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Thursday, January 08, 2004

Reclamation Project

University life was much more humane then that it has now become. Less doctrinaire, less ‘correct,’ more open-minded. Fewer intellectual fascists about.” Donald Justice

To understand how humane studies became inhumane in our time, begin by considering important aspects of the larger culture they've embraced. The humanities could, as I suggest in the post just below, have tried to get in touch with a bit of their inner monasticism (something like this was the model of the university for centuries), and this would have been a good idea. They could at the very least have attempted to maintain a certain quiet distance from the blare and glut of contemporary America. But instead they went the other way -- all the way out to the world beyond the college walls.

And what’s it like out there? Well, often strikingly inhumane -- not merely in the sense of cruel, but in the sense of robotic, barely recognizable as human. In an end-of-year feature last December, the New York Times asked a few writers to discuss some of the worst ideas and practices that have come to dominate American culture. Three responses were especially telling:

1.) We humiliate other people through unconscionable greed and status obsession (“When executives insist on making thousands of times more money than workers in order to feel rewarded, the peculiar American social contract is undermined. Both domestically and internationally, we're collectively trending toward mass humiliation of opponents.”).

[UPDATE: 25 Jan 04: In today's New York Times, Market Watch's columnist Gretchen Morgenson talks about various recent proposals to limit chief executive pay:
"The gap between chiefs' pay and that of lower-level workers has yawned in recent years. J.P. Morgan, the financier, is credited with suggesting that executives earn no more than 20 times the pay of low-level workers. How quaint: a 2000 study by Towers Perrin showed that chiefs at big domestic companies earned 531 times what their hourly employees did, on average."]

2.) We are soulless workaholics (“Studies reveal that Americans do an average of
350 hours [the equivalent of almost nine 40-hour weeks] more work each year than
Europeans, and two-thirds fail to sleep eight hours a night. Stress-induced illnesses are rampant. Even when we're not working, we "work out" or watch reality TV. We have turned our homework- and activity-burdened older children and ourselves into
workaholics, multitasking 24/7. What are we trying to prove?”).

Workaholism update 1.12.04: “According to the latest figures from the Federal Reserve, America's consumer debt has topped $2 trillion for the first time, continuing what debt experts view as an alarming surge in recent years,” reports today’s Washington Post. One observer notes that in the long term this means “our standard of living has to go down." Another remarks: "It's going to result in people having to work longer. Effectively, if this continues, the average American will not have enough to retire on and will not be able to retire."

3.) We are pathetically dependent upon mercenary experts to live our lives and define our experience for us (“These days you would think that there is no such thing as normal, thanks to the hand-in-glove working of the drug and insurance companies with the American Psychiatric Association, which publishes the handbook of 374 ‘mental illnesses.’ If you are still grieving a loved one's death two months later, you fit the category of "major depressive disorder." Insurance companies want you quickly fixed, drug companies have a pill for every occasion, and friends and family are too overworked to provide the irreplaceable support for grief that is present in other countries. We are damaging the nature of friendship, teaching people that they need experts to treat them for everything.”)

The American university has always had the choice to capitulate to or to resist these trends. Our best novelists, after all, critique them: read Don DeLillo’s White Noise. But the English faculty of our liberal arts institutions by and large mirrors these trends - like the APA, many professors impose shabbily inadequate narratives upon richly textured human experience; like many other Americans, they are often technology-mad work robots; and, as for number one on the list: some of the highest profile academics in the humanities today tend to model precisely the reptilian winner-take-all approach to social life the writer is describing.




Reclaiming a humane academy involves among other things an attentiveness to our own complex emotions - not the kitsch of psychotherapy and tv, not the umbrage of the university sex police, not the emotionlessness that Richard Rorty, having in mind cultural theorists, calls "dry knowingness," but rather the actual forms of feeling we undergo in the world and at the university.

The mature deployment of emotion is, as writers since Aristotle have known, one of our only ways of apprehending and assimilating significant and sometimes traumatic private and public experience. “Feel, feel, I say,” wrote Henry James in 1915 to a friend whose husband had just left for the war front: “Feel for all you’re worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live, especially to live at this terrible pressure.” The cathartic release of emotion that aesthetic experience prompts (violence prompts the cathartic release of emotion too, of course, and from Columbine on down this is the preferred American way) remains just as urgent in our current pressurized circumstances, and yet the very people who should be leading us to it - teachers of the humanities - represent, as Andrew Delbanco notes in my last entry, an oddly affectless vanguard.

“Many people who become academics,” writes James Elkins, author of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings, “fail to feel anything very strongly... Virtually all academics are in the tearless camp.” Based on his surveys of art historians and other academics in the humanities, Elkins remarks that “the majority of such people...actually distrust strong emotions,” which are seen as “old-fashioned, romantic, and unfitted to modern art.” Crying in front of paintings is “unprofessional.” Underlying this emotion-phobia, Karl Mannheim suggested decades ago, is “the great historical process of disillusionment, in which every concrete meaning of things as well as myths and beliefs are slowly cast aside.” (Again, something like this is what Delbanco has in mind below when he talks about humanities professors and their loss of faith.) Intense aesthetic emotion is simply one of the casualties of a larger “destruction of all spiritual elements, the utopian as well as the ideological” in modern life, a condition Mannheim calls “matter of factness.” Mannheim regards the ascendancy of matter of factness as a catastrophe, “the decay of the human will” to comprehend and improve the world.

Richard Rorty, who essentially repeats Mannheim’s argument about matter of factness in our time, attacks excessive theorizing among American humanities professors which, again, substitutes a cold “knowingness” for awe, and “resentment over the failures of the past for visions of a better future.” The result, he says, is not intellectuals who are a little smarter, but rather intellectuals who are “a little meaner.”

[Along these lines, Timothy Burke tells a wonderfully toxic little tale about an exchange he once had with a fellow faculty member at Swarthmore:

“I had a chance a few years ago to attend a dinner for a guest lecturer. Some of
my favorite colleagues from Swarthmore were there. The conversation started with
issues that were fairly specific to the speaker’s presentation and work, but very
rapidly grew into a fast-paced bull session aimed at the primal question, “What is a
good society”? Afterwards, I talked with one of my colleagues who hadn’t been
there about how this had been the best discussion I’d had since I was an
undergraduate, and my feeling of melancholy about how rare and odd this
conversation actually was. My colleague looked puzzled and said, ‘Sounds awfully
simplistic.'"]


The aesthetic enthusiasm which post-structuralist critics like Fredric Jameson ridicule as grounded in “quaint romantic values” is in fact our only means, Rorty argues, toward infusing ourselves with what he calls “social hope,” the conviction - which we feel in the presence of powerful aesthetic objects - that, despite all, the world remains comprehensible, workable, and transformable toward something better by our efforts. Yet transformative hopefulness of any kind continues to be, in the words of the art critic Peter Schjeldahl, “plowed under by the irony machine” of postmodern thought.

Aesthetic experience discloses a world made radiant and vital by a mostly unseen but
occasionally glimpsed sublime coherence - unattached to any divinity or creed - underlying the seeming contingency of the world. “I am sure that far from feeling myself degraded by my intercourse with art,” William James tells his skeptical father, “I continually receive from it spiritual impressions the intensest and purest I know.” In Victor Segalen’s Essay on Exoticism: An Aesthetics of Diversity, he describes the heart of aesthetic pleasure as involving a vision of “the diversity of forms and of things [as they] rise from some unfathomable abyss of unity.”

Though the source and nature of this unity remains enigmatic, its effect on the observer involves the sudden conviction that there is more to the world than we have ever sensed before; that beneath the flux and immanence of daily experience, the world is animated by a steady source of meaning and value. The observed beautiful thing is the emblem of that somehow reassuring submerged coherence in its unanswerable reality, its stupendous presentness. Standing in the bedroom where his lover has just died, gazing at his face, Mark Doty writes of the beauty of the moment: “All things which are absolutely authentic are beautiful. Is there a luminous threshold where the self becomes irreducible, stripped to the point where all that’s left to see is pure soul, the essence of character? Here, in unfailing self-ness, is not room or energy for anything inessential, for anything less than what counts.”

This process of adaptation to a broken world involves both direct confrontation with the morbid and horrifying force of the instigating event, and, just as importantly, reassurance that individual and communal abilities to overcome injury and reorder the world remain intact. Iris Murdoch admired T.E. Lawrence, she said, because he had the ability to “let the agonizing complexities of situations twist [his] heart instead of tying [his] hands -- that is real human greatness.” In an essay titled “Mahler Was There Ahead of Us - How Art Helps Us Face the Unfathomable,” Joshua Kosman writes that artists “take our ragged, inchoate emotions and reflect them back in more coherent form. [T]hey help us replace raw terror with a sense of awe.”




“When we say a thing is unreal,” wrote DeLillo of the World Trade Tower
attacks, ‘we mean it is too real, a phenomenon so unaccountable and yet so bound to the power of objective fact that we can’t tilt it to the slant of our perceptions. First the planes struck the towers. After a time it became possible for us to absorb this, barely. But when the towers fell. When the rolling smoke began moving downward floor to floor. This was so vast and terrible that it was outside imagining even as it happened. We could not catch up with it. But it was real, punishingly so...”

Yet if it is incomprehensible, it is not, DeLillo suggests, omnipotent. Although the
terrorists have temporarily seized the “narrative” of the world, “it is left to us to create the counternarrative” by letting the event twist our hearts rather than tie our hands. “We need,” he writes, “the “smaller objects and more marginal stories in the sifted ruins of the day. We need them, even the common tools of the terrorists, to set against the massive spectacle that continues to seem unmanageable, too powerful a thing to set into our frame of practised response.”

“The writer begins in the towers,” he continues, “trying to imagine the moment,
desperately. Before politics, before history, and religion, there is the primal terror. People falling from the towers hand in hand. This is part of the counternarrative, hands and spirits joining, human beauty in the crush of meshed steel. ...The writer tries to give memory, tenderness and meaning to all that howling space.” In Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life, Adorno wrote that in the wake of World War II and the concentration camps, “there is no longer beauty or consolation except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibility of what is better.”