Efficient” Creativity and the Residue of the Humanities

The humanities are having a hard time as a disciplinary field, increasingly having to prove themselves as necessary or useful. This reality occurs as the academy undergoes a neoliberal institutionalization, which involves the privileging of hard “proof” and the pressure to produce useful, valuable, and practical research—what Bill Readings in The University in Ruins (1996) calls “excellent” knowledge and what Alan Liu in The Laws of Cool (2004) calls “knowledge work.” The academy today operates at the intersections of information culture, the cultural dominance of technology, and capitalist craze. In this way, it resembles Neil Postman’s theory of the technopoly: founded on principles of industrial invention (42), technopoly favours progress over tradition with the belief that “what cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no value” (51). Shaping and controlling societies and institutions, technopoly informs contemporary neoliberalism; through the neoliberal restructuring of the university and its research, the technopological academy is realized.

The danger for humanities scholars and students with regard to meeting demands for useful, valuable, and practical research is that we perpetuate the larger, systemic conditions that shape such expectations and of which such expectations are symptomatic. Additionally, we ignore that the humanities are being devalued for practising what they preach: for being theoretical, creative, reflexive, and humanist—characteristics that not coincidentally are polarized from technopoly.

Inherent in a technopological neoliberalism and the technopological academy is a capitalist drive that more and more espouses a “maximum productive performance” (Schumpeter 81). Coined by Joseph A. Schumpeter (1942) as “creative destruction,” this drive fosters the constant revolution of “the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one” (83), a cycle of growth that Alan Liu shows has reached a modern apex in the form of postcapital, postindustrial information culture.

In particular, Liu voices a concern over the creative destruction of historical consciousness in the humanities, arguing that with “technologies, techniques, and the efficiency of their alignment … [there is a] predetermined result that the contemporary almost always outmatches the past” (The Laws of Cool 302). Tradition becomes perceived as the opposite of progress, as with the technopological turn, which saw that there was “no time to look back or to contemplate what was being lost” (Postman 45). As such, technopoly today and its drive of creative destruction performs instrumentalism, “eliminat[ing] alternatives to itself … It does not make them illegal … It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant” (48). The drive to create comes at the price of forcibly forgetting the past and, in doing so, culturally destroying it. In the same vein as postmodernist fears of weakening historicity, Liu observes that the humanities are being asked to prove the pertinence of historical thinking and historical consciousness in today’s research output (The Laws of Cool 5), being made to ask, “Why now? Why is this relevant now?”

Under such a treatment, history is useful only insofar as its relevance and application to current concerns can be proven, prompting Liu to argue that information culture and postindustrial society create a circumstance and style of thinking that is governed by the “eternal ‘now’ ” (The Laws of Cool 8). Invested in pragmatics of the present, the eternal “now” concurrently anticipates progress through change and is ready to become its own next stage. In this way, history, time, memory, and modes of thinking that use reflection—by which I mean acts of comparative thinking about that which exists in past and present moments—become engulfed in a “will be” condition. Lost is a regard for the future as a part of a process of history; information culture and postindustrialism pretend that there is no arc of trajectory, only “here,” the current position, and “there,” the goal that is to be reached. Our bodies have left our souls trailing behind.

As the academy becomes institutionalized, we may anticipate a technopological rejection of “art for art’s sake” and an embrace of texts with productive outcomes—creative and critical works that perform knowledge work and that generate moneymaking research. And here is where the concern lies: the...