The Point of the Arts and Humanities

In the context of only one of the debates that has been provoked by the Con-Dem Government’s vandalism of everything we all hold dear (there urgently need to be more debates about more of the vandalism, including the scrapping of free swimming for children and the elderly, the scrapping of ‘book start’ to encourage a love of reading, the demolition of the public sector, the removal of funding for Access courses and for teenagers as such, the selling of British forests and woodlands to private interests and companies [including, of course, logging companies], and – oh yes – the privatization of the public university system), there have recently been numerous suggestions that *if* the Arts and Humanities even think that they have a case to expect public funding of any kind then they must now make a case for themselves. Justify or die.

 

I didn’t want to do this all over again, but people have been hassling me to do it; so before I get back to the important tasks of the day (which include writing about the way that Donnie Yen’s recent films are constituted and haunted by the absent presence of Bruce Lee and are to be best understood as part of Hong Kong’s self-writing in the wake of the post-1997 return of Hong Kong to China; writing module outlines, and phoning BT to complain about their doubling of my monthly repayments for no good reason), let me make a few propositions about “the point” of the Arts and Humanities.

 

1.      Any ‘point’ of or for the Arts and Humanities is bound up with the question of ‘the point’ of the university as such.

 

2.      Any answer about ‘the point’ of the university itself is bound up with the answer to the question of what kind of society we are or ought to be living in or striving to construct.

 

3.      The history of the debates about what the university is ‘for’ and what society ‘is’, ‘is like’ or is ‘for’ are entrenched and hundreds of years old.

 

4.      Some of the ‘points’ of the university have involved arguments about ‘improving’ society through investments in different sorts of ‘truth’: religious truth, cultural truth, factual truth, scientific truth, political truth, and so on.

 

5.      Some ‘points’ have therefore been explicitly ‘theoretical’, while others have been explicitly ‘practical’. Utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham were deeply against ‘useless theory’ (art, philosophy, religion, etc.), and all for practical application. Hence institutions like Imperial College were founded and organised with an eye to practical training in matters of business, management, and Indian languages (note the name: Imperial. What does that signify? Anyone? Anyone?). Here learning Indian languages is ‘useful’ and ‘beneficial’ and ‘justified’ because it constitutes practical training for Colonial and Imperial programmes of social and economic domination. (Today language learning is more often than not part of ‘arts and languages’ – ‘less’ useful. Arabic, however…)

 

6.      “Utilitarian” rationales have led ineluctably to one dominant definition of ‘useful’/’practical’: profitable.

 

7.      The argument that knowledge should be ‘practical’ and that ‘practical’ means immediately and obviously linked to the ‘profitable’ is currently in the ascendant. The problem with it is that it is very wrong. Ask any scientist which is more important: ‘fundamental’, theoretical, speculative, ‘disinterested’, open-ended research or technical, project-based, aim and outcome-oriented, corporate or military funded or sponsored science. But it need not be this venerable old example. What else is useful but not profitable? What else is useless but invaluable? Music. Pictures. Laughing. Masturbation. Grooming. Walking the dog. Dancing. Stretching. Riding a bike. Teaching. Listening. Talking. I don’t know. Thinking. Think about it.

 

8.      The belief that anything have “a point” is flawed. Nevertheless, many things do have rationales. Certainly, all things in the university do. Many activities are based on a theory, even if those involved in this or that activity aren’t necessarily aware of or interested in articulating the underlying theory of their own activity or practice.

 

9.      If people are genuinely interested in establishing ‘the point’ of this or that Arts or Humanities subject, degree programme or disciplinary field per se, then the discussion would not remain a discussion about “the” Arts and Humanities in general. History programmes will have a different rationale in different departments in different universities in different countries in different times, and these will be different from each other as well as different from the rationales for art, art history, philosophy, media studies, and so on. No two syllabi will (or ‘should’) be identical.

 

10.  No Arts or Humanities or any other subject will be likely to define itself as useless or lacking in a practical or useful “point”. Media studies, for example. This is the most caricatured and ridiculed subject that we have. Yet, whilst there *may* be programmes in media studies which claim that media studies is important because TV is great fun to watch and celebrities are just so cool, I have yet to encounter this. Rather more often, the rationale for media studies is that the media is socially, culturally and politically ubiquitous, important and consequential. The media is biased. Programming is orientated and organised certain ways, ways that could be different. Society is informed or misinformed or uninformed in ways which affect people’s beliefs and thinking and actions and orientations, and so on. So one practical point to media studies is that it is ethically and politically important to understand the workings of such a complex and dominant set of interlocking institutions which permeate everyone’s everyday lives, thoughts and actions. Does studying media studies mean that you will get a job in the media? No. Should that be the rationale for media studies? No. Do students often enter into degrees in media studies and leave feeling embittered because they are not immediately employable in a precise profession? Yes. Whose fault is that? It depends. But certainly the perspective which holds that you go to university to get a degree and that degree is your ticket to a job is on conflict with what universities actually offer. But should universities only offer vocational degrees?

 

11.  It is true that there is a mismatch between students’ hopes and dreams when they undertake something like media studies (a job on the telly!) or film studies (I will be the next Tarantino) or journalism (move over, Kate Adie) or fine art (Damien who?), and those of their lecturers and professors, most of whom will most likely want to disabuse the students of their misconceptions of the subject and seek to transform them into critical and politically engaged members of a democratic citizenry. Students may enter identifying with presenters on TV, but the academics spend three years trying to transform that into an identification with Noam Chomsky. And what is the point of Noam Chomsky?

 

12.  The contemporary marketization of the university has been taking place for a long time now. Read Lyotard. Read Bill Readings. The question is whether we want UK universities to be private universities. As the more astute commentators have pointed out, the privatization of UK universities will not transform UK academia into US academia. The entire funding structure of the universities and of the country is completely different….

 

13.  I could go on. But I will stop on unlucky thirteen by referring you to some key points. The logic of the thinking which underpins the rationale for the cuts is flawed. The research upon which its justification is based is shockingly poor. (As one academic wrote under a link to the research methods and practice of the Browne Report: “Clear Fail”.) The consequences of the cuts are likely to be devastating for the UK – not just for universities, but for the UK as such. The claim that the cuts are necessary for financial reasons is nonsense. The rationale is, rather, blatantly ideological – neoliberal, to be precise. There is loads of money around. It’s just that on neoliberal thinking, it has to stay in the hands of the very wealthiest very few. Somehow people are accepting of this rationale, even as they grumble a little about bankers’ bonuses… Shouldn’t it be these people who have to justify their existence, rather than historians and philosophers? What about the politicians who justify their existence and their point on a set of election promises that are then systematically and completely reneged upon? … And so on. Any ‘point’ of or for the Arts and Humanities is bound up with the question of ‘the point’ of the university as such. Any answer about ‘the point’ of the university itself is bound up with the answer to the question of what kind of society we are or ought to be living in or striving to construct.