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Monday, July 07, 2008
Links: Humanities, Mao, Word Order
Writing in The Wilson Quarterly, Wilfred McClay chides Stanley Fish for his frivolous defense of the humanities and notes that “This sustained shrug elicited a blast of energetic and mostly negative response from the Times’ online readers. To read through the hundreds of comments is to be reminded that Americans do seem to have a strong and abiding respect for the humanities.” He goes on to offer his own defense in traditional terms:
The distinctive task of the humanities, unlike the natural sciences and social sciences, is to grasp human things in human terms, without converting or reducing them to something else: not to physical laws, mechanical systems, biological drives, psychological disorders, social structures, and so on. The humanities attempt to understand the human condition from the inside, as it were, treating the human person as subject as well as object, agent as well as acted-upon.
Such means are not entirely dissimilar from the careful and disciplined methods of science. In fact, the humanities can benefit greatly from emulating the sciences in their careful formulation of problems and honest weighing of evidence. But the humanities are distinctive, for they begin (and end) with a willingness to ground themselves in the world as we find it and experience it, the world as it appears to us—the thoughts, emotions, imaginings, and memories that make up our picture of reality. The genius of humanistic knowledge—and it is a form of knowledge—is its commensurability, even consanguinity, with the objects it helps us to know. Hence, the knowledge the humanities offer us is like no other, and cannot be replaced by scientific breakthroughs or superseded by advances in material knowledge.
Meanwhile, Jed Perl castigates the cult of Mao in current Chinese art. Here’s the opening paragraph from his review of a show at the Guggenheim:
There are times when art should be the last thing on an art critic’s mind. The thunderous popularity of a number of contemporary Chinese artists compels a political analysis. Much of the work is powered by a startling and completely delusionary infatuation with Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. This is more sinister than anything we have seen in the already fairly astonishing annals of radical chic. We are witnessing a globalized political whitewash job, with artists and assorted collectors, dealers, and sycophants pouring a thick layer of avant-garde double-talk over the infernal decade of suffering, destruction, and death that Mao unleashed on his country in 1966. And as we are also dealing with the house of mirrors that is the art world, I have no doubt that somebody is ready to explain that I am confusing appropriation with approbation or that fascism is just another way of spelling freedom. I must say, the theory people have a lot to answer for. But here is the bottom line: the global art world’s burgeoning love affair with Mao and the Cultural Revolution makes a very neat fit with the current Chinese regime’s efforts to sell itself as the authoritarian power that everybody can learn to love.
From later in the review:
The power of totalitarian regimes to wipe out a visual arts culture generally exceeds their ability to obliterate a literary culture, and it is by no means clear that such traditions can be revived. Recall that in Russia at the start of the twentieth century the visual arts were flourishing as never before, with Kandinsky, Malevich, Chagall, and many others at the beginnings of extraordinary careers. Lenin and Stalin put an end to all that, and it has never come back. This is not to say that there is nothing of value going on in China today: I do not know all there is to know about art in China. What I do know is that the work that is being promoted around the world as the cutting edge of new Chinese art is overblown and meretricious.
Finally, Language Log has two posts (one, two) covering recent research suggesting that Agent, Patient, Action (Subject, Object, Verb) is an innate cognitive schema, but not a syntactic one. The research shows that to be the order people use when acting in charades and is independent of the word ordering typical of their language.
Comments
I’ve been teaching Chesterton’s Father Brown stories this summer, and I was struck by the similarity between McClay’s defense of the humanities and Brown’s defense of his anti-methodical methods in “The Secret of Father Brown.” I’m too tired for a direct quotation, but Brown’s point is that, unlike Holmes, he uncovers criminals by, in effect, becoming one, drawing on and becoming self-aware of all the sinful desires and motives within himself, becoming the person capable of any given crime. Whereas science treats subjects as objects, friends as strangers, Brown argues, his method involves becoming the stranger, finding the stranger in himself.
Could we say that one way of thinking of the great humanities scholar is that s/he takes on the seemingly foreign or strange work of art and, in the act of criticism or scholarship, tries to become the sort of person who would have constructed the work of art? As Father Brown says, it’s not about “reconstructing the psychology” of the other, but rather about finding that all that’s other is always already somewhere in the self.