Blow Up the Humanities

1. Blowup Time

1 Blowup Time What is my place in the world as a human being preparing for a career as an army office of the nation that stands at the forefront of Western civilization? — David Bedey, West Point professor, quoted in Carol Iannone, “Liberal Education at the Academy” In a completely free market, the humanities would clean up. Faced with a choice between an arts degree costing £8,000 a year, and one in science costing upwards of £30,000, history and philosophy would suddenly become very popular. —Iain Pears, “Why the Humanities Remain Highly Relevant” There seems to be no agreement among the students of liberal-arts education as to the fundamental principle or principles upon which a college curriculum ought to be built. . . . [T]here has been no recognized integrating concept. —Harvey A. Wooster, “To Unify the Liberal-Arts Curriculum” T his chapter situates the humanities within the history of U.S. universities. That story is characterized by two tendencies: an expansion of governmentality, in the sense of research undertaken for the public weal, teaching that trains the populace in selfregulation , and paymasters and administrators accreting authority over academics; and an expansion of commodification, in the sense of research animated by corporate needs, students addressed as consumers , and collegecrats constructing themselves as corporate mimics (Miller 2003; also see Agger and Rachlin 1983; Tuchman 2009). The outcome has made culture an object and an agent of use, a resource that indexes and occasions historic changes and purposive policies (Yúdice 2003), with spectacular results for the two humanities. 18 \ Chapter 1 Many writers within the governmentality tradition assume that it is incommensurate with Marxism, and vice versa.1 I see no logical reason for this stance. The project of neoliberal governing-at-adistance has its own logic and materiality, of course, but they fit the agenda and methods of corporatization as much as governmentality (Miller 2010a). Both tendencies have been at play since the emergence of higher education as part of public culture in the United States 150 years ago, and neoliberalism has heightened their influence. The classic U.S. model of higher education aims to equip students with a liberal inclination that respects knowledge of a topic and for a purpose rather than simply knowledge by a particular person. The model places its faith in a discourse of professionalism, not charisma. It makes people believe in and exchange openly available knowledge as opposed to secret magic. In other words, if someone truly wants to know how television works as a piece of technology, or how I can write this online twenty thousand feet above Manhattan or in a Culver City bar, she is permitted access to such intelligence. She may equally subscribe to digital cable and broadband based on her confidence in the system of governmental and university research, industrial training, and accreditation that galvanizes and regulates this fraction of a culture industry. She need not do so based on the idea of electronic communication as a gift from a deity via an elect whose knowledge and power cannot be attained by others. But the liberalism that governs knowledge has itself been transformed by the doctrine that higher education is a competitive industry and students are sovereign consumers. A radical shift in political theory is entailed in this change because it signifies that university study is not primarily about citizenship but employment. Hence it is a quasi-private, individual good, not a collective, public one. How did this state of affairs come to pass? Despite their stature, in some ways, universities have always been the underprivileged sector of U.S. education in that they are considered inessential for the population as a whole in contrast to compulsory schooling. So unlike in the case of the primary and secondary 1. See, for example, special issues of Cultural Values (2002) and American Behavioral Scientist (2000). Blowup Time / 19 sectors, parents and students pay major college costs directly. On the one hand, at the level of political theory, higher education is an entitlement rather than a right, so costly and valuable is it, and so jealously guarded as a site of boosterism and a route to collective prosperity and power. On the other hand, in accordance with this governing paradox, universities are very privileged as centers of new knowledge and investments in an uncertain future. Education and research are described as both indices of socioeconomic problems and answers to them...