts” about Rome are from Varro: the seven hills and the traditional foundation date, for example, are both his.) And it is remarkable how easily the poetic side of Varro was nearly erased from history, and I think this is emblematic of academia today, where data is demanded at nearly every level of discourse, knowledge is privileged over wisdom, transferable skills and measureable outcomes supplant unknown pleasures and unseen transformations. Even the humanities have turned to scientific discourse, though in most cases it should be called scientistic. Such a turn is not in and of itself problematic, only that it too often comes at the expense of the non-disciplinary and the non-assessable, and we risk erasing other histories and marginalizing another set of voices. The institutionalizing of education may necessitate marginalization and erasures, but the processes that lead to these consequences are now occur within a discourse dominated by deeply non-humanistic concerns, and rests upon assessability. Nothing truly human is assessable. Even when we claim to know the experience that transformed us, and identify the moment when we saw the light, we can have no epistemological certainty about it. We will not know what mixture of experiences led to the cure for cancer, or why a particular combination of intellects in a lab did the trick: we may receive the anecdote of the eureka moment in the bathtub, we will know that the discovery will necessitate many hours in a lab, but there will never be certainty about what did or did not go into the cure. All humanistic discourse rests upon that ultimate uncertainty, yet in current discourses about higher education is it assumed we can know what will effect us and our world: that we know in some general sense that the study of linguistic structures in a language spoken by a few hundred people in a remote part of the world has not the transformative potential on us or our world in the same way that a study of the chemical composition of an asteroid passes by the solar system possesses. There is a fundamental uncertainty that all of this assessment ignores, and because ignores, is eliminating the foundation of a humanistic education. We let the comforts of academic expertise retard the striving after wisdom. I think Varro tried to represent something more, or at least I would choose to read his fragments in that manner: a spirit of humanism, a self-reflective presentation of his researches, with a poetic style that has largely been effaced, inhumanely. The treatment of Varro, the treatment of fragments, and the treatment of people not only in the world but in higher education, share disturbing commonalities.

And this is not to set humanities in science in opposition, which is a trap easy to fall into: humanism and the humanities do not always walk together, and scientists often represent the best of the humanistic discourse, because they as well as anyone can understand the perpetual process of questioning and the absence of full understanding. Nor is this is a plea for relevance, which I think is one of the most damaging words ever applied to education, and is now routinely confused with importance. One of the most powerful functions of all academic pursuits, and of the humanities in particular is to be irrelevant, to not be of this world. It is interesting that scientific pursuits, no matter how removed from this actual world (or solar system) are accorded automatically relevance, though why the atmosphere of Pluto is relevant in a way Tang poetry is not escapes me. There are the obvious answers, but because the answers are obvious, we should ask the question again.

This has been another one of our BROTHERWISE FIVE interview series, during which The BROTHERWISE DISPATCH interrogates intellectuals, artists and activists with five probing questions to the delight of our readers.

On behalf of Joseph McAlhany and The BROTHERWISE DISPATCH,

Peace.

-A. Shahid Stover

(this interview of Joseph McAlhany for THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH was conducted by A. Shahid Stover through email correspondence from September 7th – November 15th of 2015)