Permanent Crisis

Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon’s Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age will be on sale tomorrow, and it’s an absolutely essential book for anyone who cares about the humanities — or even just thinks about the humanities. You may read the introduction (as a PDF) here, and also read an interview with Paul and Chad here. I expect to have more to say about the book later, but just for now I want to make a couple of introductory points about what I consider to be the two chief themes of the book — themes woven together skillfully in the development of the argument.

The first key theme is obvious from the title: It is the nature of the modern humanities to be always in crisis. From the Introduction:

One of our chief claims is that the self-understanding of the modern humanities didn’t merely take shape in response to a perceived crisis; it also made crisis a core part of the project of the humanities. The humanities came into their own in late nineteenth-century Germany by being framed as, in effect, a privileged resource for resolving perceived crises of meaning and value that threatened other cultural or social goods as well. The perception of crisis, whether or not widely shared, can focus attention and provide purpose. In the case of the humanities, the sense of crisis has afforded coherence amid shifts in methods and theories and social and institutional transformations. Whether or not they are fully aware of it, for politically progressive and conservative scholars alike, crisis has played a crucial role in grounding the idea that the humanities have a special mission. Part of the story of why the modern humanities are always in crisis is that we have needed them to be.

I don’t think you could read this book with any care and come away doubting the truth of this claim. The second major claim I want to call attention to may seem at first to be rather different, but in fact is closely related to the first. From Chapter Seven:

For decades, the humanities have arrogated to themselves critique and critical thinking, and thus they asserted a privileged capacity to demystify, unmask, reveal, and, ultimately, liberate the human from history, nature, or other humans. Whether as Judith Butler’s high-theory posthumanism or Stephen Greenblatt’s historicist communion with the dead, the humanities have claimed sole possession of critique and cast themselves as custodians of human value. In order to legitimize such claims and such a self-understanding, the modern humanities needed the “disenchantment of the world” and needed as well to hold the sciences responsible for this moral catastrophe. Only then could their defenders position themselves as the final guardians of meaning, value, and human being.

The success of the sciences — and more particularly, I would say, of the technocracy that arose from the explosion of scientific knowledge over the past two hundred years — provides the entire context for understanding the character of the modern humanities: the account of the virtues and goods the humanities claim to be the unique guardians of, and the account of their guardianship as being under constant existential threat.

But this raises a crucial and uncomfortable question: Can the humanities relinquish their crisis narrative without also relinquishing their unique guardianship of humane values such as “critical thinking”? We could scarcely envy a model of humanistic learning that wasn’t in crisis only because, like Othello, it’s occupation’s gone.

In the interview linked to above, Len Gutkin asks whether the humanities can get along without a crisis narrative, and Reitter replies: “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.” This is perhaps more bluntly pessimistic than the book itself, which tries in its Conclusion to suggest some resources that could lead to a Better Way, notably (a) Edward Said’s reading of Erich Auerbach and (b) Max Weber’s Wissenschaft als Beruf — which Reitter and Wellmon have recently edited, in a new translation by Damion Searls.

I’d like to make another suggestion, based on a theme Reitter and Wellmon contemplate early in Permanent Crisis but don’t pursue at the book’s end:

Recent efforts among scholars to establish the history of humanities as a distinct field started with a question: “How did the humanities develop from the artes liberales, via the studia humanitatis, to modern disciplines?” Our question is slightly different: Have the continuities linking the humanist scholarship of the faraway past to that of today been stretched thin? Or have they, or some of them, remained robust? These are, of course, big questions, and we won’t treat them comprehensively, let alone try to resolve them. But we do begin with the premise that the continuities between the modern, university-based disciplines collectively known as the humanities and earlier forms of humanist knowledge such as the studia humanitatis have been exaggerated. The modern humanities are not the products of an unbroken tradition reaching back to the Renaissance and, ultimately, to Greek and Roman antiquity.

I think this is correct. But I also think Reitter and Wellmon are correct when they write, elsewhere in the book, “The current institutional arrangement of university-based knowledge — with its particular norms, practices, ideals, and virtues — was not necessary; it could have been otherwise.”

So here’s what I’m getting at: It may well be that the humanities are chained permanently to their crisis narrative as long as they function within “the current institutional arrangement of university-based knowledge.” That is: If we do not get the kind of “massive reorganization of society” that Reitter mentions, it’s likely that the humanities can only have a self-understanding not dependent on a crisis narrative if they learn to operate outside the structures of the modern research university. And if that were to happen, then the old ways of the studia humanitatis might turn out to be more relevant than they have been in the past several centuries.