Dear Humanities Profs: We Are the Problem. By Eric Bennett
NB: This comment on the issues connected to 'multi-culturalism' and 'deconstruction' is written about American literary and media studies departments, but is relevant in other continents. DS
Now that we have a culture of higher education in which business studies
dominate; now that we face legislatures blind to the value of the liberal arts;
now that we behold in the toxic briskness of the four-hour news cycle a
president and party that share our disregard for expertise while making a
travesty of our aversion to power, the consequences of our disavowal of
expertise are becoming clear. The liquidation of literary authority partakes of
a climate in which all expertise has been liquidated. In such a climate,
nothing stands against demagoguery. What could?
That English
departments have contributed to this state of affairs is ironic to say the
least. A lifetime ago, literary studies was conceived precisely in opposition
to the specter of demagogues. The field was funded and justified on the
presumption of its value as a bulwark against propaganda and political
charisma. Our predecessors feared more or less exactly what we now face. The
discipline we’ve deconstructed was their answer to it...
Even the most devoted
relativist cannot behold Fox News or Breitbart and not regard these media
outlets as propagandistic in the most flagrant sense. Eisenhower would have
balked. Promoting conspiracy theories, granting vile charisma a national
platform, amplifying peccadillos into crimes and reducing crimes to
peccadillos, they embody everything that literary studies was meant, once, to
defend against — not through talking politics, but by exercising modes of
expression slow enough to inoculate against such flimsy thinking. Yet the
editorial logic of right-wing media resembles closely the default position of
many recent books and dissertations in literary studies: The true story is
always the oppositional story, the cry from outside. The righteous are those
who sift the shadows of the monolith to undermine it in defense of some notion
of freedom.
In the second decade
of the 21st century, the longstanding professorial disinclination to
distinguish better from worse does not inspire confidence. The danger of being
too exclusive, which the canon once was, pales before the danger of refusing to
judge.
Can the average
humanities professor be blamed if she rises in the morning, checks the
headlines, shivers, looks in the mirror, and beholds a countenance of righteous
and powerless innocence? Whatever has happened politically to the United
States, it’s happened in stark opposition to the values so many philosophers
and English professors, historians and art historians, creative writers and
interdisciplinary scholars of race, class, and gender hold dear.
We are, after all, the
ones to include diverse voices on the syllabus, use inclusive language in the
classroom, teach stories of minority triumph, and, in our conference papers,
articles, and monographs, lay bare the ideological mechanisms that move the cranks
and offices of a neoliberal economy. Since the Reagan era our classrooms have
mustered their might against thoughtless bigotry, taught critical thinking,
framed the plight and extolled the humanity of the disadvantaged, and denounced
all patriotism that curdles into chauvinism.
We’ve published books
like Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s The Signifying Monkey, Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Judith
Butler’s Gender Trouble, and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The
Ethics of Identity - treatises that marshal humane nuance against
prejudice, essentialism, propaganda, and demagogic charisma. We’ve cast out Bill
O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Steve Bannon, but also Allan
Bloom, Jordan
Peterson, Richard J. Herrnstein, and Charles Murray. Our manner has been
academic, but our matter has been political, and we have fought hard. So how
have we ended up in these ominous political straits? The easy answer is frightening
enough: We don’t really matter.
The hard one chills the blood: We are, in fact,
part of the problem.
How has this sorry
reality come to pass, across the humanities, and as if despite them? I can only
tell a story of my own field and await the rain of stones. Three generations
ago, literature professors exchanged a rigorously defined sphere of expertise,
to which they could speak with authority, for a much wider field to which they
could speak with virtually no power at all. No longer refusing to allow
politics to corrupt a human activity that transcends it, they reduced the
literary to the political.
The change was sharp. From World War I until the
1960s, their forerunners had theorized literature as a distinct practice, a
fine art, a realm of its own. Whether in the scholarship of the Russian
Formalists, in T.S. Eliot’s archconservative essays, or in such mid-century
monuments as Erich Auerbach’s
Mimesis (1946), René Wellek and Austin
Warren’s Theory of Literature (1948), and Northrop
Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957), literature was considered
autonomous… read more:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Dear-Humanities-Profs-We-Are/243100
see also
Andrew Calcutt: The surprising origins of ‘post-truth’ – and how it was spawned by the liberal left
Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson - Revisiting Foucault and the Iranian Revolution
Farewell to reality
Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson - Revisiting Foucault and the Iranian Revolution
Farewell to reality
Articles on ideology in East Europe
