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.
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