March 25, 2003
There is a lovely post over at Invisible Adjunct that goes to the heart of this weblog. Entitled 'Tradition versus Traditionalism'----and that distinction says a lot----the text addresses the decline of the humanites in academia from someone living on the academic margins.
This decline is what motivated this weblog. So a fellow spirit who understand's the damage that is done to those who delay and defer a good deal of early to mid adult life (establishment of a viable career, marriage, children, etc) in pursuit of a doctorate degree that turns out to lead to nowhere in terms of a job or career. This is what has happened to so many of my friends in academia here in Australia due to the massive redundancies in the humanities.
The text starts from:
"....the decline of said humanities? (I say "decline" rather than "crisis" because I think we are talking about a slow and gradual death rather than an acute and sudden convulsion). I suspect there must be a relationship between the two, though I can't claim to have figured it out....If we ourselves do not believe in what we do and if we ourselves either will not or cannot offer a convincing explanation of what we do and why it is we should be doing it, then we cannot expect the public to continue to lend its support to the work we do in the humanities."
Nicely said. Those in the humanities have lost their way about why they are writing history or philosophy over and above being what Nietzsche famously called nookdwellers. They really do have to reinvent themselves if they do not want entrepreneurship imposed on them as scholars by the state and the market.
Two responses are quickly and rightly rejected:
"Now, I am not advocating a cynical pandering to the public, ie., Let's pretend to enthusiastically endorse a series of traditions that we secretly despise in the hopes that the state legislature won't further slash our budgets...I am beyond weary of the kind of presumptive hostility[of the public?] that too often passes for critical thinking in today's academy. "
So where does that leave a humanities academic without tenure? In a tight corner. How to connect with the common life? Its a tricky situation since the knee-jerk reflex of academics is to scorn public life in the name of reason whilst living their everyday lives within it. The good old mind body split has deep roots.
A useful distinction is made:
"Let us distinguish carefully between tradition and traditionalism, and support the former while rejecting the latter. By "traditionalism," I understand a non-critical and even reverential celebration of texts/thinkers/canons that are supposed to be above and beyond the reach of criticism precisely because they have stood the test of time and are now to be elevated (or relegated) to a quasi-sacred space as a collection of quasi-sacred objects. As I see it, traditionalism does not support but rather undermines tradition. The texts we study should not be viewed as museum pieces or sacred relics to be carefully sealed off and placed behind glass, out of our reach and out of harm's way. Rather, the texts we study are ours to do with as we like, and we should feel free to handle them with our grubby hands and to muck around with them as much as we please. If they have stood the test of time, then they can surely bear the weight of our criticism. And they should be approached, I think, as something living and vital, to be passed on from one generation to the next, which is how I understand "tradition."
All of which is to say, there must be some middle ground between uncritical celebration and wholesale rejection. I think we need to work harder at finding this middle ground. To my mind, this middle ground involves an understanding of ourselves as working within a series of traditions into which we would introduce our students."
Fair enough. Its a good response to academic disciplinary texts. It gets some movement and diversity going in the humanities. But it remains discipline bound. Now we also live in traditions in our everyday life in civil society, the family and political life. What is the relationship of a rejuvented humanties to these? Do humanities academics speak to these? How do they do so? Or has the old idea of a liberal education for democratic citizenship been lost?
Invisible Adjunct's text wanders a bit at this point and then turns in on itself. The text says that:
"...life on the margins can force upon you a kind of critical distance that you might not have if you were more comfortably situated within. And so I find myself increasingly committed to a defense of the notion of tradition, for a number of reasons and on a number of grounds. But for now, I want to emphasize a very practical and pragmatic point: namely, that if we continue to undermine the humanities from inside the academy, then we really don't have much by way of a defense against attacks on the humanities from outside the academy."
Once again we come back to circling around the relationship between the public, the common life and the rejuvenated humanities in the academy. Faced with the poor earnings propects of an arts degree the text ends on a despairing note of decline:
"Perhaps the liberal arts are close to becoming completely irrelevant, and the humanities as we know [them] or as we once knew [them] will be consigned to the museum?"
The humanities as we once knew them in their old disciplinary form will be consigned to the musem, after a period of academic breakdown.
But this need not be the case for the humanities in the form of a interpretative mode of thinking concerned with meaning and understanding and critical of an instrumental rationality of the technosciences that is increasingly hegemonic in the high-tech corporate university, which now produces market values. As a result intellectual practice inside the university is changing as a result.
This transformation is not something that is just imposed on the university from outside by the state as many conservatives maintain; the transformation of the university from liberal to corporate is part of the wholesale transformation of the economy and society. It is not just the traditions of the humanities that are being pummelled; it is also everyday life and its traditions that is battered by this transformation of society/economy by an enlightened economic reason.
The distinction between traditionalism and tradition applies in everyday life as well but the humanities remain silent. They remain silent about which parts of the traditions of the common life vcan be used to resists and counter an economic rationality. In another post The Only Emperor is the Emperor of Ice Cream Invisible Adjunct does ground herself in t family life:
"I look at my wee son who is truly the light of my life, and there is probably nothing I would not do for him (I resist the cult of domesticity that dies hard in America, sure, but would I give up my life to save the life of my son? I surely would...do so without hesitation). And Edmund Burke was right about our "little platoons," he surely was right about this. At some level, I have to care more about my own child: a child requires so much of time and energy and investment (physical, emotional, financial and so on) that none of us would be here, I am sure, if parents didn't care first and foremost for their own children."
Here we have the distinction between the traditionalism--the cult of domesticity--and the tradition of caring for another. But the humanities belong to the workplace--these intellectual practices are about work which is distinct from the private life. Would not one to way to defend the humanities from attacks from outside the university be to show the usefulness of the humanities ithrough an engagement with the issues of private life.
Could they not engage with the contemporary issues of Burkes 'little platoons' instead of leaving it to the culture industry or religion? Could they not engage with the issues thrown up the stresses and strains of balancing work and family? If the humanities are going to have an after life then they need to step outside the boundaries of the workplace and the academic traditions of the university.
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Here are my initial thoughts:
The liberal arts are older than Western democracy, and find their roots in an earlier aristocratic order. They are the arts of the free, those with leisure, as opposed to the unfree. Nor are they the primary vehicle by which the unfree became free. That freedom came primarily from economic and political forces, and the liberal arts struggled to keep up. (Damn I'm sounding like a Marxist.)
To their credit, they did keep up, and they have given us solid foundations for understanding what modern democratic society is about (and should be about). Nonetheless, their aristocratic origins have not been shed, nor can they, because they are still oriented toward leisure (scholia), i.e., the life that is chosen simply for its own sake.
I don't see this tension (or contradiction, to use your language) abating. Academics will always be somewhat marginal figures, but this need not mean alienated figures. We don't need to become shills for big business or consumerism, but we ought to be more respectful of what modern economies have done for freedom and prosperity. Rather than placing ourselves against the culture as a whole, we should find the virtues within it and promote them. Most of my students understand that money doesn't bring happiness. What they don't realize so well is what might bring happiness, and so they follow the route of money by default. I see part of my job to help show them the alternatives. To my mind, I am reconciling them to the higher parts of their culture, not setting them against it.