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The fundamental thesis is > Three generations ago, literature professors exchanged a rigorously defined sphere of expertise, to which they could speak with au
by thisiszilff 8y ago
The fundamental thesis is
> 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.
Hence all the references to various scholars and their works.
Nowhere does the author bash Trump or say his voters are uneducated imbeciles. The quote most related to this is
> 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.
Which boils down to "The humanities anti-establishment position needs to be toned down. This election when many of us did not get an outcome we wanted, we realized the value in having strong and trustworthy public institutions."
The main theme of the essay is self-awareness:
> 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.
Considering the essay starts out with
> 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?
The takeaway is that humanities professors have become ineffective because they've traded expertise for politically motivated analysis. There's a feel good, all inclusive, woo woo diversity culture about the humanities, but its come at the price of critical analysis and discerning judgment. Instead of providing a a critical, reasoned opposing view, they've become increasingly radical and reactionary. Instead of seeing their view as a small, but important contribution to the greater project of society building, they've tried to monopolize the project. The end of the essay reaffirms that the humanities have something to offer, but that that offering has to be a balanced towards improving the establishment instead of encouraging critiques with no means of improving or fixing it.
- pasabagi 8y agoI think there should be a footnote to all of this: the crux of the argument is as old as the humanities itself. He's disingenuous to pretend that political concerns were implanted into the humanities 30 years ago, when the truth is, the role and position of politics in the humanities is basically the inaugural concern of the entire field. What's more, it's also disingenuous to characterize the scholarship of three decades ago as 'rigorously defined' - especially in comparison to contemporary stuff. New Criticism / Formalism etc. are in theory 'rigorously defined', but the reason why their 'rigorous definition' has been broadly abandoned was because it was nonsensical and arbitrary. Humanities scholarship is much more rigorous than it was in previous decades - it's just a shame that so few read it.
- thisiszilff 8y agoI don't think the rigorous definition of the field is the important bit, rather the kind of area one has expertise in. These days people will develop expertise with a set of "tools" and then apply them to whatever area they'd likem. We get feminist critiques, Focauldian critiques, deconstructive arguments, LGBT critiques, etc., that take on political and social issues in a very slanted manner because they analyze the issue in terms of a this framework. Instead of being experts on feminism, for example, we get experts on everything from a feminist perspective. It's good to have this perspective, the problem is that the perspective is overwhelming. The point is to analyze the issue from this perspective, but we've lost a focus on the relative importance of this perspective and the issues it raises. Moreover, sometimes the issue itself is obscured because it is contorted to be analyzable by this framework. I will say, the problem he delineates doesn't seem to plague all of the humanities, only certain areas. Analytic philosophy departments and history departments seem to not suffer from the same problems.
- pasabagi 8y agoI don't know if I'm living in a bubble, but I don't think I've ever come across a Foucauldian critique in the wild, as it were. Occasionally I've come across a moral panic over some careless tweet an assistant professor wrote. It is true that a lot of humanities faculty are pretty far-left, but that's just one end of the broader trend in academia, exacerbated by the fact that so few artists, philosophers, or writers find much to like in capitalism. As for analytic philosophy, I like some of the work - but I think you've pointed at something like a nice cover over a dirty secret when you mention its apoliticism. Analytic philosophy essentially restricts philosophy to a very small subset of its traditional topics, which are emphatically non-political. That's part of why it's tended to survive and dominate in countries that have regular panics about professors having the wrong political opinions. It hasn't done well out of the strength and clarity of its arguments - often they are orthogonal to the concerns of French and German philosophers. It has done well out of the conservatism and cowardice of university administrations, and embattled accademics.