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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781478002383 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/28/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
Knowledge under Cover
Disidentification is about recycling and rethinking encoded meaning. The process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message's universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications. Thus, disidentification is a step further than cracking open the code of the majority; it proceeds to use this code as raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture. — JOSÉ ESTEBAN MUÑOZ, Disidentifications
I have begun to suggest the distinctive importance of aesthetic inquiry to the project of disarticulating the humanities from liberalism. That importance may be understood in short form in this twofold way: One, aesthetic inquiry emphasizes the link between what is held to be reasonable and what is viscerally experienced. In that way, it brings forward the doubled meaning of sensibility (what is held to be reasonable and what is available to the senses) and the sensus communis as a key domain of political struggle. Two, aesthetic inquiry, turned on the aesthetic itself, elucidates the historic and ongoing uses of art — of its meanings, its constitution and definition — in the service of dominant regimes of power (i.e., liberal modernity) as well as by those subjugated by and within them. The suppression of experience and onto-epistemologies incommensurate with the logics of the dominant is of a piece with the dehumanization through colonialism, settler colonialism, and racism justified by the developmental telos of liberalism. The aesthetic and the subordinated — "the minor" — accordingly are aligned, a shared positioning that gives aesthetic inquiry special purchase in the project of bringing alternative humanities to bear.
In this chapter, I invite us to consider the impact of aesthetic inquiry, understood in this way, on our understanding of the power and operations of the privileged paradigms of the liberal humanities, exemplified by those organizing knowledge production and prioritization in the discipline of English and the field of American Literature. I follow the lead of writer Lan Samantha Chang, and draw from visual art by Allan deSouza and Carrie Mae Weems, as I make the case for deliberate disidentification from the liberal humanities. Chang's novella, Hunger, helps us apprehend such humanities in contemporary form as an apparatus of the U.S. nation-state, and unfolds the meanness and inadequacy of the aesthetic education it offers. Bound to the ideologies of the modern nation-state as exemplified by the United States, they require both a disavowal of its foundational and ongoing violences, which is effected through the production of ignorance under the guise of knowledge, and a prioritization of abstract ideals over empirical realities. DeSouza and Weems, together with Chang, invite us to think here specifically about the implications of these insights on the horizons and practices of minoritized discourses in the academy, as well as those of fields like American Literature, which have become multicultural in ways that attest to the pervasiveness and power of liberal common sense. What emerges is a reminder of the continuing force of U.S. nationalism and its ability, through its promulgation of liberalism, to conserve power and resources for a few at the expense of a great many. Aesthetic education through the received humanities buttresses these exclusionary ideologies and practices. The governing proposition of this chapter is this: While their defunctioning cannot alone forestall the injurious activities of the U.S. nation-state, we can at the least stop submitting to its demands as we claim the humanities as a ground for bringing forth sensibilities that grapple with rather than cover over its constitutive violence.
In this regard, my address here is directed to those of us who, in light of the strategy of "represent and destroy" that is liberalism's response to racism and settler colonialism, seek ways of working in and through the university against and beyond the liberal order. There is much unavailable to our immediate control in remediating the structures and effects of racism and colonialisms, but the creation of curricular and other structural pedagogies that refuse inducement to identify with liberalism and with the U.S. nation is well within our reach. Under the aegis of the humanities, I believe we can amplify the work of antiracist critique, Indigenous and settler colonial studies, ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies — of, in short, the work issuing from and within the dispersed administrative/classification units of the institution, and emergent from the people and communities subjugated or otherwise minoritized in the service of upholding the rightness of the liberal order. I envision our work as putting into place, as others who came before us did, ideas and practices that will allow us to look back on this time and identify what we were collectively able to do despite as well as because of institutionalization, and despite as well as because of the political economic conditions and policies that subordinate the importance of aesthetics to the production of common sense. What will the humanities have stood for, what will they have been and done, in this long era of normalized war making in the name of humanity, impoverishment in the name of progress, surveillance and multifaceted suppression of dissent in the name of civic society, and mass incarceration of especially Black and Brown people for the sake of the public good? How do we put into place concepts and structures to realize a humanities that elicits subjectivities and social formations that demand and secure the conditions necessary to the flourishing of people rather than nations, of lives rather than ideas?
Both the exigency for and the difficulty of contesting the received iteration of the humanities come of the assaultive pressures on higher education that characterize the current conjuncture. Neoliberalization, the process whereby personal responsibility delinked from history and the deployment of free-market ideology in every facet of life are compulsorily mandated, is plainly legible in the defunding of public higher education that has continued apace since the 1970s. The minimal funding that is now available — down to about 34 percent on average, from a high of about 60 percent in 1975 (in national average terms) — is contingent on market-driven performance standards that simultaneously assert the inadequacy of government and the efficiency of corporate structures to administer all aspects of society, and education most decidedly. These policies have led to sharp increases in tuition — as much as 247 percent since the 1970s at flagship state universities, and by about 164 percent at community colleges. By as soon as 2050, if current trends continue, most states will entirely cease to support public higher education. In what regard such education will continue to be public is unclear, except insofar as this redistribution of tax dollars evacuates its meaning as related to providing access to higher education to the general populace. Now, with concerted emphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields deemed necessary to success and national competitiveness in the global workforce, outcomes toward and relevance to those goals serve as primary measures of institutional performance. It is thus that it seems necessary to defend the humanities as a means of resisting the rationality that authorizes and resources certain kinds of knowledge at the expense of others.
At the same time, it is also increasingly clear that long-standing arguments for the humanities, including those that insist on their utilitarian and political value — the teaching of critical thinking and support of ethical development toward the ends of sustaining democracy — have limited persuasiveness in this state-supported, political economy–induced climate of self-interested competitiveness. In a crudely pragmatic sense, such arguments simply have been ineffective in forestalling or reversing defunding policies; liberalism's weakness as a remedy for neoliberalization is resoundingly evident in educational policy.
That weakness is, I believe, indicative of the ways that neoliberalization exposes rather than initiates the collaboration among capitalism, colonialism, and liberalism that characterizes and animates U.S. national identity formation as the exemplary modern nation-state. In other words, the rationalization of the humanities along these lines affirms the values and concepts of bourgeois liberalism and settler colonialism as they obscure how neoliberalization is precipitated by rather than a sharp departure from them. To be sure, the humanities are not solely or perhaps even primarily responsible for neoliberalization, but in their affirmation of liberal ideology, they have facilitated its establishment as policy and common sense. I would suggest that the much-rebuked "one percent" may be understood not as aberrant to the bourgeois liberal project but rather as its logical conclusion: that subject arguably embodies the Adamsonian ideal of a life of comfortable leisure; it is the enlightened, achieved subject of modernity. Aesthetic education, the purview of the humanities, has long trained the privileged classes who had access to studia humanitatis to embrace the private, property-owning individual of liberalism as the apotheosis of humanity.
In their received form, they are a legacy of the nationalist and robustly patriotic ideologies of the U.S. nation-state characterizing the post–World War II and Cold War eras — ideologies that give specific shape to the long life of liberalism. That the humanities have been complicit in the furtherance of U.S. nation and empire building in these ways is apparent not only in the histories underlying the establishment of higher education — the civilizing mission executed through education that accompanied militarized efforts to exterminate and dispossess Indigenous peoples and the accumulation of wealth through the stolen land of those peoples and stolen labor of enslaved peoples — but also in their explicit recruitment toward patriotic ends in the twentieth century. While the study of human expression and behavior has existed since antiquity, the humanities crystallized as a meaningful rubric in the interwar years and became overtly nationalist in the overlapping post–World War II, Cold War, and civil rights movement eras. An affirmation of the distinction between Bildung (self-knowledge) and Wissenschaft (knowledge of the natural world) crystallized in the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment European contexts, the establishment of the humanities in the U.S. university seemingly settled debates regarding the relative importance of science over ethical development. The formally compartmentalized organization of university life was to allow humanists and scientists to coexist in pluralist harmony, familiar to us now in the hardened institutional structures of higher education. In the middle-late twentieth century, with heightened awareness of the military and economic dominance of the United States in the global world order, the threat of nuclear war, and the demands of insurgent power and rights movements, the humanities were rationalized in the United States on patriotic grounds.
We can see this nationalist mobilization of the humanities in the founding of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1965 as an independent federal agency. This is a signal event in the consolidation of the belief that the arts and the study of the best of human achievement, as the humanities were described at the time, were vitally important to realizing the dream of American greatness. The 1964 Report of the Commission on the Humanities, coauthored by the American Council of Learned Societies, Council of Graduate Schools in the United States, and the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa, recommended the establishment of theNEH in order that the "highest achievements" of humanity might serve to guide Americans and the United States in "kindling aspirations" and acting with concern for "man's ultimate destiny" on the global stage. The authors argued that the humanities were crucial to the conveyance of such "enduring values" as "justice, freedom, virtue, beauty, and truth," as well as to the acquisition of cross-cultural knowledge and to modeling "excellence of ... conduct ... [to] entitle [the United States] to ask others to follow its lead." Without such training, what is diagnosed as "a novel and serious challenge" posed by "the remarkable increase in their leisure time" resulting from technological advancement could lead to "trivial and narcotic amusements," which are posited as clearly against the national interest. The values and vision of the humanities articulated in this report expressly pull forward the ideology of the founding fathers to argue their importance to the telos of the United States, destined to be a superior civilization produced by generational advancement from war to the arts, from the utilitarian to the reflective.
If driven by somewhat less overt patriotism, current rhetoric declaring the crisis of the humanities echoes the ideology of this earlier context. Consider, for example, a 2013 article in the New Republic by Gordon Hutner and Feisal Mohamed titled "The Real Humanities Crisis Is Happening in Public Universities," which opens with the declaration, "You've probably heard several times already that the humanities are in 'crisis.' The crisis is real." Their call for a "new deal for the Humanities" argues for redress of the withdrawal of support for the liberal arts on the basis of the contribution that the humanities — the "noble tradition" of the liberal arts — make to "enriching society." Representative of a dominant strain of arguments for the defense of the humanities, such rhetoric bespeaks the continuing force of liberal ideology and finds traction in the face of the produced and imposed austerity that public higher education is currently confronting.
My concern, in brief, is that though we may well be at (or amid) a turning point regarding the humanities and higher education, a danger of this moment is that present conditions provide the opportunity for the reentrenchment of liberal values integral to the U.S. nationalist project. If we allow that to happen, we are effectively obscuring and indeed affirming the histories and ongoing practices of dispossession and denigration justified by liberalism. In other words, what I am getting at is that given that bourgeois liberalism has been instrumental in the justification of U.S. imperial and colonial maneuvers, the affirmative recruitment of its concepts warrants pause even in the face of neoliberalization. The militarism and political economic expansionism of the United States historically and currently advances under cover of liberal values in ways that are anything but abstract. What Lisa Lowe has astutely termed the "ruse of freedom" conjured by bourgeois liberalism's close partnership with racial capitalism has facilitated everything from slavery and indentured servitude to colonial occupation, both historic and ongoing, to contemporary forms of war making for the sake of rescuing victimized women, always imagined to be elsewhere. Neither have liberal solutions been effective remedies for eradicating the forms of violence organized along the intersecting axes of sociopolitical identity. They have instead proliferated into and as the legitimation of the security state — the sanctification of belief in personal and national sovereignty that authorizes the innovation and enactment of regulatory and disciplinary mechanisms designed to protect the public from the criminal, the citizen from the terrorist, the legal from the illegal migrant. In short, and as the discussions that follow elaborate more fully, if we take seriously the long-lived ways in which the humanities have served U.S. nation building from its founding to the contemporary, we cannot but also take seriously the need to disidentify with rather than defend them. These histories, that is, explain how the humanities are organized in such a way as to promote identification with and attachment to the liberal order despite both its participatory history in producing, and corollary overweening inadequacy as a response to, the necropolitical state activities and effects characterizing the current conjuncture.
Lan Samantha Chang's aestheticization of the hollowness yet powerful appeal of the promises of happiness and prosperity tethered to U.S. national identity makes sense of this history of the humanities. Chang's attention to the (im)potency of aesthetic education helps us apprehend and understand how the liberal humanities — the purview of aesthetic education and an engine of modernity — produces ignorance in the guise of knowledge. It is an ignorance empowered by the apparatuses of the U.S. nation-state in ways that induce commonsense attachment to bourgeois liberalism's promises despite its manifold failures to secure freedom, happiness, and prosperity as empirical realities; it is an ignorance resulting in material consequences captured by an immutable hunger arising from deprivation and dissatisfaction that cannot be resolved by individual will. Beyond acting as a prompt for critical investigation, Chang's work bespeaks the specifically aesthetic nature of knowledge practices and the authorized institutions that advance them. Her novella identifies how ideas come to be experienced as truth or falsehood through institutional and state mechanisms far beyond the control of any individual, and identifies those mechanisms as reiterating the material diminution of lives along the intersecting axes of race, gender, sexuality, and class. What it registers and bespeaks, in other words, is the structuring of inequality as an integral part of bourgeois liberalism's cherished institutions of aesthetic education and the heteronormative nuclear family.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Preface xiIntroduction. The Difference Aesthetics Makes 1
1. Knowledge under Cover 26
2. Pedagogies of Liberal Humanism 51
3. Making Sense Otherwise 74
4. Mis/Taken Universals 89
Conclusion. On the Humanities "After Man" 122
Postscript 126
Notes 131
Bibliography 159
Index 175
What People are Saying About This
“The Difference Aesthetics Makes reconsiders the centrality of aesthetics to the humanities and elaborates an aesthetics of ‘illiberal’ humanism that emerges from relations of difference, not identity; from dissensus, not consensus. This timely and significant book will be of crucial importance for readers in English, American studies, ethnic studies, anthropology, art history, and beyond.”
“Reading various texts to demonstrate how minority literature presents itself as the productive other to dominant articulations of the aesthetic, Kandice Chuh makes significant interventions in inquiries around the relationship between politics and aesthetics, the humanities as a site of critical alternatives, and the role that minority discourse plays in those inquiries. An exciting and ambitious book.”