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Dear humanities professors: We are the problem

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https://www.chronicle.com/article/Dear-H...Are/243100

EXCERPT: 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.

[...] 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. [...]

Then, starting in the 1970s, autonomy became a custom honored only in the breach. [...it was...] argued that pure art was pure politics. [...] "works that have attained the status of classic, and are therefore believed to embody universal values, are in fact embodying only the interests of whatever parties or factions are responsible for maintaining them in their preeminent position." Porous boundaries, fluid categories, and demoted reputations redefined classic texts.

Beauty became ideology; poetry, a trick of power, no more essentially valuable than other such tricks — sitcoms, campaign slogans, magazine ads — and no less subject to critique. The focus of the discipline shifted toward the local, the little, the recent, and the demotic. [...] The demographic exclusivity of the midcentury canon sanctified the insurrection. Who didn’t feel righteous tossing Hawthorne on the bonfire? So many dead white men became so much majestic smoke. But now, decades later, the flames have dwindled to coals that warm the fingers of fewer and fewer majors. The midcentury ideal — of literature as an aesthetically and philosophically complex activity, and of criticism as its engaged and admiring decoding — is gone. In its place stands the idea that our capacity to shape our protean selves is the capacity most worth exercising, the thing to be defended at all costs, and the good that a literary inclination best serves.

Democratizing the canon did not have to mean abdicating authority over it, but this was how it played out. In PMLA in 1997 Lily Phillips celebrated a new dispensation in which "the interpreter is not automatically placed above either producers of texts or participants in events but is acknowledged as another subject involved in a cultural practice, with just as much or as little agency." This new dispensation — cultural studies — "emerged forcefully because the awareness of positionality, context, and difference is endemic to this historical period."

Having eaten the tail of the canonical beast they rode on, scholars devoured their own coccyges. To profess the humanities was to clarify one’s situatedness, one’s limited but crucial perspective, one’s opinion and its contingent grounds. Yet if "opinion is always contingent," Louis Menand asked laconically, "why should we subsidize professionals to produce it?"

By the 1990s, many scholars equated expertise with power and power with oppression and malicious advantage. The humane gesture was not to fight on behalf of the humanities — not to seek standing — but rather to demonstrate that literary studies no longer posed a threat. Unmaking itself as a discipline, it could subtract at least one instance of ideological violence from the nation and world.

If the political events of 2016 proved anything, it’s that our interventions have been toothless. The utopian clap in the cloistered air of the professional conference loses all thunder on a city street. Literature professors have affected America more by sleeping in its downtown hotels and eating in its fast-food restaurants than by telling one another where real prospects for freedom lay. Ten thousand political radicals, in town for the weekend, spend money no differently than ten thousand insurance agents.

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.

Consider their historical situation [...] To combat ideology, literature had to have properties of its own, beyond and above politics. Modernism had intensified these properties. What vouchsafed the purity of a text was in large part its sophistication. No dictator could find in it a resource for brainwashers. Difficulty, ambiguity, tension, paradox, and irony, the whole pantheon of New Critical values, signified, quite proudly, political uselessness. Such qualities established literature as transcendent content within immanent forms. This classroom commitment to eternity lasted roughly from 1945 to 1967. It fused together expertise, seriousness, difficulty, aesthetic hierarchy, and political innocence. It also tied these attributes mostly to poems and novels by straight white men. This, though, was a tragic contingency and not the essential truth of the field.

"Content is to be dissolved so completely into form," Clement Greenberg announced in "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," "that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself." The danger of avant-garde works, "from the point of view of fascists and Stalinists, is not that they are too critical, but that they are too ‘innocent,’ that it is too difficult to inject effective propaganda into them, that kitsch is more pliable to this end." Kitsch sustained despots; difficult art, their enemies.

[...]

For going on 50 years, professors in the humanities have striven to play a political role in the American project. Almost without exception, this has involved attacking the establishment. As harmful as institutionalized power can be, as imperfect as even the most just foundations inevitably appear, they are, as it turns out, all we’ve got. Never has a citizen been so grateful for institutions — for functioning courts, for a professionalized FBI, for a factually painstaking CBO or GAO — as since November 2016.

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 danger of being too exclusive, which the canon once was, pales before the danger of refusing to judge. In 2011, Louis Menand observed that "few people think that … in the matter of what kind of art people enjoy or admire, the fate of the republic is somehow at stake." The Apprentice [Trump] signifies once and for all the hubris of such blitheness.

The only way to battle, with real hope of meaningful reform, against populist nationalism is to affirm alternative forms of commonality. Far and away the greatest challenge for scholars in the 21st century will be figuring out how to do this work and also how to reclaim the influence that they voluntarily, and with the best of intentions, ceded. That influence will depend on expertise, and that expertise, for anybody in the humanities, will derive from a profound and generous understanding of the past....

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