The point of the Humanities

[joanna bujes]

At 11:07 PM 03/02/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>Actually, I was thinking of the war prop dreck as a good example
>of my point.  But why diss Memento?  Cool stuff; maybe I'm easy,
>but I'd call it good art.  This is why I kinda lost interest in
>the humanities as an undergraduate despite my "artsy" self-concept
>at the time: I say it's good, you say it's shite, we just have to
>shrug and go on, or engage in pointless quasi-theological debate.

It's interesting you should put it that way: humanities as the cultivation 
of taste (assuming you have the means to gratify that taste.) No wonder 
it's dead.

In the sixties, when people believe that learning about history, 
anthropology, literature, and the arts would somehow make them better able 
to fight for social justice...when people believed that there was some tie 
between the humanities and the pursuit of justice, the humanities were more 
interesting.

Then came identity politics! BANG!, Deconstructionism! BANG! BANG!!, 
academic professionalism! BANG!!! BANG!!! BANG!!! And before you knew it, 
the humanities became a pointless exercise in intellectual masturbation.

I'll never forget that depressing day, in 1980 or so, when Fred Crews 
rounded up the grad students at U.C. Berkeley and proudly announced that 
our job prospects  were improving because other schools had stopped viewing 
Berkeley grads as troublemakers.

Joanna