Interview with James Boyd White.

• Position: Interview

INTRODUCTION

The occasion of the following interview was the Montesquieu Lecture at the University of Tilburg, which Professor James Boyd White delivered in February 2006. (1) In the lecture, entitled "When Language Meets the Mind," Professor White discussed the manner of interpreting and criticizing texts, both in the law and in other fields, that he has worked out over his career.

The heart of this method, as described in the lecture, is to direct attention to three sets of questions:

* What is the language in which this text is written, and the culture of which it is a part? How are we to evaluate these things?

* What relation does this writer or speaker establish with this language as he uses it--does he just replicate it unthinkingly, or does he make it the object of critical attention or transformation? How are we to evaluate what he does?

* What relation does the writer or speaker establish with those to whom and about whom he speaks? How are we to evaluate these relations?

To ask these questions in a serious way invites one into a complex mode of thought: thought at once anthropological and linguistic, as it examines a culture and its language; at once literary and psychological, as it examines ways of simultaneously employing the resources and resisting the limitations of one's cultural inheritance; at once ethical and political, as it examines the identities, the relations, and the communities we create and dissolve and recreate as we speak or write. The method is both descriptive and normative, and it treats both law and other forms of thought and speech. It underlies Professor White's writing and teaching alike.

Jeanne Gaakeer, the interviewer (as well as a contributor to this tribute to Professor White), has long been interested in the relation between law and the humanities, having written her doctoral dissertation on the subject and having published a book on law and literature, with particular attention to the work of Professor White, entitled Hope Springs Eternal.

The work of which this lecture is an example is inherently interdisciplinary, making use throughout of humanistic and literary texts to help us understand the nature of legal thought and expression. As early as 1965, in a review of Myron Gilmore's Humanists and Jurists, Professor White was critical of the then prevailing lack of connection between law, history, and literature, fields once common to the legal profession. Since then he has sought to connect these fields in large part through their shared engagement with language. This emphasis follows from Professor White's view that the essence of the lawyer's work lies in the process:

[o]f identifying and construing authoritative texts, of translating from another discourse in to the law. [T]hese are literary activities, arts, ... or what the Greeks would call technai. All this, for Professor White, involves an "enterprise of the imagination," "an enterprise whose actual performance is the claim of meaning against the odds: the translation of the imagination into reality by the power of language."

In this interview Professor White discusses a broad array of topics, varying from the possibilities and impossibilities of Law and Economics, and Law and Literature, to legal interpretation and the interrelation of law and politics, with the issue of Guantanamo Bay as a poignant example.

MONTESQUIEU LECTURE: "WHEN LANGUAGE MEETS THE MIND"

For your Montesquieu lecture you used as a motto Simone Weil's "Only he who knows the empire of force and how not to respect it is capable of love and justice." What was the reason that you chose this text and in what way does it exemplify important themes for your view on law?

The essay from which this sentence is taken, L'Iliade, ou le poeme de la force, has been in my mind ever since I first read it over forty years ago. (2) Weil's reading of the Iliad deeply influenced my own interpretation of that poem in When Words Lose Their Meaning, and the larger view out of which Weil was writing, captured in that brief sentence, has become increasingly significant for me.

It is wonderful in many respects. For one thing it takes the position that the deepest human motive is the desire to be capable of love and justice, which seems to me both true and original. Who would willingly or happily say of himself that he was not capable of love or of justice? Yet love and justice are often not thought of as related, but in some sense opposed: love is personal, nonjudgmental, an emotion; justice is impersonal, rational, driven by standards and rules. Weil is saying not that these are the same thing, but that they are compatible, and together the most important thing of all. Justice without love would not be justice at all; and love without justice would be false. The desire for love and justice is so deep that it makes us vulnerable, and we tend to hide it behind other things--rationality or democratic theory or a view of life as choices or acts of consumption. But this phrase captures, for me at least, much of what life is about at its center.

In addition, it is her idea, hinted at here but developed more fully in the essay, that the empire of force is not simply a matter of brute power of a military or economic kind but resides in the habits of mind and imagination by which we dehumanize others or trivialize their experience, and this seems to me exactly right. A system of brute power depends ultimately upon the acceptance of a way of thinking about the world, and oneself within it, that the actors in the system share, perhaps unconsciously. The members of a secret police must share a loyalty to their leader or the organization will collapse. For an example of another sort think of American racism, which inhabits the mind of everyone raised in our culture and with which every decent person must struggle.

Weil's sentence then tells us where we can start to understand and resist the empire of force, which is with the way the it works in our own minds and imaginations, leading us to objectify others and to disregard their reality. Our double task is to understand this fact--to see as well as we can how we are the captive of evil forces in our world--and to learn how "not to respect" the empire, that is, how to resist it in our own thought and imagination and feeling.

How does this relate to law and to the life of the lawyer? Directly, in my view, for the meaning of law depends entirely upon the way in which it is practiced, in the aims and understandings that move those who inhabit its world. What we call law can on the one hand be a salient and powerful instrument of empire, denying humanity and trivializing human experience; or, on the other, it can be an important way--perhaps our best way--of seeing, recording, resisting empire. It depends entirely upon the way in which law is done, upon the quality and direction of the lawyer's or judge's mind at work: does it seek to understand the empire at force at work in the world and in the self and learn how not to respect it? If so, and only if so, that mind, and the law itself, may become capable of love and justice.

This sentence is the motto not only of my Montesquieu lecture, but of my recent book, Living Speech: Resisting the Empire of Force, which develops at length the ideas I have just sketched out.

Does this also apply to your choice of Dickinson's "I like a look of agony," (3) or is there another perspective involved as well given the fact that you also spoke about Abraham Lincoln's speech at the end of the Civil War?

I include Dickinson's poem as an example of a text that shows the writer understanding and not respecting the empire of force in one of its most important forms, namely deep sentimentality--which is simultaneously the stock in trade of authoritarian political regimes and a vice against which the poet must constantly struggle. In Dickinson's case, as a woman poet in nineteenth-century America, she was expected to write saccharine verse full of false feeling, one object of which would be to maintain a reduced and sentimental image of the woman herself. In "I like a look of agony" Dickinson confronts and resists those demands directly, insisting on the reality of her own experience as one who grew up surrounded by false thought and false speech. She reveals this directly in the biting next line, "Because it's true"--unlike the rest of what she was offered by her world.

Dickinson represents for me a mind doing just what Weil recommends, confronting the empire of force as it is at work in her culture and her own mind, and showing us how not to respect it.

In his Second Inaugural Address Abraham Lincoln does much the same thing in a very different context, as a political leader giving a speech near the conclusion of a war, a speech that is meant to be the occasion for founding a new community on the ruins that the war has left. Lincoln confronts the language of empire in one of its most familiar forms, the language of war and triumph, of hatred and dehumanization, and finds another way to imagine the warring parties, in this case as equally culpable actors in a moral and providential drama.

What does the title of your lecture refer to, then? I mean, given your ideas on language, it would seem that it is not a matter of "meeting." Can the one be at all without the other, in Cartesian fashion?

You are quite right to raise the question of the title, "When Language Meets the Mind," which seems to assume that there is something called the "mind" which exists unpolluted and pristine until it confronts this alien thing called "language." Of course our minds are in large part shaped by our languages; this is in fact one way the empire works, taking over our imaginations without our quite knowing it. So the task is much harder than the title would imply: not how to defend yourself against an invasion that takes place now, in your maturity; but how to deal with the fact that the habits of mind and...