The Arts And Humanities "woz asking for it, guv"

Nick Cohen’s article in The Guardian, ‘Academia Plays Into The Hands of The Right’, claims (among other things) that British academics in the arts, humanities and social sciences are in some sense to blame for the cuts that the Con-Dem Coalition government are making. This shares an uncanny amount in common with Alain de Botton’s recent outbursts on the same subject (and has more than a touch of the ‘Melanie Philips’ to it too…). What they both share is a great deal of confusion and some ill-thought-through prejudices.

 

Take Cohen’s opening move: quoting a passage from (the American) Judith Butler that is not only out of context but also lifted from another context in which Butler’s writing was singled out for opprobrium on the basis of it being ‘bad writing’. The premise of the criticism is that academic work in the arts and humanities should be ‘clear’. The assertion is that Butler’s work here is not clear. The conclusion is that academics who write like this deserve to be cut by the Government.

 

But, hang on a moment. Butler’s work is clear. Crystal. Provided only that you have the disciplinary training to read high-level cultural theory. If you don’t have this disciplinary formation, then you can hardly expect to dip into a paragraph here and there of cutting edge theoretical work and expect it to be immediately transparent. That’s why academic disciplines are called “academic disciplines”, you know. Disciplines require discipline, training. That means time and effort. In order to understand the paragraph of Butler that Cohen quotes to illustrate all that is wrong with Western academia you would already have to have followed the interdisciplinary, cross-cultural and historical debates about hegemony, the nature of power, the significance of structuralism and the moves that caused and became post-structuralism, the arguments of deconstruction about identity formation, and – shall we say, for brevity – so on. And if you can’t understand that particular paragraph, would it make more sense to go back to an earlier paragraph or maybe an earlier books or set of books, or would you prefer to simply throw the rattle out of the pram?

 

At the risk of sounding ‘elitist’ or ‘incestuous’ for referring to an earlier work, let me just say: we’ve been here before. Allow me to quote from Thomas Docherty in a 2003 interview discussion with me: “The fact that the language of criticism, or the language in which we might properly and sensibly discuss literary history (or the history of other arts), is a specialised language and not immediately available to those ‘outside’ is, of course, a pseudo-problem; and the idea of ‘widening participation’ in the interests of something called ‘access’ is a pseudo-reply to this pseudo-problem.”

 

Docherty’s words here came as a response to a set of questions I had posed him about the significance and impacts and directions of cultural studies: you know – does cultural studies have any impact ‘outside’ of the university, and so on. In this light, it is worthwhile quoting Docherty again:

 

“It would make less sense to pose the same question to a bioscientist, I think; for the ‘cultures’ with which she or he works are cultures that very definitely impinge on life outside the walls of the laboratory, even if the technical aspects of their work remain specialised, inaccessible or even unavailable to those of us who do not spend much time inside those laboratory walls or inside that realm of work and its attendant vocabularies. I must say that I, for one, prefer my bioscientists to be extremely specialised, even in ways that might exclude me from any detailed knowledge of what is going on in their treatment of my illnesses, say. I would probably have less trust in the bioscientist who argued that their technical knowledge, gleaned over (let us say) thirty years or more of extremely dedicated work, was immediately accessible to me, decidedly not in possession of such knowledge. To say the least, I would feel patronised; and behind that patronising attitude lurks the very ‘elitism’ that ‘access’ to education is supposedly countering; for he who patronises me is reassuring me in my condition of mediocrity with respect to his specialised knowledge. In assimilating ‘the everyday’ as a means explicitly of bringing ‘culture’ to all (and everyone has an ‘everyday’), cultural studies is complicit with this reassurance of mediocrity. Worse, in reassuring everyone that their ‘everyday life’ is itself culturally valid and dignified, cultural studies removes the reason for valid and substantive political struggle from those whose everyday life is anything but a fulfilment of their life-possibilities.”

 

This intersects with another of Cohen’s (and de Botton’s) concerns: the fact that not enough academics who study culture and society ‘speak to’ that culture and society about this or that urgent matter. In the same volume of interviews in which I published Docherty, I also published an interview with Catherine Belsey. She argued therein that ‘if something matters, it matters widely’, and that, as such, academics do have a responsibility to be clear about how and why what they do matters. Some may take issue with this. And in the light of Docherty’s arguments here, I certainly would too. Because – I reiterate – academia is constituted by and through and in and as *disciplines* and not everyone within those disciplines need be nor possibly even could be an ambassador for that discipline. This may simply be because they are doing disciplinary work, which is more than likely to make immediate sense only within the disciplined context of one or two intersecting fields. And yet, at the same time, I am a believer in the need to justify one’s activities. But I do not think that this means that everyone should have to do this first and foremost. But if these media friendly journalists ‘lite’ took the time to look and listen and read and think, they would see that there is already great defences and justifications of and for academic work of all kinds.

 

I could go on. But let’s cut to the chase: Cohen’s – and de Botton’s – and all the rest of the – claims that the arts, humanities and social sciences are themselves somehow to blame for the cuts being wrought on them is identical in structure to the arguments that girls wearing mini-skirts or make-up are responsible for their rape. Is that clear enough for you?