Crisis in the Humanities II

The other articles I was reading are Monika Fludernik's "Threatening the university - the liberal arts and the economization of culture" (pp. 57-70), Rey Chow's "'An addiction from which we never get free' (pp. 47-55), Elizabeth Freeman's "Monster, Inc.: notes on the neoliberal arts education" (pp. 83-95), Susan Stewart's "Thoughts on the role of the humanities in contemporary life" (pp. 97-103).

Fludernik contends that the crisis in the humanities "is a direct result o the radical economization processes affecting culture in Western society; and, second, that these process affect not only the humanities but all disciplines with the exception of the applied sciences (on which the economic model of the university is, after all, based)." (p. 57)

Stewart rightly observes that "[w]e cannot expect individuals to care about what is far from them in time and space more intensely than they care about what is near, nor would such facile empathy necessarily be desirable for those who receive it." (p. 98) Her "third world" economy metaphor for the unfavourable and disadvantaged humanities departments of many universities forces us not to care more.

I found Chow's article most revealing because of above all its title about the very nature of humanistic knowledge: "an addiction from which we never get free", and her drawing relevance on Hong Kong based on her Hong Kong background and observation.

"Hong Kong is simply one of many places in the world today where it is much less the deliberate and reflective search for knowledge than the expedient access to information that defines what it means to know - what it means, in other words, to be socially connected, because copiously 'informed,' human being." (p. 49) Given that Chow graduated from HKU with English and Comparative Literature majors three decades ago, She openly confesses that "[g]rowing up in Hong Kong in the 1960s and 1970s, young people of my generation were keenly aware of the impracticability of a course of learning in Chinese poetry, history, or philosophy." (p. 51)

The biggest challenge we all face today is "the manifestation of a process characteristic of globalization - the transformation of knowledge itself into information. What the so-called instrumentalization of knowledge highlights is what the phrase says: the turning of knowledge into an instrument or a tool that can then be used for a specific, identifiable end." (p. 49) Furthermore, "the informationalization of knowledge casts knowledge rather in the form of an infinite flow, the crucial aspect of which is not so much substance as continuous movement, instant disposability, and, massive inputs notwithstanding, a constant need for replenishment." (p. 50. emphasis original)