A recent entry in this blog entitled “the exhaustion of criticism” (published July 9th, 2011) accused academic critical studies in general, and Biblical Criticism in particular, of exhausting itself (and its potential readership), to the point of a complete disciplinary unraveling.
I do believe that scholars working in the Humanities (Philosophy, Theology, Religious Studies, History, Cultural and Media Studies, Art and Literary Criticism, and cognate fields) face a dangerous threat of exhaustion unto death. Attribute the situation to any number of factors.
During the past century and a half the earth’s population has exploded, leading to a proliferation of new philosophies, theologies, religions, historical investigations, and artistic and literary productions. The sheer volume of potential objects for critical activity would overwhelm the capacities of any particular scholar.
Of course, disciplinary mastery has always been elusive, but today, it is frankly impossible. Given that the number of potential contemporary objects of study far exceeds the (already numerous) important objects that have survived from previous centuries and from antiquity, the balance of work to be done must focus on “contemporary” materials. And so, in this context the idea of a classical canon of important works is increasingly hard to defend to an academic audience — forget about successfully selling the canon to the next generation of readers, distracted as they are by hundreds of cable channels, tens of thousands of games, millions of websites, and the myriad options for textualized and mediated connectivity in the world of social media.
Coincident with this proliferation of potential objects of criticism, and the “contemporization” of discourse, there has been an inevitable fragmentation of academics into ever more numerous and narrow specializations. Increasingly, intellectuals find themselves separated into camps, pockets, and subcultures, talking either at cross purposes, or on parallel, non-convergent lines. Within the subdisciplines, the proliferation of work forces academics to turn from the objects that should properly occupy their energies and towards bibliographic and pedantic analysis of scholarship. Scholarship becomes scholarship on scholarship, and it seems ever less likely that we can expect synthetic work to emerge or find a broad, popular audience. Nobody is listening.
At the same time, economic practices have shifted dramatically, so that scholars are no longer in the economically privileged position of their great grandfathers. Scholarship is not a field dominated by men with wives and nannies for the children, maids for the home, cooks for their food and secretaries for their paperwork. Most scholars today lack such economic supports for their life of the mind. Instead, we labor along other servants in the service economy, being extremely lucky to have our summer vacations as the main thing that sets us apart from other typical dual-income middle middle class suburban/urban households, where children, housework, and the worries of everyday life constantly undermine “serious work.”
And beyond this, while a few exalted academics at elite schools still enjoy the leisure and economic support they need to do “research” (All Souls College at Oxford University springs to mind… it still exists), most scholars are teaching more credit hours, to more students, for less pay, with fewer teaching assistants, all the while dealing with a even greater emphasis on the culture of bureaucratic oversight for their work. Try saying the phrase “outcomes assessment” to any college professor you know and watch his or her brain start to melt inside the skull. It’s amusing.
Such mundanities are certainly not the only set of distractions for middle aged scholars like myself. We operate in the same informational matrix as our students; social media bombards us with the constant recommendations of (or banal updates from) friends, our work email inboxes overflow with “carbon copied” announcements of events and other chatter. My generation was the first to work through school with the burden of knowing about the psychological problem called “ADHD”; but this disorder seems to have been robustly adopted as a typical cognitive paradigm.
These words of mine today were inspired by a recent essay in Philosophy Now, on the “Death of Postmodernism.” I think if the essay is read correctly, it matters very little whether its author, Alan Kirby, may be correct that “Postmodernism” is a useful scholarly rubric or even a live movement in art and culture. (The “postmodern” already seemed like a dead issue when I first heard the term and tried to read the impenetrable postmodernists back in sophomore year of college, in 1989; my friends and I instead suggested that we should just be “postfuturists” and get over ourselves already). What seems important, instead, is to notice how exhausted Kirby sounds, as if he simply cannot fathom how we will ever, as scholars, come to terms with the technological transformations of text and reading practices that he so deftly identifies. He calls the new way of creating and reading texts “pseudo-modern,” which stretches the idea of “modernity” well past the breaking point, as far as I am concerned. Like me, he sees a bewildering variety in the modern show, text, and game, and also like me, he despairs at the undeniably vapid and shallow nature of it all. The fact that Kirby’s analysis turns on an apparent generation gap (speak for yourself, sir!) between today’s teachers and the supposedly different readers and consumers that make up today’s students highlights the same issue that I raise above: faced with ever expanding ranks of junior human beings, with their strange ways of talking and their unfathomable tastes in music and art, many of us in older generations are apt to freeze like the proverbial deer in the headlights.
I’d keep working on this little rant and give my suggestions about how I think we ought to deal with this desperate situation of our exhaustion, but I have to stop writing and take care of my 21 month old son, James.