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© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2008, Unit 6, The Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW

[Expositions 2.1 (2008) 027–034] Expositions (print) ISSN 1747-5368  
doi:10.1558/expo.v2i1.027 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 

The “Reflexive Humanities”

VIckI TromANhAUSEr

Department of English 
SUNY New Paltz

A recent article in The New York Review of Books about affluence in 
America offered sobering news for today’s college students and the 
parents funding their education. Its assessment of the value of higher 
education featured two tables, one documenting skyrocketing tuitions 
over the last thirty years and another estimating what college degrees 
are worth in terms of yearly income (hacker 2007, 32, 33). The news 
does not look good, and in particular for the humanities. So it is no 
surprise that rising costs of higher education have pressed the humani-
ties into an increasingly defensive posture and prompted concerns 
about their ability to earn their keep among neighboring disciplines 
with more immediately practical applications to advertise. Such trends 
bespeak a cultural preoccupation with the economic bottom line and 
the growing perception of education as a saleable commodity whose  
investors have every right to expect a material return. When value is 
conceived in purely financial terms, the humanities are destined to fare 
rather poorly. It is in this defensive climate that Stanley Fish in his  
recent New York Times piece interjects his deliberately provocative 
claim: “To the question ‘of what use are the humanities?’, the only 
honest answer is none whatsoever.”

Fish’s small concession of the intrinsic pleasures the humanities bring 
to those who practice them is a slim peg on which to hang an entire 
tradition of intellectual inquiry and at the same time appears suspi-
ciously cozy with the pressures of the very market forces from which 
he seeks to protect humanities departments. measuring the value of 
the humanities solely in terms of the pleasure they yield those who 
study them can prove a limiting proposition that, as mark Edmund-
son warns, educators in the classroom have been inclined to take all 
too literally (Edmundson 1997). The culture of consumption has 

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© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2008

penetrated the American university, turning instruction into a service  
industry intent on satisfying the student as savvy customer. Fish tellingly  
employs commercial language when he argues in a follow-up column 
that justification for humanistic study “requires more than evidence 
that a consumer can get a desirable commodity in your shop, too; it 
requires a demonstration that you have the exclusive franchise” (Fish 
2008). rather than challenging the students, the classroom as “shop” 
becomes an extension of the marketplace, delivering up its intellectual 
wares in a form designed to amuse and entertain, and comprises a def-
erential environment that is unwilling to risk offense.

Fish’s baiting questions about the value of the humanities opportun-
istically tap into internal anxieties about a crisis of identity as scholars 
engage in ever more defensive accounts of their disciplines’ objectives 
and substantive contributions.1 Fears of the steady erosion of discipli-
nary integrity have fueled efforts to rediscover specialization and to 
recognize that humanistic study possesses its own particular techne or 
skill set.

The cultural turn in the humanities has led members of Fish’s and 
my native discipline of English studies to trespass on some unexpected 
terrain, from anthropology and political science to technology and 
ecology. Scholars in search of fresh pastures thus graze in other disci-
plines outside of the traditional humanities, drawn to fields that appear  
exotic but in which they have no real expertise. This kind of approach 
is, as marjorie Perloff contends, not so much interdisciplinary as it is  
“otherdisciplinary” (Perloff 2007, 655). Perloff sounds a more pervasive 
concern that interdisciplinary offerings have substantially weakened 
the position of the humanities within the academy, compromising the 
disciplines’ integrity as autonomous fields. Both Fish and Perloff inde-
pendently speak to growing fears about an academic climate in which 
literary matters appear secondary, and take on a merely instrumental 
value in relation to other more practically useful, and hence financially 
justifiable, kinds of research.

Such scholarly eclecticism, syncretizing disparate areas of knowl-
edge, has led historian roger Griffin, in his recent investigation of the  
relationship between fascism and modernism, to identify the need for 
“reflexive humanities” that can take stock of their own activities and 



Tromanhauser 29

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methods (Griffin 2007, 36). In disabling outsiders from determining 
the value of humanistic study, Fish refuses to grant its practitioners an 
ability to achieve sufficient analytic distance to assess their own disci-
plinary undertakings. And by doing so, he overlooks one of the greatest 
strengths of the humanities, effectively neutering the disciplines rather 
than shoring up their potency against the assaults of the uninitiated. In 
his presumption that justification “confers value on an activity from a 
perspective outside its performance,” Fish too hastily dismisses the pos-
sibility that humanists might provide a sustained inquiry into the value 
of their own endeavors. The interpretive framework Griffin proposes, 
at once panoramic and self-conscious, presents a necessary correction 
to the underexamined and hubristic practices of an earlier generation 
of humanism. The poststructuralist epistemology of the late twentieth 
century has, Fish implies, settled into the humanities like gangrene, 
forcing researchers “into the reaches of incomprehensible and often 
corrosive theory” (Fish 2008). But instead of signaling the imminent 
demise of the humanities, this kind of theoretically informed reflexiv-
ity offers an encouraging sign of their general health.

It is the humane sensitivity with which the humanities reflect upon 
their own undertaking and the neighborliness with which they reach 
out to other disciplines that constitute their particular, and indispen-
sable, contribution to the academy. And perhaps it is by opening up 
the questions of justification, which Fish’s deceptively transparent pro-
nouncements seek to foreclose, that we might renew the humanities’ 
relevance and clarify their distinctive merits, without pressing for an 
autonomy that spurns the judgments of outsiders.

When Fish concludes that the humanities “don’t do anything, if by 
‘do’ is meant bring about effects in the world,” he echoes W.h. Auden 
who, in an elegy for W.B. Yeats, wrote that “poetry makes nothing hap-
pen” (Auden 1977, 241–243). The elegy itself is a kind of exercise in 
literary interpretation, an evaluation of the deceased poet for posterity, 
which might restore some wanted subtlety to Fish’s polarized extremes 
and offer a different assessment of humanistic study. “In memory of  
W.B. Yeats” (February 1939) provides a reflection on the poetry of 
statement, on art as manifesto or primer for action. If the poem’s cen-
tral axiom that poetry makes nothing happen smacks of the slogan, 



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Auden thwarts such interpretive reduction, and when read in relation 
to its various contexts—stanzaic, literary-biographical, historical—
the line gathers disparate and even contrary meanings. Auden’s elegy 
meditates on the legacy of the poet to a world in which what Virginia 
Woolf called the infernal bray of the dictator’s megaphone threatened 
to drown out the whispered revelations of the poet. his ambivalent 
tribute places Yeats at the heart of a modernist debate in the interwar 
period over the degree to which art should speak directly to the politi-
cal and social concerns of the moment and the extent to which the poet 
was morally obligated to intervene in political reality, whether broad-
casting propaganda or driving an ambulance in civil War Spain.

Auden’s public meditation on Yeats’s poetic legacy took place at a 
pivotal moment in his own career. The elegy was composed months 
before the outbreak of the Second World War and shortly after he had 
emigrated to the United States, a culture he hoped would foster an 
unconstrained voice.2 Written between Auden’s expression of political 
zeal in “Spain” (1937) and his renunciation of partisan allegiances dur-
ing the war, the poem presents two opposed conceptions of the dead 
poet as maker (from poiein, to make): that of the mystical visionary 
aloof in the Tower on Lady Gregory’s estate and that of the revolution-
ary activist whose verse turns in the gyres of epochal history. The elegy’s 
middle portion was a later addition, forming a bridge between the first 
section’s sober assessment of Yeats’ impact on the world and the third 
section’s celebration of the power of verse to transcend the person who 
wrote it and the immediate political circumstances that occasioned it. 
In the middle section Auden addresses Yeats directly in a tone that 
is chummily familiar—“You were silly like us”—casually chiding him 
for the more egregious aspects of his political views, the eugenical and 
stridently nationalistic (even fascistic) strands of this thinking. The 
words of the dead man appear to have left the world fundamentally 
unchanged, more altered by it than altering of it, “modified in the guts 
of the living.” In the wake of his death, as the living poet can attest,

Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its saying where executives
Would never want to tamper; it flows south



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© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2008

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

Approximating the “memorable speech” that Auden considered the 
best definition of poetry, the aphoristic statement that poetry makes 
nothing happen subverts the imperative claims of Yeats’ revolutionary 
verse.3 Poetry ensures its survival by resisting the tampering of “execu-
tives” who remain riveted to the bottom line and the calculation of 
measurable profits and losses.

Auden carries out his argument with Yeats about the political  
potency of their art in the grammar of his poem. Poetic making, as the 
verbs in the middle portion suggest, exists in the intransitive mode, act-
ing without an immediate object or practical agenda: it “survives / In 
the valley of its saying” and “flows south.” one way of understanding 
the subtle qualifications of Auden’s oblique imagery is to see the pas-
sage as enacting a distinction between authorship and writing, which  
allows us to envision a way of happening that is not torn be-
tween the binary opposition of what we might describe as Fish’s 
and Yeats’ attitudes towards humanism. Distinguishing between 
two modes of writing, roland Barthes argues that, in the case of 
the author, “to write is an intransitive verb,” whereas the writer, by 
contrast, is a “‘transitive’ man”: “he posits a goal (to give evidence, 
to explain, to instruct), of which language is merely a means; for 
him language supports a praxis, it does not constitute one” (Bar-
thes 1988, 187, 189). The central section of the poem accordingly 
shows the author in Auden contending against the writer in Yeats. 
Auden jettisons the “transitive” properties of Yeats’ poetry in order 
to inaugurate an “intransitive” poetry. But to deny that poetry has a  
material impact upon the “weather,” the “sufferings” of the poor, or the 
“roaring” of brokers “on the floor of the Bourse” is not to say it is of 
no use. If “poetry makes nothing happen,” in the sense of compelling 
action in the outside world, it nevertheless provides a “way of happen-
ing.” Auden’s organic metaphor implies a different scale of time, where 
poetry is a river that alters the landscape, as it might transform the 
psychic geography of readers, gradually and undramatically, but with 
the most profound consequences.



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Again, attentive reading, as Auden demonstrates in his confrontation with 
his predecessor, possesses its own ethical dimension. once he has purged 
Yeats “himself,” or at least his exaggerated persona, from the verse that sur-
vives him, Auden turns in the final section to argue the opposite case—that 
poetry is a force that exceeds the social causes of the moment, at once meta-
political and suprahistorical. In its celebration of a language that can tran-
scend the man and pardon “his views,” poetry regains a transitive force that 
can move an object, without necessarily compelling its object into passivity: 
the “unconstraining voice” of the poet can “persuade us to rejoice,” “Let the 
healing fountain start,” and “Teach the free man how to praise.” This final 
section of the poem mingles the two perspectives of poetry making nothing 
happen and poetry affecting reality more deeply than simpler forms of ac-
tion. Auden exhorts poetry itself to “persuade,” “Let…start,” and “Teach,” 
without, for example, telling us what to “praise” or “rejoice” in. Poetry 
thus gives us the means to praise, “a way of happening,” without com-
manding a specific outcome. In fact, poetry, and by extension the  
humanities, warn against too readily reducing the range of human 
choice to an expedient program for action. If Auden ultimately is 
not prepared to say of poetry what Fish says of the humanities—
that they do not “bring about effects in the world”—he nonetheless  
renounces the extravagant claims of many of his fellow modernists that  
poetry could remake the world in its own perfected image, a form of  
supreme arrogance in which the artist becomes indistinguishable from the  
authoritarian.

“In memory of W. B. Yeats” displays the reflexivity that is the special 
contribution of the humanities, as the poem juxtaposes two compet-
ing theories of the poet’s power: whether art is immune or directly 
answerable to social causes; what I have called, following Barthes, the 
“intransitive” and “transitive” properties of art. If the latter theory  
appears to gain the upper hand in the end, it does so only after Auden 
has expressed his reservations by letting the other argument have its 
say. The poem carries greater force for leaving the argument in play, 
giving voice to both possibilities without seeking forcibly to resolve 
them. In the polarized climate of the academy, shaped by the competi-
tive forces of consumer capitalism, Auden helpfully reminds us of the 
softer shades of value that exist between the lofty peaks of our culture’s 



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spiritual salvation and the obscure depths of institutional budgets. As 
a renewed expression of the vitality of the humanities, Auden’s poem 
also preserves a place for rhetorical, ethical, and political engagement, 
which Fish would banish from the university. In a New York Times 
column last September, for example, Fish rebuked columbia Univer-
sity President Lee Bollinger for attacking mahmoud Ahmadinejad on 
political grounds during the Iranian president’s visit to the campus. 
Arguing that Bollinger’s public challenge constituted an unwarranted 
provocation, where both university president and classroom instructor 
ought to be bound by “academic protocols” of political and ideological 
neutrality, Fish expressed his convictions that the goal of the liberal arts 
is to impart analytic skills devoid of any unseemly taint of partisanship 
and that the university should not “stand anywhere on the vexed issues 
of the day” (Fish 2007). It makes a great deal of sense to challenge the 
value of the humanities, as Fish does; but even his reductive attitude is 
one that was, ironically, fostered in the self-conscious environment of 
humanistic study. Auden’s poem shows that, even when history presses 
with most alarming circumstances on the moment of writing, cynicism 
and polarization need not constitute our response.

Notes

1. Terry Eagleton offers a witty critique of Fish’s sophistical argumentative tactics 
in “The Estate Agent,” London Review of Books, march 2, 2000, reprinted in 
Eagleton (2003, 171–179).

2. For an illuminating reading of the poem and the personal and social circum-
stances from which it emerged, see mendelson (1999, 3–17).

3. From Auden’s Introduction to the anthology The Poet’s Tongue (1935), in 
Auden (1996, 105).

References

Auden, W.h.

1977 The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927–1939. Ed. 
Edward mendelson. London: Faber and Faber.

1996 The Complete Works of  W.H. Auden: Prose and Travel Books in Prose and 
Verse, Volume I: 1926–1938. Ed. Edward mendelson. Princeton: Princeton 
University Press.



34 The “Reflexive Humanities”

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Barthes, roland

1988    Authors and Writers. A Barthes Reader.  Ed. Susan Sontag.  New York:  
Noonday Press.

Eagleton, Terry

2003 Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivak, Žižek and Others. New 
York: Verso.

Edmundson, mark

1997 on the Uses of a Liberal Education as Lite Entertainment for Bored col-
lege Students. Harper’s, September.

Fish, Stanley

2007 The Administrative Imperative: Always Lower the Stakes. New York Times, 
September 30, online edition.

2008 The Uses of the humanities, Part Two. New York Times, January 13, online 
edition.

Griffin, roger

2007 Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hit-
ler. New York: Palgrave.

hacker, Andrew

2007 They’d much rather Be rich. New York Review of Books, october 11.

mendelson, Edward

1999 Later Auden. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. 

Perloff, marjorie

2007 Presidential Address 2006: It must change.” PMLA 122/3: 652–662. 
doi:10.1632/pmla.2007.122.3.652

http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2007.122.3.652

