Nick Cohen vs The Humanities
Nick Cohen is going after the Humanities in his contrarian manner, claiming that academics have nobody to blame but themselves for the ease with which the current government are going to get rid of them. He seems rather delighted, in fact, by the prospect of the slate being wiped clean.
His starting-point is a paragraph by Judith Butler that he’s got from somewhere else. It uses a few technical terms from the Marxist tradition and makes reference to Louis Althusser. The sentence is far from elegant: its convoluted grammar would surely have benefited from some editorial cleaning-up. That, though, is beside the point.
The argument to which this gobbet of text is supposed to contribute goes like this. Since 1968 (yes, he gives the date) academics in the Humanities have fallen under the spell of funny Continental philosophy and started writing weird stuff nobody (i.e. not Nick Cohen) can understand. Because it looks complicated, successive governments have continued to pour money into this industry, not realising that the more obscure it got the easier it was for charlatans to write utter drivel, Sokal-style, and get away with it. As the “work” they were doing became ever more content-free and obsessed with stylistic density it also became completely detached from public interest or debate. Hence the fact that nobody is out on the street protesting about the proposed withdrawal of funds. Oh wait.
Let’s put a pin in a few of the claims and assumptions we hear, over and over again, when this little cliché gets wheeled out.
1. No writing, of any sort, can be judged good or bad simply by counting the number of people who have read it or the percentage of those who claim to have understood it; almost all writing is accessible to some people and not to others. Maybe Nick Cohen really doesn’t have the word “hegemony” in his vocabulary or doesn’t know who Althusser was; in that case it would be hardly surprising that he finds Butler’s quote hard going. One could certainly impart in fifteen minutes all the information needed to understand it to a roomful of intelligent and interested people.
2. It’s true that there’s something special about the difficulty of the kind of work that was influenced by Derrida and Lacan and that began to appear in English in the 1970s: not that it’s more difficult than anything else (it isn’t) but that its difficulty has an unusual cause. But it isn’t what people like Cohen think, which is to say a veil of obscurity behind which only banal ideas are hidden. I’m afraid that to see why it’s special takes a bit more than just defining a few technical terms. It may be that after going through that process you think this work is not worthwhile. It may also be that you notice that a great number of people working in this tradition go to enormous lengths to explain as clearly as they can what they’re up to. But:
3. The Humanities do not mostly produce torrents of articles and books of Derridean density. Yes, you can cherry-pick stuff that’s ridiculous, of course, but a great deal of research in the Humanities isn’t even in this tradition. Pop into a Philosophy department some time if you don’t believe me.
4. A beef about the kind of research that’s done at universities can’t be used to justify a cut to funding for teaching done there. The two things are slightly connected, more so at postgraduate levels, but they are most certainly not the same thing.
5. You can’t reduce questions about whether research X should be funded to whether research X would make a best-selling non-fiction title. If we could then we could simply get rid of all research funding immediately and leave it to the publishers to sort out. And while we’re at it, publishing popular books and appearing on the radio and at events like Big Ideas are good for an academic career, not bad for it as Cohen claims. The trouble is finding the time for these things, on which see below.
6. The introduction of the Research Assessment Exercise in 1986 significantly skewed university work in favour of quantity of publication. Hence even projects that don’t yield much of value tend to spin off a few minor publications simply to satisfy departmental quotas and beef up the author’s CV. Yes, this means low-quality stuff gets published, and yes if you’re going to publish something that’s not very interesting you’re going to have to stuff it full of citations, jargon and so on to make it look the part. A Thatcherite reform created a problem that a neo-Thatcherite administration is now going to solve. This would be the time to refer back to Judith Butler’s comment about hegemony and stuff, should you have it in you to read it again.
People who know me know I’m no fan of the current system of Higher Education, and I’ve had times when I’ve been so frustrated with it that I, too, have thought a scorched-earth policy might not hurt. Even if you’re not with me on that, there are obviously serious questions to be asked about how and why the Humanities are funded, just as there are in relation to the arts. Cohen’s right when he says the Humanities are really feeling the lack of a full-throated defence, a coherent and intelligible account of why it’s worth spending money training people to read Old Norse and study the semiotics of advertising, whether that money ultimately comes from the state or elsewhere. Until we get past comparing scars from the Theory Wars, though, that’s unlikely to transpire.
