The impasse and disregard the humanities experiences is a vociferous topic for its imminent demise is constantly predicted. But then despite the end of history being predicted, history marches inexorably to its own inconclusions.
These were some of the questions that emerged on a conversation re the Crisis in the Humanities.
If it were not for tradition, then how would we know that the Great Books are truly great books? If it were not for epistemes of learning, then how would we know how to read them? If it were not for tradition then why is the philosophical canon organised in the way it is? Who is the subject? What is the postcolonial? What is the role of the intellectual? Why are the Humanities being subjected to instrumentalist discourses and forced into apologias, critics of or producers of nationalism? And how do all these dizzying considerations of location affect the work we do, or seek to do? And so forth ...
As fascinating as that conversation is, to preempt with delicious anxiety the death of one's labor, should we not push the question back on itself. What is the crisis? Why is it that the Humanities, which presumably holds the most prescient thinkers, is not immune from the discourse of crisis that has become so central to the production of modernity? It is crisis after all that holds the capacity to move, to engender capacitation, to accord the threat of extinction to an essential mode of being/operation and thus in realisation of its inexorable value to resuscitate albeit with compromises (in other words, tradition is reasserted in the normal mode of being whilst proclaiming the new). It is crisis, that modality of thinking and talk, that produces the seeming break with the past, unless of course, crisis is the normal mode of operation. And now it seems the tradition that holds sway is perpetual crisis.
We live in a time of crisis. We have psychological crises, energy crises, safety crises. food crises and on and on. The modern subject and its institutions, after all, is instantiated and given value in claiming crisis for itself. The Humanities is clearly not immune from our own panics, moral and otherwise.
So, rather than ask about the Crisis in the Humanities, should we not ask what the Crisis is symptomatic of from our positions in the Humanities? Should we not ask how our methods have devalorised the multidisciplinary endeavors of the Humanities, how we have denigrated our own labor through our traditional use of natural science metaphors and methodologies, how we have historically and traditionally set ourselves up as the poor cousins of the natural sciences and to recognise that for our disciplines to be truly human, we should move them out of the laboratories we toil in, though we might call them by other names (most days my laboratory is called fieldwork and the archive). How in order to be recognised, we produced the zombie subject in laboratories that could not contain their excess? How our very thinking is instantiated by crisis, panic, anxiety: about the disappearing social order, about the retention/disappearance of ordinary modes of being, about holding onto and validating the knowable, about valorising or villifying whoever most speaks loudly to us, and on and on. Whatever urgency you feel about your particular anxiety, congratulations, you have located an urgent crisis in need of several years of your life!
I would like to ask more, new interesting questions but I too am bound by my own disciplinary traditions. There indeed is a crisis if we cannot think ourselves out of orthodoxies boxes.
