PROSTITUTING THE HUMANITIES

It’s popular sport amongst Humanities faculty these days to have joined ranks with those who find the Humanities suspect and obligated to defend their worth in terms of their contribution to economic productivity. Possibly the question is not why the humanities do or do not have greater economic utility but why the vocational world is ethically bereft if not inhuman. Possibly this is the task before the Humanities that they fear to carry out.

After all if you are not part of the knowledge business that contributes to the bottom line, you are essentially expendable in present day academia. Rather than struggle for a community of learning with a public mission, especially the re-politicization of community itself, the new technocratically conditioned academics would seem to prefer to subordinate the Humanities to the norms of performativity and thus determine the worth of the “liberal arts sensibility” in terms of its potential for sublimation into entrepreneurship.

The “innovative” Humanities, that kind of Humanities discipline worth funding, would be understood as those who study and analyze “what is” in order to identify and evaluate opportunities for improvement thus consciously contributing to “what will be.” In such linear progress from a present of re-workable raw materials to a future of newly profitable productivity, it seems there is little room for any critically reflective relation to traditions and cultures, to memory and history as if creativity and innovation are antithetical to tradition and memory. Whereas the retrospective and innovative are in truth mutually determining, for the new servants of corporate globalization and marketization of knowledge, they seem to be mutually exclusive.

It is one thing to buy into the inevitable globalization and marketization of economic life; it is quite another to presume that cultural change is analogous to the quality of change we see, for example, in “innovative” alterations of the new Volkswagen Beetle. A poet such as T.S.Eliot interprets the Divine Comedy “innovatively” in The Waste Land for its Truth value not as an object lesson in innovative performativity as a mode of corporate entrepreneurship. The new bottom-line Humanists would have our culture and tradition-- or what is left of it in the face of modernist devastation of what cannot be capitalized upon-- made prêt a porte. It would have our cultures change globally with the rapidity and arbitrariness of the fashion industry and with equally uniform universlity. Such “conservation” seems more to embalm the accidental than preserve the essential.

We surely do not proceed tabula rasa in neither cultural nor economic change, and, for example, surely we do not re-write the Constitution every 15 years; however, when Law is politically instrumentalized in the service of trans-national corporate capital it need not be re-written. It need merely be hermeneutically raped in facilitating the interests of corporatization, militarization and the financialization of the economy. The Law itself like the fashion industry can also be re-made prêt a porte thus living up to the virtue of “innovation.”

Whereas the students pursuing knowledge in the productive spheres realize they must compete in the global insurgency of capital and soon after graduating join their “army,” the Humanities student, which should essentially be all students, has not yet realized he must join the resistance against the decimation of culture, tradition, history and memory in order for his knowledge to be truly innovative in the public sphere and not merely exploitable for the purposes of the private sphere. If he does not, he may soon be “innovated” out of his own humanity for a new and more useable ‘replicant’ model that’s easier to reproduce.

Should we revere the Humanities only for providing for a ‘transfer of learning’ which expedites the performative powers of the captains of industry? Should we validate the Humanities only for having been found to provide models for how to practice technically innovative thinking? Are the Humanities now justified merely in having been shown to have similar cognitive skills and processes as in the hard sciences? Is the “innovative thinking” of the Humanities redeemed in the transferability of its kind of learning and inquiry as a utilizable sensibility and set of skills for the technical and productive sciences?

If so, I suggest the Humanities have yet to be understood let alone appreciated especially in their political relevance for cultural self-preservation in the face of globalization and in their human relevance as spiritually of intrinsic worth in the face of entrenched secularist nihilism.

THE PURPOSE OF THE COMMUNITY COLLEGE, POLITICAL AND OTHERWISE

“The purpose of the community college is to train the local workforce with marketable skills…”. So says Hobbes, my ‘friend’ over at Niagara Times blogspot. The occasion for so instructing us as to the limits of the community college was an excursus on the presumed foolishness of NCCC anthropology Professor Phillip Haseley suggesting that there may well be evidence to justify research on UFO phenomena as legitimate work in academia.

Of course this excursus was simply pretext for trashing the professoriate at N-trip and providing further justification for not granting us even a penny raise in our 4 1/2 year contract dispute with a stonewalling Administration. But then that’s apparently what Dr. Klyczk and Co. is being paid a tidy sum to do which action is obviously being sanctioned by the Board of Trustees and the Niagara County Legislature. In short, "bust the damn Union and to hell with the full-time faculty," is their underlying attitude when it comes right down to it.

But that and Haseley’s foray into the question of the existence of flying saucers and such aside, what exactly is the “purpose” of the community college. Such “job training” may well be important as a task of the community college. I won’t contest that. However, if there is anything else we do of worth, Hobbes fails to grasp exactly what that might be. Of course he doesn’t care what that might be. If it were up to him he would eliminate our entire Social Sciences and Humanities Divisions.

If such draconian measures were undertaken, a major disservice would be done to the people of Niagara County and any other students from the surrounding area who choose to come to NCCC for the excellent preparation we provide for the last two years of college. N-trip provides a general education for those preparing to transfer to a 4-year institution. More specifically it provides, within the limits forced upon it by the present sorely deficient General Education Program, for the kind of critical literacy that prepares a citizen for intelligent and responsible participation in the political world.

The reason such as Hobbes and the power elite he represents would sooner suppress any public knowledge that the community college does anything more than job preparation is not only to accentuate and promote this service. But it is to suppress any suggestion that the community college might serve the purpose of the enlightenment of the people as to what is really in their political interest intellectually and economically.

The community college reduced to job preparation is the prostitution of the institution to the pre-determined needs and wants of an economy to which the workforce must simply conform and adapt. Perish the thought that the “workforce” be educated to decide the kind of economy it wants to create or re-create and thus find worthy of working in.

Hobbes “workforce” is the traditional mass of wage-slaves who have been instrumentalized to provide for the economic status quo and at least to get out of the way of an economy now financialzed as an essential whole and otherwise reduced to a service economy for the established profit and war machine of American transnational capital.

During the recent visit of SUNY’s new Chancellor to the campus of NCCC, I suggested to her that the main problem with SUNY education was an emasculated and impotent General Education Program. In short I told her our present General Education is a lip-service program amounting to, in the en d, little more than a pointless smorgasbord of “exposure” to the Humanities and Social Sciences. I suggested to her more concretely and specifically a solution to this problem perceived to be the same as I interpreted the problem, she admitted, by every other SUNY campus in the State: namely, that General Education is sorely lacking in achieving any meaningful and purposeful common goal for our students and our communities.

My solution is that the organizing principle of General Education should, and possibly only can, be the education toward that which the American populace has in common as a federalist and democratic polity: namely, instruction in democratic participation at the levels of leadership, service, discourse and self-transformation toward the American Ideal. This is what the community college system can do best if we were not in fact being prostituted in the interests of business and industry for cheap and easy job preparation.

The community college is the most important institution of critical learning as determined by the proper roll of the people in securing the sanctity of communities and in re-appropriating the federalist political structure long since undermined by centralist and bureaucratic-technocratic forces in America. Everyone gives lip service to critical thinking as a general education goal. It’s just that we are all for the most part quite disingenuous as to what we believe ought to be criticized. The answer to that question as to the target of critical thinking is: the forces and powers of de-politicization and the market managed homogenization and de-naturing of culture and consciousness. The target moreover is a government at all levels long since de-politicized and reduced to a legitimating arm of big business and banking.

So politically mindless job training is not the task of the community college. It’s fundamental and foremost task is the nurturing of powerful citizens with vision and cultural vitality for freedom, equality, culturally specific communities and the economic capacity for the production of material abundance for all, not just for the privileged.
　
　
　
　

MORE MORALISM AND RESENTMENT AT NIAGARA TIMES

Since Hobbes over at Niagara Times blogspot has censored my participating on his site discussions, I continue to respond to his posts “worth” commenting on from my site.

Yesterday Hobbes took Elise Cusack, New York Power Authority board member, to task for failing to adequately represent Western New York. In spirit I agree with Hobbes. But his “critique” politically has much to be desired.

Let me explain. Firstly, why is it that a Board Member is assumed to be chosen to represent an area of the State? Is that the designated task of a Board Member? Or is that just what is expected traditionally in status quo “politics?” I don’t know how the job title reads, but it’s likely it doesn’t state that a Board Member’s first obligation is to his or her region. Possibly it should if it doesn’t say that. My guess is it states that the Board’s responsibility is to the well-being of New York State as a whole first and foremost. Even if it doesn’t state that, nevertheless, that is how the Board acts.

Personally I would prefer that each Board member did best represent the interests of his or her region. But then I’m a populist. Hobbes is a right-wing Republican who practices character assassination “politics” in the interest of power mongering for his party. Hobbes real interest in the prosperity of Western New York as a regional polity is doubtful at best. His interest in a new populist, regional politics is non-existent witnessed by his kicking me off his web site comment section. Any attempt I made while participating at his site to engender a meaningful political dialogue beyond his myopia was childishly mocked by him and his flock for the most part.

If Hobbes could think and see outside the windowless box he rants within, he could see that moralizing about “bought-off” would-be bureaucrats does not explain nor change the political situation of our region. He doesn’t see and is not willing to think about the fact that the bureaucracy and politicians function like a social class whose interests do not lie in maximizing the prosperity and abundance of the given region of the state that they live in. Their interests lie in doing what they have to do to continue to play a part in and personally benefit from the money monopoly which that virtual political class controls and defends.

However, all real politics starts at home and remains local politics. Hobbes hasn’t learned to define “home” in this proper political sense. The partisan power politics of “well intentioned” Republicans does not define our political “home.” “Home” means the communal value foundation and power base which is the source and purpose of any meaningful and effective politics for Western New York.

Cusack hasn’t “sold her soul” in taking the cushy well-paying "job" with NYPA. She simply has done what was necessary to benefit as a lackey of the political class. For such as her it’s not really even a matter of Hobbes-style partisan power politics. Yes, she has no political conscience nor integrity from my point of view. Surely, Hobbes was right in implying that her raison d’tre as a Board Member was the big payday at the end. Yet,it’s not even a matter of “playing politics.” It’s just a matter of playing the managerial game of the administrative wing of the political class. “Just call me Richie” Richie Kessel does it well. I saw his smooth moves from a front row seat during his last visit to the Niagara County Legislature. Kessel and Cusack are not really political people. They are messenger boys for the politicos higher up in the centralist hierarchy. They are the bought and paid for “votes” that keep money, wealth and power flowing out of Western New York.

Finally, Hobbes conclusion is sadly wrong. It’s not that the state of the Power Authority is a “sad, sad commentary.” His perspective and reasoning is the ‘sad, sad commentary.’ Moreover the people of Western New York have not "had enough" any more than Hobbes has. They will keep taking it, practicing their moral judgment and impotent resentment and hoping a political messiah will come along to take care of them. For the people it’s a tragedy. For Hobbes it’s a paycheck from the Republican Party for continuing to write such ultimately self-serving tiresome partisan tirades.

The state of our pathologically bureaucratically centralized and professionalized democracy is the real problem. Politics must be re-thought. The lines of political identity, belonging and purposefulness must be re-drawn. The radical de-centralization of power in the form of re-constitution of community and local democracy is the answer. Cheerleading for the phantom rebelliousness and threatening indignation of illusory “residents” of Western New York is tiresome and no one is buying it.

Back to the drawing board Hobbes!