The chronic crisis of the humanities: a discussion about its genesis and long-standing duration. From the article:

In [their new book] Permanent Crisis … Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon … suggest that today’s preoccupation with crisis in the humanities is historically and conceptually overdetermined, less a response to current material realities than baked into the modern humanities’ self-conception. For the authors’ purposes, the humanities in their current institutional form are a product of the German-language universities of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, rather than the terminus of a lineage from the Renaissance or antiquity. Germanophone humanists established a set of binaries that continue to structure the modern humanities, “pitting the utilitarian, technical, and vocational rationality of the sciences against the disinterested, liberal, and critical humanities.”…

Reitter: Can the humanities do without crisis talk? Probably not, unless there was some massive reorganization of society where there didn’t seem to be a fundamental tension between the pace of capitalism and the pace of humanistic thinking. It’s natural, and not necessarily bad, for the humanities to think of themselves as providing a kind of counterweight to various modern forces that seem to have productive effects but also get in the way of what a lot of people think of as human flourishing.

But it’s a sad irony when humanists don’t bring historical perspective and self-understanding to discussions of the humanities.…

Wellmon: The humanities in their modern, institutional forms function as release valves, or a safe institutional space, for talk about values, meaning-making, or ethical concerns generally within a capital-driven system — whether that’s the mid-19th-century Prussian system, the managerial capitalism of the early 20th century, or the explosive, “golden era” capitalism of Cold War liberalism….

Reitter: The humanities adapt themselves in such a way as to put themselves at the center of an institutional project — the university. That’s crucial.

But also, the paradoxical idea of the higher practicality of impractical liberal learning is introduced, which is not really something that you find in traditional justifications of the humanities before this time….

Those thinkers are responding to the fragmentation they see as attending modernization: bureaucratic rationalization, industrialization, specialization. The word for specialization in German at the time was Einseitlichkeit, literally “one-sidedness.”…

Wellmon: The modern humanities, however historicist they might insist that they are, are a fundamentally presentist project. What makes the humanities modern, for us, is that they are understood as countervailing against very present dangers. In this sense, the modern humanities address not disordered desires, unruly passions, or the presence of evil but historical changes: industrialization, new technologies, natural science, and capitalism. This permanent relationship to the present links the modern humanities to the temporality of crisis…

Reitter: Precisely as the humanities have fought to fit themselves within the constrained space of the university, they have made these enormous promises about what they can do, promises that are often better kept, it seems, outside the university.

For an upcoming discussion by Chris Wellmon about the new book, see here.

For other posts on the crisis of humanities, see here.