Back in the before-time, or maybe before the before-time, I was a graduate student in English Lit at a couple of Canadian universities. The great wave of "theory" was just crashing over our graduate programs at the same time, ca 1984.
Some of us were interested in why this was happening in such a coordinated and aggressive manner. We arrived at the conclusion that with all the right wing activism calling for the defunding of useless humanities departments, those humanities departments were casting around for a methodology that would make them look more like the sciences.
"Theory" was the answer. When critics wanted to attack humanities as useless pabulum (reading novels and poems and then writing expansive book reviews and calling it a thesis), the impenetrable thicket of "theory" could be pointed to as a counter argument. If critics persisted and pointed out that it was unintelligible gibberish, it was pointed out that they would have found quantum physics just as confusing.
What is most interesting to me is that these "conservatives" always calling for the defunding of humanities education under whatever rubric suits the moment are the same people who like to paint themselves as the defenders of "western civilization".
It beggars the imagination to wonder what they even begin to mean by that.
Yeah. I put 'conservatives' in scare quotes because most American "conservatives" are just old style liberals who would gladly stand by and watch the world burn if they thought it would put a few more dollars in their pockets.
Younger rightwingers think they are moving beyond Thatcherite/Reaganite "free market" cultism but they are just dupes of capitalists like they always have been.
"Useful idiots" is already taken, so most "conservatives" in the American sense are more or less "useful morons".
aggggghhhh! the piece ended just when it started to get super interesting. Can you, for free, and for my entertainment and edification, write a companion piece that starts with the point that you end on: that the insistence on "relevance" in funding for the humanities is precisely what generates the churn of the kind of stuff the public hates and makes fun of when they do the putatively hoped-for thing and notice it and engage with it? I would like this a lot and I bet others would, too. :)
Thanks! I had another whole section planned on precisely that topic, but decided that 3000 words was long enough for a single essay. I may return to the questions you raise here later! There's so much to say about "relevance" and the way in which certain topics (reduceable now to simple tags or even single words) have cachet and are what drive visibility, either as welcome (indeed overdue) "acknowledgement" or "relevance" (on one hand) or "wokeness out of control" on the other. In a sense, both the progressive left and their right-wing critics are seeing the same things, just responding in very different (though highly predictable) ways.
You're completely correct about the regime of relevance, but that's only half of the story. In order to get funding in the social sciences, it not only needs to be relevant but needs to support existing, unquestionable narratives surrounding such fashionable topics. Research funding on left-wing authoritarian, the risks of vaccines and genetic engineering/synthetic biology in general, detransitioners, or anything that challenges the claim we are all boiling in a 'climate emergency' will never get funding. The so called 'left' have much greater power around funding than I think you want to give them credit for.
Back in the before-time, or maybe before the before-time, I was a graduate student in English Lit at a couple of Canadian universities. The great wave of "theory" was just crashing over our graduate programs at the same time, ca 1984.
Some of us were interested in why this was happening in such a coordinated and aggressive manner. We arrived at the conclusion that with all the right wing activism calling for the defunding of useless humanities departments, those humanities departments were casting around for a methodology that would make them look more like the sciences.
"Theory" was the answer. When critics wanted to attack humanities as useless pabulum (reading novels and poems and then writing expansive book reviews and calling it a thesis), the impenetrable thicket of "theory" could be pointed to as a counter argument. If critics persisted and pointed out that it was unintelligible gibberish, it was pointed out that they would have found quantum physics just as confusing.
What is most interesting to me is that these "conservatives" always calling for the defunding of humanities education under whatever rubric suits the moment are the same people who like to paint themselves as the defenders of "western civilization".
It beggars the imagination to wonder what they even begin to mean by that.
Conservatives want their team to win, at the expense of society at large.
Yeah. I put 'conservatives' in scare quotes because most American "conservatives" are just old style liberals who would gladly stand by and watch the world burn if they thought it would put a few more dollars in their pockets.
Younger rightwingers think they are moving beyond Thatcherite/Reaganite "free market" cultism but they are just dupes of capitalists like they always have been.
"Useful idiots" is already taken, so most "conservatives" in the American sense are more or less "useful morons".
aggggghhhh! the piece ended just when it started to get super interesting. Can you, for free, and for my entertainment and edification, write a companion piece that starts with the point that you end on: that the insistence on "relevance" in funding for the humanities is precisely what generates the churn of the kind of stuff the public hates and makes fun of when they do the putatively hoped-for thing and notice it and engage with it? I would like this a lot and I bet others would, too. :)
Thanks! I had another whole section planned on precisely that topic, but decided that 3000 words was long enough for a single essay. I may return to the questions you raise here later! There's so much to say about "relevance" and the way in which certain topics (reduceable now to simple tags or even single words) have cachet and are what drive visibility, either as welcome (indeed overdue) "acknowledgement" or "relevance" (on one hand) or "wokeness out of control" on the other. In a sense, both the progressive left and their right-wing critics are seeing the same things, just responding in very different (though highly predictable) ways.
You're completely correct about the regime of relevance, but that's only half of the story. In order to get funding in the social sciences, it not only needs to be relevant but needs to support existing, unquestionable narratives surrounding such fashionable topics. Research funding on left-wing authoritarian, the risks of vaccines and genetic engineering/synthetic biology in general, detransitioners, or anything that challenges the claim we are all boiling in a 'climate emergency' will never get funding. The so called 'left' have much greater power around funding than I think you want to give them credit for.