A Time for the Humanities: Futurity and the Limits of Autonomy

12. Crisis Means Turning Point: A Manifesto for Art and Accountability

210 c h a p t e r 1 2 Crisis Means Turning Point: A Manifesto for Art and Accountability Doris Sommer When I feel trapped, I ask myself, what would an artist do? antanas mockus If the humanities are in crisis, this is no time to lament a cruel fate, but to make choices, fast. In common usage, crisis can mean stagnation and festering, a present so oppressively present that it crowds out the past and stifles the future. It is paralysis, or the kind of revolution that moves in vicious circles, like the ones associated with Mexico’s Institutionalized Revolutionary Party until its first national defeat in 2000.1 What response is possible except a derivative criticism, since there is nothing to do but disengage and denounce? Humanists have become adept at this face-saving gesture in the face of impossible odds. But crisis has another, more engaging, and obliging, meaning if you follow the etymological precision that enables Antonio Gramsci’s interventions, despite the scienti fic Marxists who would have stopped him: Crisis means the opportunity , and therefore the obligation, to choose, quickly.2 Acknowledging the danger of the other meaning—a static equilibrium imposed by a I am grateful for the advice of Professor Arabella Lyon in preparing this essay. Among her contributions is the reference to Robert Scholes. “Presidential Address 2004: The Humanities in a Posthumanist World.” PMLA 120 (May 2005): 724–733. Doris Sommer 211 strong leader that can preempt an organic resolution to crisis—Gramsci exhorts his readers to think on their feet and seize the opportunity to redirect history.3 What are our choices now, while policy makers, foundations, social scientists , and other fellow citizens train a polite gaze on the humanities? Meanwhile, waning support for students and teachers of the arts alarms and offends us. Don’t we deserve support, almost by birthright, as guardians of artistic and spiritual values in a world that keeps contracting the focus of education to narrowly rational and technical training? Yet training in arts interpretation, as much as in the cultural studies that address a broad range of creative practices, feels the pinch of purse strings drawing closed. Let us consider the predicament and possible responses. Critique of ungenerous others is not enough, and despair amounts to self-defeating inaction. Surely humanists can muster more creativity. Common Sense Quite early in the development of modern civility, intellectual narrowness had worried Immanuel Kant. He hoped to contain “the scandal of reason” that dismissed other human faculties by capping his major work with exercises to develop judgment.4 Reason would reduce judgment to mere calculation, so Kant located that faculty for thinking freely in the unreasonable evaluation of beauty and the sublime. Aesthetic experience is a second-order pleasure. It judges immediate pleasures in order to distinguish self-serving enjoyment of an object that may be physically or morally useful from the freely conferred admiration for the form of an object, regardless of use or meaning. The exercise of judgment requires practice in locating aesthetic pleasure beyond external purpose and existing concepts. Unlike other philosophical activities, aesthetic judgment for Kant assumes that all evaluators will reach the same conclusion, since their exercises should be equally free from interest. Positing intersubjective agreement, Kant resignified “common sense” as the sense of judgment derived from freedom that we have in common and that can develop into an aptitude for free citizenship. Kant did not follow up on this ethico-political consequence of art for art’s sake, Hannah Arendt explains, because it might have been risky to engage political philosophy and it was, in any case, redundant.5 Judgment leads to political deliberation, she concludes. But the corollary between examined private pleasures and enhanced public sphere is news to most scholars today, good news that 212 Crisis Means Turning Point humanists might explore through programs that develop a taste for active (i.e., creative) citizenship. Some artists and city governments, along with business interests, are already at work forging cultural citizenship and creative economies.6 And research in education consistently links the practice and appreciation of arts with enhanced cognitive and social development.7 Perhaps these links are worthy of more attention from the humanities, where the focus on aesthetic practices could include the ripple effects from pleasure to judgment and consequently to the common social sense that can sustain deliberation and collective action. Humanists who...