Easily Distracted

Though I felt sympathy for Joyce Goldberg’s feelings that she could no longer teach military history to students whose primary interest in the material was therapeutic, I ultimately thought she was reproducing a binary opposition that will have increasingly dire consequences for 21st Century scholarly communities. Goldberg argues that as a scholarly historian, her “pedagogical goals focus on honing cognitive skills through the tool of history”, and that these goals are frustrated or deferred by students who are seeking psychological comfort or closure from their own military experiences or the military experience of loved ones.

I completely understand that feeling of inadequacy in the face of strong emotional reaction to academic subject matter. I’m no more trained than Goldberg is to provide expert therapeutic advice to people who need it. But students didn’t end up in Goldberg’s classes because they misread the sign on an office door and thought she was a PTSD counselor. They were in a classroom studying military history because they thought that history had something to offer them that they couldn’t get from therapy or counseling. I think that’s not just a reasonable expectation, it’s one of the reasons why we study history in the first place.

The key point is that the understanding that comes from studying history, anthropology, literature or other disciplines addresses our feelings and experiences, our lives as humans, but often indirectly, through layers of mediation. That is not ‘objectivity’ or anything like it. We “work through” our human experiences by understanding the experiences of others, by investigating how systems and structures produce and confound human agency and desire, by considering the maddening dance of cause and effect, intention and accident.

So I can see telling a student who has an expectation that there will be a simple lesson from a relevant history that there’s nothing of the sort to be had. I can see telling a student that they’ve got to be willing to defer their need for an explanation, an answer, that they can’t be healed in a moment, a lesson, a simple act of knowing.

But I can’t see the good of saying that scholarly knowledge of military history (or anything else) is inevitably at odds with arriving at an understanding that might be therapeutic, might provide some serenity, or at least connect suffering and uncertainty to a wider, richer human range of suffering and understanding. That’s not just something which might happen in the study of history, it’s something which should happen. We make no promises of healing or peace, but we ought to think that scholarly work is a kind of working through, a vastening of the kind of experiences that can trap and isolate us in a lonely misery and confusion. Why should we imagine that scholarly inquiry develops “cognitive skills” and make that development antagonistic to trying to understand the meaning and feeling of human experience here and now?

A quick follow-up to yesterday’s post. Reading Toni Bowers’ excellent post about a panel at the American Society for 18th-Century Studies in which Cliff Siskin and Bill Warner called for scholars of literary studies to “stop doing cultural studies”, I kept thinking: this feels familiar. I think the stance of Siskin and Warner has some kinship with what I was talking about in yesterday’s post.

What’s interesting in these moments is that they reveal how disciplines are not really markets, nor are they composed of a series of persuasive speech acts, though we sometimes act as if or claim that either or both are true. E.g., we sometimes argue that disciplines change because their practicioners have new interests, priorities or techniques, that they have a supple if slow-paced response to a kind of intellectual market. You write what you think is important, and the field either “buys” it or it doesn’t. And we sometimes say that the priorities of a discipline are determined by persuasion: that scholars do work and then argue for its importance or necessity. If they argue well, ta-da! knowledge.

What’s uncomfortable in a call to NOT do something is that both of those narratives are rather openly pitched over the side. Rather than waiting to see if there is a “market” for getting cultural studies and literary studies messed together like a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, or accepting that if such work is persuasive in its arguments for itself, there must be something to it, the “we” invokes an invisible off-stage governmentality. Doesn’t seem so innocent or magical to me, though neither is it realistic–so much of this kind of call to governmentality in disciplinary life is rather like the Wizard of Oz in his humbug mode, fire and flash but just little people behind curtains when it comes to it.

But this is also part of what sets up the kind of narrative that I was critiquing yesterday: it’s the first positional move in a longer game. First you call for an unnamed disciplinary sovereign to safeguard the traditions of the disciplinary nation. Or you harrumph that changes have taken place in your discipline and your institution without your consent, without a plebiscite. When the restoration of your treasured norms by sovereign fiat doesn’t follow, you can begin beating the O Tempora O Mores drums, and paint yourself into the margins. From there you can get a pretty clear sighting of a kingdom of unhappy exiles, the Land of Violated Traditions, and should you wish, they’ll be happy to stamp your passport and show you to the refugee camps.

In the last few years, I’ve had a few conversations with colleagues here and elsewhere in which they insist that good humanistic inquiry is necessarily defined by its fundamental aversion to instrumental justifications of its own work and that teaching in the humanities should not be reduced to the development of skills, competencies or the transference of highly concrete bodies of canonical knowledge to students. Instead, they suggest, humanistic inquiry and teaching ought to be shaped by ineffable, unpredictable, highly intrinsic values, that it should refuse to reduce or quantify meaning and interpretation, that humanist inquiry is an end in and of itself, that it is more about process and less about results.

I’ve said before that I think this view sets up false or unnecessary antagonisms, partly because I’m quite partial to the idea that humanistic work disrupts, defers or messes up mechanistic or instrumental schemes of all kinds. Job one in my teaching and my writing is to confound and scramble attempts to render societies and individuals transparent, manageable, predictable, legible. I steer my boat by the star of James Scott.

I know some of the folks who feel most strongly on this score see their views as under threat primarily from outside of the humanities, associating instrumental or reductionist approaches to academic inquiry and teaching with the social sciences and natural sciences (or with administrative managerialism and corporatization). I find that rather odd given that one of the dominant approaches to humanistic scholarship and teaching over the last thirty years has argued that humanistic work must forcefully critique existing social formations, discursive regimes, constructions of identity and subjectivity and so on. If the humanities are threatened as this complaint alleges, then the threat comes first and last from within their own domain. (I’m especially frustrated when friends who would otherwise argue for humanistic inquiry to intervene quite instrumentally in ongoing political and social struggles suddenly opt for a description of humanistic work as anti-instrumental, irreducibly intrinsic, ‘inquiry for inquiry’s sake’.)

There’s another problem with this description of humanistic inquiry when it is coupled with a defense of existing academic programs, projects or prerogatives, however. Namely, that many of the best examples of humanists and intellectuals whose life’s work best matches the purity invoked in this vision weren’t academics employed by the postwar American academy. Mostly, we’re talking about intellectuals who did critical and creative work before modern research universities came into being, before tenure became an institution, before academic departments and specialized inquiry defined scholarly community, before TIAA-CREF and health benefits. Or if we’re talking post-1945 intellectuals that would serve as widely admired exemplars of a purer dedication to humanistic work, I suspect that many of the names that would leap to mind across the humanities would be people who may have taught in universities at times but whose lives were significantly untethered to the academy, financially, socially and intellectually.

I’m not saying that 19th or early 20th Century humanistic intellectuals in the West lived without compromised reliance on money or support. Some lived off inheritances or spouses, others wheedled money and support from patrons or indulgent friends. And I don’t think there’s anything good to be said for dying alone, ill, impoverished, as more than a few intellectuals have. But there is something very odd about the conflation of humanistic inquiry as an overall project with the fate of particular academic disciplines in the highly particular institutional architecture of the American academy as it has developed since 1965 or so. The grand vision that defenders of a purer humanities enunciate, if it has existed at all, existed vigorously before the university systems of today, before the comfortably professional and middle-classness of professorial lives today, and might reasonably be expected to exist in some other form after them, if they should disappear or markedly transform.

If that’s not a reasonable expectation, it falls to humanist academics who understand themselves and their projects in these terms to fill in a missing piece of their argument. How and why did humanist intellectuals become so strongly located within and wholly dependent upon the American academy and its particular institutional norms? And no fair describing that process as a process of subjugation, loss, capture or domestication, because any of those labels imply that the real priority of humanists should be to seek emancipation from academic institutions, not the preservation of their position within them. This rhetoric inevitably has to be about conservation, stewardship, the protection of an inheritance, a belief that something wonderful happened when humanists came inside the ivy-covered walls and left their starveling Parisian garrets, that a good middle-class salary and benefits enabled some new possibilities for humanists which should be valued by the society at large, which is paying for those possibilities in some way or another. (A side note: good luck describing that value in terms that don’t end up appearing instrumental or extrinsic.) Even more importantly, a humanist taking up this position has to argue that at some point in the not too distant past, those possibilities were so valued. Otherwise, why complain now of the encroaching menace of instrumentalism and managerialism? This is a stance that is very ill-served by the donning of a sackcloth and ashes, that should not complain of eternal marginalization and exclusion, nor crown itself in thorns. If it makes any sense at all, this is an argument about what the humanities gloriously achieved after 1945 by observing more and more specific kinds of disciplinary forms, by professionalization, by participation in and responsibility to institutional life, by coupling the production of intellectual work to the education of most young people rather than the instruction of a small privileged elite. This is an argument made from a presumed center, even if perhaps one which believes it is time to re-center humanistic practice in academic institutions.

I suppose it’s clear that I think this is the wrong road to travel. I think we can learn a lot from recognizing that many admirable humanist intellectuals have carried out their work outside of or at a distance from the norms of contemporary disciplines within the humanities. The lesson in that is not that the humanities in the academy are disposable, absolutely not. It might be, on the other hand, a sign that the contemporary disciplinary and institutional specificity of the practice of humanists in the American academy isn’t a necessary condition of vigorous, challenging and desirable humanistic work within contemporary universities and colleges. There are other ways to skin that cat. It might even be that intellectual work by humanists as my more traditionalist friends defend it is best served by much looser structural and organizational practices than in other divisions of academic work, that this would bring the practice of humanistic scholarship inside of the academy more in line with the deeper history of this kind of intellectual work. And maybe, just maybe, that move would also solve much of the much-fretted about “crisis of the humanities” by permitting a reconnection or reacquaintance between wider publics and humanist intellectuals.